Free The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin Page A

contradictorily as an economic and military asset, and as a strategic and political risk. Its loyalty and quiescence could never be taken for granted after 1857. The dense web of commercial connections was best left to itself under the regime of free trade, thought most British leaders. They knew that commercial success, and the commanding role of the City, depended on ‘confidence’ – not least foreign confidence in British public finances. They were ready to throw in their diplomatic resources, and sometimes the navy, to persuade ‘recalcitrant’ states to open their markets, although rarely in cases where they would meet strong resistance or risk a dispute with another great power. They pressed British officials in India and elsewhere to enlarge the consumption of British manufactures by heavy spending on railways (and heavy borrowing from London). But they were usually reluctant to champion particular companies (unless they could serve a larger objective) and suspected the motives of British merchants and capitalists as much as they did those of settlers, planters and missionaries (a missionary, quipped Lord Salisbury, was ‘a religious Englishman with a mission to offend the religious feelings of the natives’). 1 So British ‘policy’ was often in a state of unease between the need to defend ‘British interests’ abroad and official suspicion that the effort to do so would bring loss and embarrassment.
    In the long nineteenth century, this hand-to-mouth practice had favoured the growth of a decentralised system. It was glued together by a mixture of commercial self-interest, ethnic solidarity, ideological sympathy and the common dependence of Indian Civilians and settlers on London's reserve bank of military force. It permitted the florescence of colonial societies largely left free to manage their local affairs: even the Indian Civilians enjoyed much of this freedom. Despite the feeling of strain in the last decades of the century (the subject of professional exaggeration by soldiers, sailors and diplomats), Britain's long lead in extra-European expansion allowed it to ride out the squalls of imperialist rivalry up to 1914. The prospects of a continental coalition against them (the great British fear) receded to vanishing point. The First World War marked a critical shift, though its full meaning was veiled. The huge war contributions of the dominions and India affected their ‘British connections’ after 1918: encouraging dominion ‘isolationism’ and Indian resentment at an imposed ‘war economy’ so poorly requited by political change. Britain's revenge on the Turks, evicting the Sultan from his centuries-old capital, roused the fury of Muslims in India, exploited by Gandhi in the ‘non-cooperation’ campaign. Indian politics were radicalised by religious emotion – a syndrome that endured. Britain's large war debts, the drain of dollar securities, and the general disruption of markets and currencies, destroyed vital parts of the global economic regime on which London, and Britain, had thrived. The general economic collapse of 1929–32 seemed to bury the old landscape of free trade imperialism, the commercial foundation of British world power. Protection, barter and blocs arrived to replace it.
    Despite this deepening gloom, the inter-war years conveyed an ambivalent message. Cassandras foretold an ever steeper path of decline. A failure of will had cost the British their dominion in India, declared one ex-official in a widely read book. To Churchill (and others), the appeasement of nationalism was a betrayal of trust (‘the great liner is sinking in a calm sea…but the captain, and the officers and the crew are all in the saloon dancing to the jazz band’). 2 To a vociferous body of ‘Die Hards’ (and their less vocal supporters inside and outside the government), the same symptoms of weakness were alarmingly visible in many other parts of the system, especially in Ireland, Egypt and