Mary Robinson, A Nation Once Again (Dublin: Collins, 1993)
… The 1910s in Ireland dawned in discontent. The country had prospered moderately during its first decade of self-government, but its tentative growth and the literary flowering of the middle to late 1900s was overshadowed by its dysfunctional government. The Unionists who ruled the autonomous province of Ulster refused to support any national government, and none of the major southern factions – the left, the Catholic Liberals, the ultramontanes and the bourgeois nationalists – could come close to a majority. The elections of 1905 and 1909 brought in a succession of short-lived and ineffective minority governments, creating a power vacuum that was increasingly filled by the governor-general. That official replaced governments and broke deadlocks in a way that answered mainly to the powers that be in London.
The onset of recession in 1910 affected Ireland almost immediately. Although it was now a kingdom rather than a province, its economy was still tied almost exclusively to Britain’s, and remittances from workers in the United Kingdom were a critical source of foreign exchange. As the depression began to bite, unemployment soared beyond even British levels, and Ireland lacked even the incomplete safety net that Britain had set up during the Asquith years. Many Irish families took the time-honored path of emigration, going to Canada and Australasia, to the United States, even to Brazil and the Southern Cone; the modern Irish communities of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Porto Alegre date from this time.
The emergence of the Imperial Party did nothing to improve the situation. The Ulster Unionists became a de facto branch of the party, bringing it to power there more than three years before it took control of Britain itself. Its rise was accompanied by a sharp increase in harassment of Catholics in Ulster. Life had been difficult for Catholics in the north and Unionists in the south for some time, and the 1900s had seen a slow but steady population exchange between the regions, but now the remaining northern Catholics faced violence sanctioned by the provincial government and often carried out by the police. Volunteers from the Catholic nationalist parties in the south went to join the fight, and by late 1912 it had become known as the “Donegal War,” although the fighting in Cavan, the only other Ulster county that still had a Catholic majority, was at least as fierce.
The Donegal War did have one arguably positive outcome: it convinced the squabbling southern parties of the need to form a united front against the Imperials. During the 1913 electoral campaign, the Irish Workers’ Party, the Catholic Liberals and the Irish National Party reached a formal alliance, and on election day, they won almost 70 percent of the parliamentary seats. Their program was the product of much compromise, and consisted largely of establishing social insurance and maintaining a liberal status quo, but for the first time since home rule, Ireland had an effective government with the will to act against civil disorder.
In October 1913, soon after the government was sworn in, detachments of the Irish army moved into Donegal and Cavan with orders to suppress armed groups and quell the endemic violence. One of the armed groups that resisted the army was, in the event, the Ulster police. As the scale of police involvement in the fighting became apparent – and as police units armed with military weapons engaged in pitched battles with the army – the government decided to move on Belfast and seize the police headquarters and logistical command. The Ulster representatives declared this a violation of provincial autonomy and walked out of parliament; days later, the provincial legislature declared that Ulster had seceded from Ireland and rejoined the United Kingdom.
These were the last days of the Liberal minority government in London, and the last thing it wanted was to reassume responsibility for Ireland, so despite pleas from the Unionists and from the Imperial delegation in the British parliament, it declined to recognize the secession. By January 1914, the Irish army had occupied Belfast and placed Ulster under martial law. But while the army had succeeded in subduing overt resistance, it was almost immediately faced with a wave of Unionist terrorism, much of it funded and armed by the Imperial Party’s leadership.
The Ulster conflict, and the failure of the Liberals and then the Liberal-Tory grand coalition to do anything about it, became an Imperial rallying point in the October 1914 British general election, and one of the first acts of the incoming Imperial government was to reverse the previous year’s decision and declare that Ulster was once again British. It demanded that the Irish army quit the northern province within a week or face invasion. The government in Dublin was bitterly divided, with many wanting to fight, but the majority realized that they couldn’t win a war against the British army. Ireland refused to relinquish its claim to Ulster, but by the end of November, Irish forces had withdrawn, followed soon after by mass expulsion of the remaining Catholic population.
