© Carl P. Watts (2007) Carl P. Watts, ‘Pax Britannica’, in Carl C. Hodge (ed.), Encyclopedia of the Age of Imperialism, 1800-1914 Vol. II (Greenwood Press, 2007), pp. 547-50. The Pax Britannica, or ‘British Peace’, was consciously modeled on the Pax Romana of the ancient Mediterranean world. The British were imbued with a sense of cultural superiority in the same way that the Romans had been, and like its Roman predecessor the Pax Britannica was, paradoxically, upheld by almost continuous warfare. The Pax Britannica was synonymous with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), especially the first half of her reign, which was a period of remarkable British prosperity and imperial confidence. The Pax Britannica was made possible by several factors: first, the establishment of industrial and commercial primacy; second, the possession of the largest empire in history, which consisted of both formal colonies and areas of informal influence; third, the maintenance of British naval supremacy; and fourth, the projection of military power, provided mainly by the Indian Army. It is important to recognize that the Pax Britannica was a cultural edifice underpinned by a number of ephemeral advantages, which evaporated towards the end of the nineteenth century. The actual and potential challenges of rising European and non-European powers produced an anxiety-ridden ruling elite in Britain and its colonies by the turn of the twentieth century. The British had a sense of imperial mission and sought to bestow the benefits of their civilization upon native peoples, just as the Romans had done many centuries earlier. In the British case there was a particular desire to civilize the ‘Dark Continent’. British missionaries began work in West Africa as early as 1804, and were not easily deterred by tropical disease or the hostility of native peoples, which meant that many of them became martyrs to their cause. Missionaries did not only seek to Christianize indigenous societies, but also to civilize them, by teaching them English and changing their mode of dress, standard of hygiene, and type of housing. British missionaries were also active in India during the first half of the nineteenth century. However, Indian civilizations were a great deal more sophisticated than those in Africa, and the British had consciously refrained from interfering with Indian customs during the eighteenth century. There was therefore widespread discontent when missionaries prevailed upon the British authorities to legislate against traditional Indian practices such as sati (the immolation of a Hindu wife, often unwillingly, upon her husband’s funeral pyre), which missionaries considered to be uncivilized. The imposition of British norms of law and order was a notable feature of the Pax Britannica, but such cultural imperialism was not always acceptable to colonial societies, as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 demonstrated. Britain’s brutal military response to the Rebellion belies the literal meaning of the Pax Britannica. The Pax Britannica was partly a result of the Industrial Revolution, which took off first in Britain from the middle of the eighteenth century and was firmly established by the time that Queen Victoria ascended the throne in 1837. By the middle of the nineteenth century Britain produced about half the world’s commercial cotton cloth, which demonstrated the dominance of British textile manufacturing. In terms of heavy industry British output was even more impressive, accounting for around two thirds of the world’s coal production, half its iron, and almost three quarters of its steel. Britain was also the world’s leading investor, banker, insurer, and shipper. The returns on overseas investments increased from £10.5 million per annum in 1847 to £80 million in 1887, by which time Britain had over £1000 million invested abroad. Britain was the primary world carrier, and consolidated this lead in the mid- nineteenth century with the switch from sail to steamships, which was another advantage conferred by early industrialization. By 1890 Britain had more registered shipping tonnage © Carl P. Watts (2007) than the rest of the world’s carriers combined. The City of London was the center of most international financial transactions, including private and public loans, currency exchange, insurance, and the sale and purchase of commodities. The international system of free trade (laissez faire) underpinned British economic dominance because as the world’s leading manufacturer Britain could produce and sell commodities more cheaply than its competitors. If foreign governments attempted to exclude British merchants from markets the Royal Navy opened them up at gunpoint (see below). Possession of colonies was an obvious sign of the Pax Britannica. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1815) Britain was unquestionably the most dynamic of the European imperial powers. Throughout the nineteenth century Britain continued to add new territories to its Empire and by the early twentieth century it covered one quarter of the earth’s land surface and encompassed roughly the same proportion of the world’s population. The formal Empire is often divided for analytical purposes into three elements: the areas of white settlement, the Crown Colonies, and India. The white territories of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and later, South Africa, acquired self-government and became known as the Dominions. In 1815 the total white population of the Empire was just 550,000 but by 1911 this had risen to almost 19 million, and trade with the Dominions was worth £175 million annually. The Crown Colonies, such as Trinidad, Ceylon, and Hong Kong, were governed directly from London and are therefore sometimes described as the dependent Empire. The value of trade with many Crown Colonies diminished dramatically over the course of the nineteenth century: for example, in 1815 the West Indies provided 17.6 per cent of Britain’s trade, worth £15.4 million per annum, but a century later the figures were just 