Back to the Future

ABOUT FIFTEEN YEARS AGO, the Anglo-American scholar Paul Kennedy published a book on the fate of empires, The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers.(1) Kennedy's special field was the British Empire and, not surprisingly, the British imperial experience, rising and falling, occupied a central position in his analysis. Non-professional readers might have been surprised at how long the rise had taken, and how rapid and how recent the fall had been.There were many readers, and the book was a surprise best-seller in the early 1990s, not so much because it dealt with the British Empire, but because it speculated about the American. It was a moment of self-doubt in the history of the United States. With the Cold War just past, could the victorious United States be teetering on the verge of decline? Had the American moment passed, and would the United States cede economic primacy to east Asia, and in particular, to Japan? Some Japanese certainly hoped so; and some Americans feared that it might be true.Kennedy's history therefore hit a nerve. A century before, Great Britain had been at its apogee, its empire girdling the globe, its mighty fleet steaming where it would, its red-coated armies parading from Halifax to Hyderabad, and all of it supported by a rich, if not inexhaustible, treasury. All this was put on display in and around London for the crowned heads of Europe in parades and regattas for Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1897, her sixtieth anniversary on the throne.Among the hordes of invitees were the senior politicians from the empire, including the recently appointed prime minister of Canada, Wilfrid Laurier. Laurier returned from London with an honorary souvenir bauble, Sir Wilfrid, dangling from his name. It was, he reflected, all very seductive and very tempting. The knighthood was politically useful. It showed colonial Canadians that Sir Wilfrid Laurier had attained a certain standing outside Canada, appropriate for English-Canadians, and flattering to French-Canadians. Laurier was all too aware that Canada was an amalgam of two different linguistic elements, and that the two did not fit together very well. He was, moreover, the first prime minister from the French-language minority, and correspondingly distrusted by many English-Canadians, for whom Wolfe at the Plains of Abraham--or Crecy or Agincourt or Waterloo--was as yesterday. The traditional enemy on these occasions was of course the French--and what else was Laurier? So Laurier had to pay ostentatious attention to the totems of empire, like Queen Victoria, and bow before them as many times as he could manage.Imperial visions, conjured up by the British colonial secretary, Joseph Chamberlain, floated past Sir Wilfrid in London. Chamberlain made no secret of his view that the empire was worth preserving, and Laurier would have agreed with that. But when Chamberlain suggested that a contribution from the colonies--especially big, rich colonies like Canada--would be welcome, Laurier demurred. It was not the time. Canada had its own business and its own agenda. Laurier had a country, half-settled, to develop. There was no money to spare to invest in fleets and armies, especially fleets and armies outside Canada's control but under Chamberlain's instead. There was the army Chamberlain was assembling in South Africa, he might have observed. The British government was doing that on its own, and out of its own resources. What need did it have for what little Canada could offer? What would Chamberlain do with that?There is no evidence that Laurier did ask, or that he would have known what to do with the answer. Indeed it is not clear that Chamberlain had an answer, but he and his sympathizers, in Britain and in the British colonies in South Africa, intended to overawe the gold-rich, Dutch-speaking republics of the Transvaal and the Orange Free State. The inhabitants actually spoke a variety of Dutch--Afrikaans--and collectively they were known as Boers, or farmers, which most of them were. …

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