The Scramble for China by Robert Bickers

Author:Robert Bickers
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141983509
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2013-04-08T04:00:00+00:00

A new imperialism was coalescing in Britain, and more widely in Europe too. It used much of the older language, images, ideas and facts – the ‘facts’ that underpinned the need for empire, that helped a calculation of its British human costs: all these we are now familiar with. But it refashioned them into a much more coherent and activist imperialism. Queen Victoria was in 1876 made ‘Empress of India’ by Prime Minister Disraeli. Possession was refashioned into empire, and into destiny. And the servants of the British state overseas, the ‘right’ men, became agents of empire. Their deaths in service were imperial martyrdoms, no less martyrdom for being secular than the half-wished-for deaths of Taylor’s disciples, or the religious at Tianjin. Margary was but the latest in the roll-call of those moistening English eyes, setting pulses a-racing and fists thumping on tables. As he travelled to Hankou on an American steamer – a ‘river palace’ he thought it – he reflected on British progress in China, how ‘wonderful’ it was that the river had been opened by ‘our fleet of mighty men of war’, and he could ‘picture Colonel Gordon’ on the heights around Nanjing.57 Margary called on local officials, demanded they restrain and educate the curious crowds who appeared wherever he went, and stated calmly that when such aid was not close to hand, ‘A kick and a few words in his own tongue telling him he is an ignorant boor will make a common Chinaman worship you.’58 His death was incorporated into the same empire script that he rehearsed as he travelled, and at Shanghai they acted out their part too, with monument and ceremony. And it also set in motion that nasty old routine, the one that Alcock’s convention seemed to have shown foresworn, of diplomatic huffing and puffing, excessive demand and brinkmanship, leading to gainful opportunity. Wade was never more obtuse and hardnosed than in the dispute over this affair. Poor Margary’s slaughter presaged another round in China’s despoliation, for it was a gift to the British hardliners. But it was also seen as a challenge, for there could be no ‘acquiescence in a defeat’, in the death of Margary and the failure of the expedition – even for Alcock, now in retirement, however cynical he was about the prospects of this overland trade.59 There could be no turning back.

The French chargé d’affaire’s demand for official Tianjin heads to roll had exasperated his peers in Peking. But the British now held the Yunnan provincial authorities entirely and fully accountable for the killings, and for the attack on Browne’s party. Above all, Wade demanded, in addition to financial reparation, the trial and punishment of the Yunnan governor. ‘Nothing else he could ask would be more thoroughly distasteful to the government of China,’ lamented Robert Hart, ‘and why? Nothing else would force it to step out to the same extent before all China and say that the foreigner is a personage to be respected.’ Hart could see this from both sides.

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