The government barely survived this humiliation, and the disaster strengthened the hand of the party that hadn’t joined the electoral alliance: the ultramontanes. They turned the 1915 municipal elections into a national campaign, castigating the government for abandoning the Ulster Catholics and appealing to the crusading spirit of the Legion that many had sympathized with during the war. In the cities where they won control – not Dublin, but several western towns where refugees from Ulster were numerous – they began to create a microcosm of the Belgian-style state that they wanted to establish in all Ireland, and those towns would be their rallying point in the national and provincial elections of 1917…
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Anand Satyanand, Forward Australasia (Auckland: Kiwi, 2009)
… In its own mind, Australasia entered the twentieth century as the mistress of the South Pacific. It was no longer a collection of small colonies but a union of respectable size, augmented by the annexation of Fiji and New Caledonia. It had built a blue-water navy during the war and emerged with a fleet of transports and colliers that formed the foundation of a sizable merchant marine. It had commercial interests in the new Indochinese protectorates and the independent Pacific islands, and considered itself the natural cadet for the British Empire in the region.
But the new federation was not without growing pains. Although the differences between the Australasian states were as nothing compared to those of South Africa, the disparities in political tradition, economics and, most of all, demographics, loomed large all the same. The busy factories of Melbourne were not the outback of the bush balladeers; the yeomen of New Zealand, and their special arrangement with the Maori, were not the indentured-labor-worked sugar plantations of Queensland and Fiji. Popular politics, and the devolution to the states of responsibility for citizenship and voting rights, could only go so far in bridging these differences.
The “Indian Question” of the 1900s was a case in point. Wages in Australasia, both for industrial and agricultural workers, were among the highest in the world, and during the last two decades of the nineteenth century, unionized labor had won such unprecedented concessions as an eight-hour day. With federation, the unions feared that businessmen might undermine their gains by importing cheap Asian and Pacific Island labor, and the incorporation of Fiji and Queensland made these fears all the more acute. The laws of both states excluded Asians from citizenship, but Indians were a majority in Fiji and a sizable contingent of the Queensland labor force, and the prospect of them working in factories or on sheep ranches was enough to throw the trade unions into a panic.
As had happened in London and Chatham with the arrival of the Malê, a debate ensued between those who wanted to address the problem by unionizing the Asian and Melanesian laborers and setting statutory wage floors, and those who preferred to do so by keeping non-Europeans out. The latter won out in the emerging Australasian Labor Party, and between 1900 and 1907, a series of laws were passed banning Asians and Pacific Islanders from living outside the states where they were already settled, and in some cases requiring them to leave the country.
The New South Wales version of the law, enacted in 1904, would result in the landmark case of R v. Chaudhry. There were few Indians in New South Wales, but one of them, Mahendra Chaudhry, was a son of indentured laborers who had studied law in London and had become a gadfly to the government through his litigation of Aboriginal land cases and his representation of immigrants accused of being subversive. Within days after the law went into effect, the police arrested Chaudhry and ordered him held pending deportation to India. Hardly one to take such things lying down, he secured bail and challenged his exclusion in court, ultimately reaching the Privy Council in 1907. That body, citing the precedent of Jaja of Opobo [1], held that British subjects were permitted to live anywhere in the British Empire, and that while Australasia or its states were free to exclude immigrants from places like China or Samoa, they could not keep out Indians. Chaudhry was free to live and practice law in Sydney.
