How Empires Fall
Globalization is not new, and
neither is its repercussions.
A little over a hundred years
ago England stood at the center of the first truly globalized economy. The British navy and the East India Company
had conquered nearly a fifth of the world’s land mass, and Queen Victoria ruled
over roughly a quarter of the world’s population. Raw materials and raw wealth flowed into England
from all over the world, and at any time somewhere in the world backs were bent
in sweatshops and fields laboring in England’s behalf. It was truly said that “The sun never set of
the British Empire.”
Such great empires require
complex organizations, and it wasn’t enough to send out agents from
England. Local bureaucrats and managers had
to be trained to read and write in English.
As the bureaucratic infrastructure became increasingly complex new
center of power emerged in the colonies. A new middle class appeared, raised to think
of themselves as citizens of the English Empire. In time, they began to wonder why they should
not also share in the rights of Englishmen.
Pressures for self-rule became protests for independence as local
leaders began to emerge in the colonies.
At the same time similar
questions were arising at home. Increasingly
the wealth of the empire was flowing into the pockets of investors, insurers
and merchants while nearly a quarter of the English population lived at or
below the poverty line. With the industrial
revolution many workers lost their jobs to mechanization, and major industries
like mining and ship building saw periodic cycles of unemployment. While nineteenth century reforms gave
householders and farmers the right to vote many of the poor were still
excluded, as were all women, and an arcane electoral system resulted in unequal
representation.
Through the end of the 19th
century the two main political parties traded the government back and forth
with relatively little disagreement over foreign policy or free trade. Then in 1901 disagreements over the Boer War
brought the conservatives back into power on a wave of nationalist sentiment,
but the war proved expensive. It soon
became clear that Britain could no longer act unilaterally, but long decades as
the world’s only superpower had left British politicians ill prepared to
negotiate with allies. As news spread of
Boer women and children dying in unsanitary “concentration camps” the public
turned against the war. The conservative
defended their actions as military necessities, but the elections in 1905 saw a
liberal victory.
The start of the twentieth
century saw the rise of progressive issues.
Women demanded the right to vote, and working parents demanded better
education for their children. The poor
demanded better living conditions, prison reform and reform of the poor laws,
and the public demanded higher taxes on the rich and tariffs on imports. The liberal party introduced national insurance
and unemployment support, but the party began to fracture over its embrace of
free trade and its willingness to compromise with conservatives. Radical progressives formed a socialist
“labor” party, and by the 1920s they had replaced the old liberals.
Faced with declining influence
overseas and an insurgent working class at home, those in power struggled to
maintain their hold. Politics became
increasingly volatile as old answers no longer met the new realities. This is how empires fall—not because those at
the top become soft and weak but because those who have labored to build the
foundations become lean and hungry. To
resist their demands, or to capitalize on them, only widens the cracks in the
social infrastructure.