practice, the Economist rarely paused to draw a critical breath between colonial wars, even when these arose from the unintended consequences of a previous one. Invading Egypt further weakened the Khedival ruling structure, for example, opening the door to a rebellion in Egypt’s own southern colony of Sudan. When the capital Khartoum fell to the jihadi forces of the Mahdi in 1885, the paper demanded vengeance – in uncharacteristically shrill tones – for a no less messianic figure, General Gordon, who had stayed in the city despite orders to evacuate: ‘The Englishmen in the Soudan have shown the best qualities of the national character, and their achievements will always hold a conspicuous place in the annals of British heroism.’50
More typical of the Economist’s justification of British imperial greed was the case it made a few months later for the seizure of the rest of Burma not already coloured red, and the destruction of a monarchy and monkhood that had structured its society for over a millennium. King Thibaw could not be allowed to defy Westminster by pursuing independent policies, whether with France, Russia or China, on the north-eastern border of India, or in commercial matters – where a fine levied on the Bombay Burma Trading Co. amounted to a violation of free trade.51 Lord Dufferin, viceroy of India, who had amassed an army to carry this last point home to Thibaw in October 1885, was ‘a moderate man’, who ‘must be trusted’.52 As in Egypt, ‘opening up new outlets for trade’ was unacceptable as an official motivation for conquest. What was at stake, however, was the sacred right of contract, and contrary to the harrumphs of radicals like John Bright, ‘we are surely bound to guard against arbitrary and illegal spoliation of our subjects.’53
Getting the rationale for imperial expansion right was important for the Economist, since narrowly nationalistic, commercially self-interested arguments played into the hands of Britain’s rivals – already liable to pursue empire for the wrong reasons, and with increasing assertiveness. Germany could be a productive partner on the world stage – as in 1884, when Bismarck worked to settle the status of the Congo and the Niger at the Berlin Conference.54 But in 1888 the paper questioned if its leader ‘directed or utilised the national desire for colonies with any wisdom’, having selected neither places where surplus population could settle, ‘nor ones which promise to greatly increase the volume of national trade’.55 Russia was untrustworthy, madly expansionist, and backward.56 France, with whom Russia allied in 1894, was tetchy and impulsive – a portrait that grew darker towards end of century, as Paris and London clashed repeatedly throughout Africa and Asia.
France’s Tonkin Expedition of 1883 was a foolish land-grab, which was bound to ignite a war with China and damage trade, causing a rise in the price of tea ‘felt in every English cottage’ and an interruption to flows of Indian opium, product of ‘a century of care and skill, akin to Lafitte among clarets, or Havannah cigars among tobaccos’.57 In 1898 it asked if French behaviour in the Fashoda Crisis was ‘worthy of a great nation’ – for, besides ‘annoying England’, why would Major Marchand, ‘with his 120 negroes from Timbuctoo’, dare tangle with General Kitchener’s mighty army over a ‘swamp at the bottom of Ethiopia’?58 Anglo-Egyptian forces had marked out this terrain in blood, tracking the Nile up to Omdurman – where they finally avenged Gordon by killing 11,000 dervishes, and exhuming and torching the remains of the Mahdi.59 ‘France has an enormous colonial empire’, it granted after the crisis was defused, ‘but she makes so little of it that it is a burden rather than a source of profits’, since it was ‘overrun by officials and soldiers, and hampered by unwise tariffs’.60
The Economist was ambivalent about American imperialism, which also reared its head in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. It advised Europe to let ‘second-rate’ Spain nurse its losses, and accept America’s seizure of Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines, not to speak of Hawaii, Guam and Wake Island; at least the US would promote economic development – or ‘the interests of humanity and the higher civilisation’ – in these places.61 But the paper harboured few illusions about American exceptionalism, pointing to the wide gap between the country’s constitution and its territorial ambitions, which made it ill-suited to be an empire. Under President McKinley the US was taking a ‘momentous step’ that was ‘not in harmony with the spirit or letter of American institutions’, in ‘violating the inalienable right to liberty’ of the native populations of the islands it had seized. More fundamentally, for the Economist the US was compromised by the character of its national political economy. For if it resembled ‘the mother country’ in seeking a commercial empire (a need for new markets was ‘the fundamental economic fact’ in the US), its ‘people have never been guided by free trade principles’.62
This was a major shortcoming in what looked likely to be the next inter-imperial feeding frenzy, over China, a ‘dying nation’ after its drubbing by Japan in the Sino-Japanese War in 1895, whose corpse the Western powers hungrily circled – including America, its ‘Open Door Policy’ in East Asia mere window dressing, in the Economist’s opinion.63 The Economist’s response to the 1899 Boxer Rebellion – an anti-Western uprising that swept through north China, cresting in Beijing, where a rebel siege of foreign legations lasted for months – was at once an admission of Britain’s overreach elsewhere, and an illustration of what distinguished its Empire from the others. Boxers ought to be ‘extinguished’ for killing Western diplomats and missionaries, but unlike in Africa, Europeans could cooperate in this stern duty. The aim was to restore order with a multi-national armed response, but to avoid partition: not just because the Chinese were clearly better able to resist than, say, Egyptians, but because the ruling Manchu dynasty was not to be jeopardised.64 Foreign investment in railways, mines, banks and the like required political stability, which outright control, in China, would undermine. If the Economist deplored the treaty that ended the expedition, it was not for exacting a huge indemnity from the ‘bloodthirsty’ Empress Dowager, but because it did so in violation of liberal precepts, on the back of higher customs duties. Afterwards, the paper deplored the protectionist leanings of the French, German, Russian and Italian businessmen who poured into China, and their cynical reasoning that if the country were ‘really and honestly thrown open’ – ‘the Anglo-Saxon will beat us in the Chinese market as he has in every other market in Asia’. In the end, it was a little disappointed with this inter-imperial experiment, which ‘future historians will describe as without precedent … the first time since the Crusades the whole white world joined in an attempt to punish an Asiatic power for a grave outrage’.65
In all these instances British imperialism was peerless, avoiding the vainglorious preening of the French, the shifting Weltpolitik of Germany, or the hypocrisies of America. What distinguished it was liberalism, a talent for promoting trade, investment and ‘higher civilization’. Yet as the scramble for territory reached fever pitch in the late nineteenth century, obscuring this civilizing commercial mission, criticism of imperialism was never to be found in the Economist. It could not be, since the reproduction of national as well as international wealth was inconceivable for the paper under Johnstone outside the imperial framework, and the invasions, pacifications, occupations and annexations necessary to construct, preserve and extend it. Whether imperialism was an ‘urge’ or a ‘tension’ internal to liberalism, or one twist in its ‘convoluted trajectory’, as several scholars would have it, what is abundantly clear is that in the second half of the nineteenth century it was central to the mainstream of liberalism – to which the Economist gave authoritative expression.66 Empire structured the world economy and made it safe for capital, even outside the zones under its direct control. And though the Economist faced criticism from radical Liberals over the policies this governing reality led it to endorse, such voices only looked (even momentarily) strong enough to challenge its dominance after 1899, when the Second Boer War shook the British Empire.
As Beijing burned, Britain faced a war in South Africa entirely on its own, in what turned into its costliest military engagement since the time of Napoleon. Not only was its performance in the Second Boer War unsteady, so was its pretext for the war, which seemed to many critics
