The Dominions 1910-17, part 1 of 2
Anita van der Merwe, The Trekkers’ Land (Cape Town: New Holland, 2003)
… “That the Bloemfontein Meetings happened at all was a miracle,” Jan Smuts would say in 1940, “and that a union came out of them was a feat as great as the loaves and fishes.” He was speaking both of imperial politics – the talks happened during the last half-year of the Asquith ministry, which was the last British government for more than a decade to have the political will to recognize the union – and to the differences between the component entities themselves.
With the Transvaal Volksraad’s decision to attend the talks [1], the number of participants stood at twelve: two independent republics, three self-governing settler colonies (including Griqualand West, in which the settlers were mixed-race), six crown colonies and princely states, and Namaland, which was under nominal German sovereignty but was also a signatory to the prior southern African regional accords. For some, the benefits of federation were obvious, but others stood to make far more uncertain gains, and all of them had substantial regional particularism that in many cases bid fair to derail the negotiations. Issues such as the form of government, the degree of local autonomy, voting rights, language, and military policy were all contentious.
Although Smuts favored a close federation, he realized that one would not be possible in this environment, and proposed instead a union that combined features of Australasia and the German Empire. As in Australasia, each canton would set its own qualifications for citizenship and voting, and would indeed be able to choose whether to hold elections at all or choose its representatives to the federal legislature in another way. And as with the German upper house, the federal parliament operated on a principle of degressive proportionality – i.e., that while the larger states had more representatives, the smaller ones were overrepresented and each had a minimum number of seats. This alleviated the Boers’ concerns that their small citizen population – far less than the enfranchised population of the Cape Colony or even Natal – might be overwhelmed, while also mitigating the Cape’s fear that the republics’ small citizen class as compared to their overall population might turn them into colossal rotten boroughs.
This constitutional structure also represented a compromise between the entities which had self-government and those that did not. The protectorates’ and princely states’ British governors or residents had always spoken for them at meetings of the existing customs union, and if each state had equal representation – as some of the delegates initially proposed – the six governors would have an effective veto over any of the union’s acts. On the other hand, strict representation by population would give the governors little clout in the union parliament, and with Basotholand, Zululand and Transkei so important as military recruiting grounds, London was unwilling to give up so much control.
In at least one of the colonies, the makeup of the parliament was also affected by domestic politics. Regiments from all three of the “martial race colonies” had served abroad in the Great War, and like veterans elsewhere, many had come back wanting more political freedom. This tendency was especially strong among the Sotho, who had more self-government to begin with and who served as elite scouts, irregular cavalry and other roles in which creativity and independent thought were at a premium. Some achieved officer rank – a distinction given to few other southern African troops – and others, who were attached to Malê regiments, came back strongly influenced by Abacarist ideals. The result was something of a domestic revolution: in 1901, the veterans formed Basotholand’s first political party, and three years later, they successfully demanded that the king and chiefs share power with an elected legislature. Like several of the princely states in India and the Niger Valley, the Sotho were modernizing, and they were loath to give up their gains on the altar of federalism.
The Sotho delegates found surprising allies in the Boers, who favored anything that might dilute British influence in the union, and a less surprising one in Smuts, who had commanded Sotho irregulars during the war and come to admire them deeply. In the end, it was decided that the governor would nominate one of Basotholand’s four representatives, the king another, and the remaining two would be elected; in the other protectorates, where traditional authority structures still held sway, the governor would nominate three members and the king or chiefly council the other one. Also, in Bechuanaland and Matabeleland, the governor would make one of his appointments on the advice of the Stellaland and Vryheidsland enclaves respectively. This gave London direct control of only 14 of the union parliament’s 73 seats – Griqualand West and Namaland would also have four seats each, the Orange Free State seven, Natal and the South African Republic nine, and the Cape Colony sixteen.
It was agreed after much debate that each state would maintain its own military forces as well as contributing volunteers to a separate union army – a state of affairs made necessary to placate Germany, which was unwilling for the Nama to put themselves under British command, and London, which insisted that the Zulu, Xhosa and Sotho regiments remain part of the
British armed forces. This and the citizenship provisions made for a loose union, but there were also countervailing provisions: a federal high court, a broad range of competences in which the union parliament could legislate, a union civil service, freedom of movement, and a bill of (very) basic rights that applied to all South Africans and sidestepped the question of who was a citizen.
