Balfour backs the new concept of empire

president for life. Britain was generous in offering lands far away from her shores, while in the same period she was far from open-armed in welcoming persecuted Jewish refugees to her own shores.

But more relevant than the evident hypocrisy in the Balfour–Rothschild exchange was the British Great Game, which lay behind the Balfour note. It is not insignifi cant that the geographical location for the new British-sponsored Jewish homeland lay in one of the most strategic areas along the main artery of the enlarged post-1914 British Empire, in a sensitive position along the route to India as well as in relation to the newly won Arab petroleum lands of Ottoman Turkey. The settlement of a Jewish minority under British protectorate in Palestine, argued Balfour and others in London, would give London strategic possibilities of enormous importance. It was, to say the least, a cynical ploy on the part of Balfour and his circle.

BALFOUR BACKS THE NEW CONCEPT OF EMPIRE

Beginning approximately in the early 1890s, a group of British elites, primarily from the privileged colleges of Oxford and Cambridge, formed what was to become the most infl uential policy network in Britain over the next half century and more. The group denied its existence as a formal group, but its footprints can be found around the establishment of a new journal of empire, the Round Table, founded in 1910.

The group argued that a more subtle and effi cient system of global empire was required to extend the effective hegemony of AngloSaxon culture over the next century.

At the time of its inception, this ‘Round Table’ group as it was sometimes called, was explicitly anti-German and pro-Empire. Writing in the Round Table in August 1911, three years before Britain declared war against Germany, the infl uential Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian) declared:

There are at present two codes of international morality—the British or Anglo-Saxon and the continental or German. Both cannot prevail. If the British Empire is not strong enough to be a real infl uence for fair dealing between nations, the reactionary standards of the German bureaucracy will triumph, and it will then only be a question of time before the British Empire itself is victimized by an international ‘hold-up’ on the lines of the Agadir incident. Unless the British people are strong enough to make it

impossible for backward rivals to attack them with any prospect of success, they will have to accept the political standards of the aggressive military powers.10

In place of the costly military occupation of the colonies of the British Empire, they argued for a more repressive tolerance, calling for the creation of a British ‘Commonwealth of Nations.’ Members nations were to be given the illusion of independence, enabling Britain to reduce the high costs of far-fl ung armies of occupation from India to Egypt, and now across Africa and the Middle East as well. The term ‘informal empire’ was sometimes used to describe the shift.

This emerging faction was grouped around the infl uential London Times, and included such voices as Foreign Secretary Albert Lord Grey, historian and member of British secret intelligence Arnold Toynbee, as well as H.G. Wells, Alfred Lord Milner of the South Africa project, and the proponent of a new fi eld termed geopolitics, Halford J. Mackinder of the London School of Economics. Its principal think tank, which was formed in the corridors of Versailles in 1919, became the Royal Institute for International Affairs (Chatham House).

The idea of a Jewish-dominated Palestine, beholden to England for its tenuous survival, surrounded by a balkanized group of squabbling Arab states, formed part of this group’s concept of a new British Empire. Mackinder, commenting at the time of the Versailles peace conference, described his infl uential group’s vision of the role a British protectorate over Palestine would play in the Great Game of British advance toward a post-1918 global empire, to be shaped around a British-defi ned and dominated League of Nations.

Mackinder described how the more far-thinking of the British establishment viewed their Palestine project in 1919:

If the World-Island be inevitably the principal seat of humanity on this globe, and if Arabia, as the passage-land from Europe to the Indies and from the Northern to the Southern Heartland, be central to the World-Island, then the hill citadel of Jerusalem has a strategical position with reference to world-realities not differing essentially from its ideal position in the perspective of the Middle Ages, or its strategical position between ancient Babylon and Egypt.

He noted that

the Suez Canal carries the rich traffi c between the Indies and Europe to within striking distance of an army based on Palestine,

and already the trunk railway is being built through the coastal plain by Jaffa, which will connect the Southern with the Northern Heartland.

Commenting on the special signifi cance of the thinking behind his friend Balfour’s 1917 proposal to Lord Rothschild, Mackinder noted:

The Jewish national seat in Palestine will be one of the most important outcomes of the war. That is a subject on which we can now afford to speak the truth … a national home at the physical and historical centre of the world, should make the Jew ‘range’ [sic] himself … There are those who try to distinguish between the Jewish religion and the Hebrew race, but surely the popular view of their broad identity is not far wrong.11

The Round Table group’s grand design was to link England’s vast colonial possessions, from the gold and diamond mines of Cecil Rhodes and Rothschild’s Consolidated Gold Fields in South Africa, north to Egypt and the vital shipping route through the Suez Canal, and on through Mesopotamia, Kuwait and Persia into India in the East.

The British conquest of the German colony of Tanganyika (German East Africa) in central Africa in 1916, was not a decisive battle in a war to bring Germany to the peace table, but rather the completion of a vital link in this chain of British imperial control, from the Cape of Good Hope to Cairo.

The great power able to control this vast reach would control the world’s most valuable strategic raw materials, from gold, basis of the international gold standard for world trade, to petroleum, in 1919 emerging as the energy source of the modern industrial era.

This remains a geopolitical reality every bit as much during the early years of the twenty-fi rst century as it was in 1919. With such control, every nation on earth would fall under the scepter of the Britannic Empire. Until his death in 1902, Cecil Rhodes was the prime fi nancial backer of this elite new ‘informal empire’ group.

The Boer War (1899–1902) was a project of the group, fi nanced and personally instigated by Rhodes in order to secure fi rm British control of the vast mineral wealth of the Transvaal, at that time in control of the Boer minority, who were of Dutch origin. The war itself, in which Winston Churchill rose to public notice, was precipitated

by Rhodes and Alfred Milner, and others of their circle, in order to bring what was believed to be the world’s richest gold-producing region fi rmly under British control.

The Transvaal was the site of the world’s largest gold discovery since the 1848 California Gold Rush, and its capture was essential to the continued role of London as the capital of the world’s fi nancial system and of its gold standard. Lord Milner, Jan Smuts and Rhodes were all part of the new empire faction which, as part of the Great Game, defeated the independent Boers and created a Union of South Africa.12

By 1920, Britain had succeeded in establishing fi rm control over all of southern Africa, including the former German South West Africa, as well as the vast newly discovered petroleum wealth of the former Ottoman Empire, by means of her military presence, confl icting promises and the establishment of a British protectorate over Palestine as a new Jewish homeland. But all accounts were not quite in order in 1920. The British Empire had come out of the war as bankrupt as she entered it, if not more so.