The ramifications of the decision went far beyond Indians: Vietnamese and Cambodians were also British subjects now, as were the natives of the former French Polynesia – the last of which had an Indian governor and an increasing reformist Islamic presence. Many feared that “every place would now be Queensland,” and pushed, often successfully, for laws restricting non-citizens to certain occupations and requiring them to register with the police. But others decided that, since it was inevitable that Asians would come to Australasia, those who had preferred to use unions and minimum wages to prevent them from undercutting white labor were right. By 1909, several agricultural and industrial unions had voted to admit Indians (although most still did not), and labor activists had taken the fight to the enemy by organizing plantation workers in Queensland and Fiji. It was during one of these campaigns that Chaudhry was arrested for disturbing public order – this time, with a criminal conviction, the authorities were able to make his deportation stick – but the labor movement in both states grew steadily, and Indians were seen as subversives who must be closely watched.
The situation was not helped by an overall apprehension about India, which, during the Partnership Raj, believed that it was Britain’s cadet in southeast Asia. Throughout the 1900s and early 1910s, a rivalry grew between Australasian and Indian merchants, with Indians in the colonial civil service often favoring their countrymen while the Australasians appealed to the British administrators. The Indian trade offices in Sydney and Brisbane often represented contract laborers in cases of alleged mistreatment, and state authorities often alleged (though they could never prove) that the sugar workers’ unions were funded by Indian nationalist groups...
… New Zealand and New Caledonia also challenged Australasian racial and labor policies. Both had indigenous citizens – the Maori had been represented in New Zealand’s parliament for two generations, and those Kanak chiefs who had French citizenship under the Latin Right retained their status under the terms of annexation – so, by their very existence, provided a standard against which treatment of Aboriginal Australians could be measured. And while the Maori rarely left their homeland, many Kanaks did, serving in the merchant marine and doing seasonal work in Queensland. Some used their protected status as citizens to organize the Melanesian workers much as the Australian unions had already begun to do with the Indians, and also made contact with the nascent Aboriginal movement. Many Aborigines dissatisfied with mission or reservation life followed them into the merchant marine, where they would have a persistent presence.
The white New Caledonians fit into Australasia much better. Their society had many points in common with Australian ranching culture, and during the 1900s, an increasing number of mainland Australians went to work and settle among them. By 1910, there were nearly as many English-speaking Australians as Caldoches in New Caledonia and marriages between the two were common, laying the foundation of the bilingual society that would develop in succeeding decades…
… Australasia greeted the rise of the Imperial Party with mixed emotions. Some, especially in the sugar states, welcomed the Imperials’ reassertion of British supremacy over the colonial populations, and others hoped that the party would pass legislation to overrule the Chaudhry decision and allow the expulsion of Indians and Southeast Asians. Queensland elected an Imperial government in 1913 and Fiji the following year, with both moving immediately to tighten restrictions on non-citizens and crack down on agricultural unions.
But the majority saw the Imperials as something bizarre and frightening. The party’s anti-union program didn’t sit well with Australasia’s long tradition of labor activism, its anti-feminism ran counter to the historic Australasian progressivism on women’s rights, and even the most conservative were aghast at its disregard for settled relationships and institutions. For many, the final straw was the growing trouble in Ireland: the Imperials’ recognition of the Ulster secession infuriated Australasia’s large Irish population, leading to protests in the major cities that verged on riots. In Sydney, Melbourne and Perth, Imperial sympathizers attacked the protesters, fighting pitched battles in the streets with Irish trade unionists, with the governments of all three states having to call up the militia to restore order.
The violence of 1915 solidified the Imperials’ reputation as troublemakers, and while they retained control of the Queensland legislature in the following year’s general election, they were voted out in Fiji and lost seats at the federal level compared to their 1913 performance. Relations between the federal government and Westminster became increasingly strained, and the outbreak of war in India would test whether the Australasians’ loyalty to Britain or their dislike of the Imperial ministry was stronger…
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Avril Campbell, Canada in the Twentieth Century (Queen’s Univ. Press, 1998)
… The Great War had left its scars on Canada, not only in the form of dead and wounded men but in the legacy of the Québec conscription riots. [2]. Conciliatory action on both sides had defused the situation at the time, and many French Canadians had served bravely in their own regiments, but the incident left a lingering perception among Anglo-Canadians that their francophone countrymen were unpatriotic and even treasonous, and bad feeling from the crisis led to a hardening of Québécois nationalism.