All this, incredibly, was achieved in two months of negotiation: the delegates reported out a constitution on January 6, 1911 and the legislatures or governors of the component states, which had been kept apprised of the meetings, and whose running debate had often influenced the talks, ratified it within days. Smuts’ role in breaking the frequent impasses cannot be overstated, nor can the importance of his timing: the third reading of the South Africa Act on February 16, in which Westminster gave its blessing to the union, was literally the last vote the Asquith Parliament took before the fatal debate over the American debt relief package.
The new federation was quickly occupied with the empire’s declining economy and the growing presence of the Imperial Party on the British political scene. South Africa itself fared better than many other parts of the empire: its precious metal and diamond resources insulated it somewhat from the depression, and the act of union itself jump-started the economy and masked the effects of the downturn. Smuts saw the depression almost as an opportunity to bring the empire closer together, and along with Canada, was one of the key architects of the 1912 Imperial Finance Board. [2] The quick collapse of the Balfour government over the board was genuinely puzzling to Smuts, who was too far from London to understand British fears that the dominions’ push for closer cooperation really meant subordination.
In the meantime, the Imperials appealed to many in South Africa who, like their British counterparts, were frightened by the rapid changes. They were especially popular in Natal, which unlike the Cape had a jealously guarded whites-only franchise: most voters appreciated the economic and defensive benefits of union, but many were distinctly uneasy about the bill of rights and the twelve African and mixed-race members of the federal parliament. But many in the Cape were also attracted by the Imperials’ racial policies and their promise to open Matabeleland and Bechuanaland for settlement, while the hard-liners in the Afrikaner Front and in the Boer republics saw the party as an ally against Smuts’ cross-racial coalition and the more liberal elements within their own societies.
The effects would be felt in April 1915, when the first union parliament completed its turn and the second was chosen. By that time, all six of the protectorates had Imperial residents or governors. London had also, in late 1914, authorized the governor of Matabeleland to reserve land for white settlement, prompting an influx of immigrants and a wave of armed resistance that would become known as the Second Matabeleland War. Basotholand was also in a state of virtual insurrection – the Imperial resident was unable to enter the colony, and exercised his functions from Cape Town – and while the disorder made many voters doubt the wisdom of the party’s policies, it convinced others that a firm hand was necessary. In addition to the 14 members nominated directly by the governors, the Imperial Party won six seats in Natal (where it had controlled the state government for two years), five in the Cape Colony and two each in the Orange Free State and the Transvaal.
With the three Afrikaner Front members as allies, the Imperials effectively controlled 31 of the 73 seats, not enough to unseat Smuts as prime minister but more than enough to be influential on issues where the ruling parties were divided. Their votes were key to forcing the union to crush the Matabeleland revolt ruthlessly rather than pursue a more conciliatory approach that Smuts preferred – a measure that made large parts of Matabeleland safe for white farmers and ranchers, but made the province a running sore of guerrilla warfare and refugees – and to packing the high court with judges who interpreted the bill of rights narrowly and were willing to rubber-stamp the land seizures. By 1916, Smuts had resigned as prime minister and taken his Afrikaner Bond out of the government, ushering in a weak independent ministry that leaned heavily on both the Bond and the Imperials for individual votes.
The Imperial Party’s growth brought conflicts of its own, especially with the Boers. The party’s view of the Boers was ambivalent: they were white, but not British, and while the Imperials were willing to accept white Afrikaners as allies, they considered them distinctly second-class. The Imperials consistently favored British interests in their land allocations and spending priorities, and in April 1916, the Bond and the party’s two members from the Orange Free State defected, throwing the union’s government into even further confusion.
