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Authors: Niall Ferguson
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anarchist Leon Czolgosz. (‘The President is in great order,’ his physician was quoted as saying. In fact, McKinley died on September 14.) This attack had awakened the American public to a hitherto neglected threat from within. The paper’s New York correspondent reported that the police were engaged in rounding up all the known anarchists in the city, though the plot to kill the President wasbelieved to have been hatched in Chicago, where two anarchist leaders, Emma Goldman and Abraham Isaak, had already been arrested. ‘I only done my duty,’ Czolgosz explained, by which he meant the anarchist’s duty to kill rulers and wage war on established governments. ‘I thought’, he added as he was led to the electric chair, ‘it would help the working people.’ The news that the President’s condition was improving and that the perpetrator’s associates were being rounded up might have reassured our breakfasting reader, as it had reassured the stock market the previous day. He would nevertheless have been aware that assassinations of heads of state were becoming disturbingly frequent. * The ideology of anarchism and the practice of terrorism were just two of the ‘serpents’ in the garden of globalization that Keynes had forgotten about by 1919.
What of the ‘projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries’? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast,
The Times
listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though
The Times
made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers’ lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike
The Times
’s editorial writers as sufficient to end the war:
To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty… would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire… The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.
Only the newspaper’s man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:
The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need – indeed, it would be a mistake – to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman… The political views of the Dutch… will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.
The Englishman’s ‘inherited ability to rule’ was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day’s
Times
reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the ‘spirit of lawlessness’ in the Gambia, which nebulous entity
What of the ‘projects and politics of militarism and imperialism, of racial and cultural rivalries’? There was ample evidence of these on September 11, 1901. In South Africa the bitterly contested war between the British and the Boers was approaching the end of its second year. The official communiqués from the British commander, Lord Kitchener, were sanguine. In the preceding week, according to his latest report, sixty-seven Boers had been killed, sixty-seven wounded and 384 taken prisoner. A further 163 had surrendered. By contrast,
The Times
listed the deaths of eighteen British soldiers, of whom just seven had been victims of enemy action. Here was a very British measure of military success, a profit and loss account from the battlefield. However, the methods the British had by this time adopted to defeat their foes were harsh in the extreme, though
The Times
made no mention of these. To deprive the Boers of supplies from their farms, their wives and children had been driven from their homes and herded into concentration camps, where conditions were atrocious; at this stage, roughly one in three inmates was dying because of poor sanitation and disease. In addition, Kitchener had ordered the construction of a network of barbed wire and blockhouses to disrupt the Boers’ lines of communication. Even these measures did not strike
The Times
’s editorial writers as sufficient to end the war:
To permit [the Boers] to protract the struggle and to exacerbate it by resort to deeds of barbarous cruelty… would not raise the character of the mother country in the eyes of her daughter nations, her partners in the Empire… The whole nation is agreed that we must carry through the task we have undertaken in South Africa. There should be no hesitation in adopting the policy and the means necessary to attain the end in view with the utmost rapidity and completeness.
Only the newspaper’s man in Cape Town, who evidently felt some unease at the harshness of British policy, sounded a note of warning:
The rod of iron should remain the rod of iron, and there is no need – indeed, it would be a mistake – to clothe it in velvet. He who wields it, however, should remember that the exercise of power is never incompatible with the manner of an English gentleman… The political views of the Dutch… will never be changed by individual Englishmen giving them occasion to doubt our inherited ability to rule.
The Englishman’s ‘inherited ability to rule’ was being put to the test in other parts of Africa too. That same day’s
Times
reported punitive expeditions against the Wa-Nandi tribe in Uganda and against the ‘spirit of lawlessness’ in the Gambia, which nebulous entity
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