These feelings remained mostly latent through the 1900s, although they derailed the promising career of Wilfrid Laurier. The Liberal leader was personally popular and had widely been expected to become prime minister after the war, but his party unexpectedly lost the 1898 election due to anti-French sentiments in English Canada and Québécois resentment of his anti-clericalism and his opposition to the riots. He would lose the party leadership less than a year later, resigning from parliament to become a civil rights lawyer in Montréal, and his loss is often blamed for the Liberals’ failure to establish a firm foothold in Québec.
The 1900s were a time of prosperity, confidence and rapid growth, marked by industrial development and resumption of the immigration that had been interrupted by the war. By 1910, Canada had more than seven million people, and although it would lose its place as the most populous dominion the following year to the newly formed South African Union, it remained the richest and most developed. At the quadrennial Imperial Conferences, Canada was the strongest proponent of an increased role for the dominions in imperial governance. It led the charge for an imperial finance board as a condition of the 1912 debt relief package, in opposition to the Australasian delegation which wanted to provide the loan with no strings attached.
The British depression of 1910 had little immediate effect on Canada, whose largest trading partner was the United States: its economy would not go into recession until 1913 when the downturn became global. Like Australasia, which also went into recession late, Canada attracted tens of thousands of British immigrants, fleeing the worsening economic climate of the United Kingdom for places where there were still jobs.
It was this wave of immigration that would trigger the latent tensions between anglophone and francophone Canadians. More than 70,000 British immigrants settled in Montréal between 1911 and 1914, upsetting the provincial government’s attempt to secure the city’s French-speaking majority by annexing the suburbs. The Québécois legislature, dominated by ultramontane nationalists of the prewar, pre-Legion mold, responded by passing laws sharply restricting the use of English and redrawing the legislative map to favor francophone rural districts. The federal government pushed back, tabling a bill to take language policy out of provincial hands and establish English and French as co-official languages throughout the country.
It was during this period that Laurier, then in his seventies, re-emerged in national politics. He had represented many British and other anglophone workers and businessmen charged with violating the French-only laws, often winning acquittals and paying poor workers’ fines from his own pocket. The Anglophones and the liberals on the French-Canadian side saw him as a bulwark against oppressive provincial government and a voice of sanity in a time of rising passions, and in 1915, they returned him to parliament after a 16-year hiatus. His platform, and that of his new One Canada Party, centered on taking issues such as language and religion out of the political arena by establishing constitutional charters of rights at both the federal and provincial levels.
This quest would remain a quixotic one during Laurier’s lifetime, although the charter eventually written into the Canadian Constitution Act 1930 would conform almost exactly to his draft, but by the time of his election, the national political environment had shifted. Another wave of British immigration was in progress – this one consisting not of economic refugees from the depression but of political refugees from the Imperial government – and nearly all sectors of Canadian politics watched the Imperials’ progress with appalled horror. Although Imperial Leagues were formed in some cities and party supporters held marches demanding that the French-Canadians be punished, Canada was the one dominion where the party gained no significant following. The example provided by the Imperials’ exploitation of internal divisions convinced the moderate Anglo-Canadian and French-Canadian leadership to set their differences aside, and once again, Laurier was able to broker a climbdown, with the Québécois government agreeing to allow English in cities where anglophones formed at least a quarter of the population and the federal government withdrawing its attempt to make language policy a national matter.
This compromise, like the one during the war, would cause lingering resentment among hard-line Québécois nationalists, who retreated further into ultramontanism and planted the seeds of the conflicts of the 1920s through 60s, and among the more militant Anglo-Canadians. But language disputes would soon be moved off the front page by the deteriorating situation in India, and by the Canadian government’s attempts to forge a united response by the dominions…
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[1] See post 839.
[2] See post 1856.