In May, the parliament voted by a narrow majority to dissolve and the government resigned, but the governor-general rejected the resignation rather than allowing an early election that the Imperials were likely to lose. This was technically legal, but it clearly violated the spirit of South Africa’s charter of responsible government, and represented an exercise of British power that was particularly frightening to the Boer republics and Namaland. All three began to seriously debate withdrawing from the union – a step that would, coincidentally, leave the Imperials just one vote short of a majority, given that the violence in Basotholand left the representatives of the Sotho king and people unable to attend. Smuts visited their capitals personally, arguing that they should instead force the governor-general to back down by threatening to hold a new election anyway. The crisis was still ongoing in late October, when rebellion broke out in Amritsar…
Leo Zammit, The Accidental Dominion (Valletta: St. John, 1980)
… British Malta was a backwater for much of the nineteenth century, regarded as a naval station and little else, its population mostly ignored. In 1849, Britain had allowed a restricted Maltese electorate to choose eight of 18 members of a weak governing council, and for half a century the reforms stopped there: in 1900, elections were still decided by four percent of Malta’s population, and the governors sent from London still reigned as virtual feudal lords. [3]
Through the nineteenth century, most Maltese greeted neglect and poverty with a resigned acceptance, but the Great War changed all that irrevocably. Throughout the war, Malta was an important naval station and an even more important field hospital. Many Maltese volunteers served in the British army and navy, and others went to fight for Italy when the Italian army seemed near collapse. The returning veterans brought back new political horizons – those who fought in Italy, especially, often returned with anarchist or socialist sympathies – and like the Irish and Indians, the Maltese believed their war service deserved a reward.
The Asquith government was not unsympathetic to the calls for reform, and dispatched a ministerial commission to talk with the Maltese leadership. The commission was initially afraid that allowing greater self-government would play into the radicals’ hands, but the Maltese delegates convinced them that without liberal political institutions, the only outlet available would be the extra-legal arena where the radicals would dominate.
The end result of the talks was the “Hinds Constitution” of 1904, which granted responsible parliamentary government but divided the parliament between a lower house elected by universal suffrage and a corporatist upper house chosen by a limited electorate. Malta was also granted the status of an imperial domain rather than a dominion – the first part of the empire outside Africa to gain this status, and a sign that, like the Malê, the Maltese were considered of unsuitable race and religion to be ranked with Canada or Australasia. Many of the Maltese, quite naturally, felt slighted, but they also realized their fundamental inequality of bargaining power.
With self-government came increasing educational, commercial and political ties with Italy. Many Maltese attended Italian universities during the postwar decade, an Italian-language newspaper was founded in Valletta, and Italian literacy spread beyond the upper class to the growing merchant bourgeoisie and even many working-class families who worked at the port or catered to Italian visitors. Politics also took on an Italian cast: the Maltese Labor Party, founded in 1907, borrowed many ideas from the anti-clerical Italian left and from Friulan anarcho-communism. This met with sharp reaction from both the nascent Catholic Liberal movement, which also claimed the working-class mantle, and from the clerical conservatives. The 1908 and 1912 elections saw the Catholic Liberals and the conservative Maltese National Party forced into an uneasy coalition in order to keep Labor out of power.
Malta’s increasingly volatile politics were not mirrored in its economy. The island domain escaped many of the worst effects of the 1910s depression: the naval base provided steady employment, the economy was tied as much to Italy as to Britain, and seasonal agricultural work in Italy, Tunisia or Ottoman Libya was often available. But the importance of naval spending to the Maltese economy also meant that Malta was in no position to reject British demands.
There were few enough of these during the early 1910s, or even during the first two years of the Imperial government: Malta was low on the Imperials’ priorities, and their racial attitudes toward the Maltese were more conflicted than their view of Indians or Africans. But with the outbreak of the Indian war of independence, Malta was suddenly an important way station again, and one from which much would be demanded…
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[1] See post 3196.
[2] See post 3598.
[3] In TTL, with Cranbrook rather than Salisbury as Prime Minister, Lord Knutsford held another ministerial post rather than being Secretary of State for the Colonies, and never promulgated the 1887 constitution that was given to Malta in OTL.
. More seriously, it allows the Church to eventually found a form of liberation theology that will be seen as quite normal among mainstream catholics, if not likeable, and that's fascinating to me.