0.47 per cent and £6.6 million. India was administered by a combination of Crown officials and representatives of local British interests in an arrangement known as ‘double government’. In economic terms India was by far the most valuable individual part of the formal Empire. By 1911 the Indian population was over 300 million, which provided Britain with a huge market, and the value of annual trade was £120 million. India was also strategically and militarily significant (see below) and Britain acquired many colonies during the nineteenth century simply to protect communication routes to India. Yet the formal Empire was only one component of British imperialism in the nineteenth century. As the historians John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson argued, equating the size and character of the Empire solely with those areas over which Britain exercised formal jurisdiction is like judging the extent of an iceberg according to the part that shows itself above the waterline. It is notable that almost 70 per cent of British emigrants in the period 1812-1914, more than 60 per cent of British exports between 1800 and 1900, and over 80 per cent of British capital investment overseas in the years 1815-1880, went to areas of informal influence such as South East Asia, Central and South America, and Africa. Britain’s informal presence in Africa developed into formal rule in the last quarter of the nineteenth century as a result of competition from other colonial powers, particularly France. The Royal Navy discharged a number of vital functions that underpinned the Pax Britannica: first, it kept the British Isles free from the threat of invasion; second, it protected and extended Britain’s overseas commerce; and third, it projected military force overseas from garrisons in Britain and India. The Royal Navy was powerful partly because of its sheer size: by the mid-nineteenth century it consisted of around 240 ships, crewed by 40,000 sailors. The Naval Defence Act (1889) established the ‘two power standard’, by which the Royal Navy was supposed to be maintained at a strength that was equivalent to the next two biggest navies combined. Another factor that contributed to Britain’s naval power was its technical © Carl P. Watts (2007) development: for example, when the French began launching armored warships in 1858 the British responded by constructing ironclads like HMS Warrior, with superior speed and firepower. Finally, a global network of strategic bases and coaling stations extended the reach of the Royal Navy to deal with many actual or potential threats to British interests. When China attempted to restrict trade with British merchants it suffered crushing naval defeats in the Opium War (1840-42) and ‘Arrow’ War (1856-60). As a result of the Treaty of Nanking (1842), China ceded Hong Kong to Britain and opened five ports to trade, with a resident consul in each (though full diplomatic recognition was withheld until the Treaty of Tientsin in June 1858). Yet the Royal Navy could also be used for humanitarian purposes: by 1847 thirty-two warships of the West African Squadron were engaged in the suppression of the slave trade, for example. Traditionally Britain was not a great military power, but its control of the Indian Army provided a significant military reserve of around 180,000 troops, which accounted for more than sixty per cent of total manpower in British garrisons overseas in the 1880s. The Conservative Prime Minister Lord Salisbury once remarked that India was ‘an English barrack in the Oriental Seas from which we may draw any number of troops without paying for them.’ Indeed, the Indian Army served in more than a dozen imperial campaigns in Africa and Asia during the second half of the nineteenth century. The Indian Army was therefore a significant element of the Pax Britannica, for without it the cost of maintaining imperial control would have been much higher. Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India, went so far as to proclaim in 1901 that: ‘As long as we rule in India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straight away to a third rate power.’ It is tempting to identify the Pax Britannica as shorthand for British global dominance during the nineteenth century, but contemporaries perceived it differently, as a cultural edifice rather than a political relationship. The extent of British power during the nineteenth century can also be easily overstated, for it was always limited to those areas in which the Royal Navy could operate. Further, the economic and strategic platforms on which Britain’s international lead rested after 1815 were merely temporary. During the last quarter of the nineteenth century competition from other European powers (France, Germany, Italy, and Russia), and non-European powers (the United States, and Japan), challenged Britain’s commercial, naval, and imperial pre-eminence, which caused considerable anxiety in Britain about the future of its Empire. Yet despite this anxiety the Empire continued to grow, and when it did finally vanish during the two decades following the Second World War it left many legacies, including widespread use of the English language, belief in Protestant religion, economic globalization, modern precepts of law and order, and representative democracy. In these respects traces of the Pax Britannica are still very much in evidence today. Further Reading: Chamberlain, Muriel. ‘Pax Britannica’? British Foreign Policy, 1789-1914. London: 1988. Eldridge, C. C. England’s Mission: The Imperial Idea in the Age of Gladstone and Disraeli, 1868-1880. London: 1973. Gallagher, John and Robinson, Ronald, “The Imperialism of Free Trade.” Economic History Review. 2nd Series, VI, 1 (1953), pp. 1-15. Hyam, Ronald. Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914. 2nd ed. Basingstoke: 1993. © Carl P. Watts (2007) Kennedy, Paul M. The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery. London: 1976. Porter, Andrew. ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume III: The Nineteenth Century. Oxford: 1999.