The Rise of the German Menace Imperial Anxiety and British Popular Culture, 1896-1903 Patrick Longson University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. Doctoral Thesis for Submission to the School of History and Cultures, University of Birmingham on 18 October 2013. Examined at the University of Birmingham on 3 January 2014 by: Professor John M. MacKenzie Professor Emeritus, University of Lancaster & Professor Matthew Hilton University of Birmingham Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1 Before the German Menace: Imperial Anxieties up to 1896 25 Chapter 2 The Kruger Telegram Crisis 43 Chapter 3 The Legacy of the Kruger Telegram, 1896-1902 70 Chapter 4 The German Imperial Menace: Popular Discourse and British Policy, 1902-1903 98 Conclusion 126 Bibliography 133 Acknowledgments The writing of this thesis has presented many varied challenges and trials. Without the support of so many people it would not have been possible. My long suffering supervisors Professor Corey Ross and Dr Kim Wagner have always been on hand to advise and inspire me. They have both gone above and beyond their obligations and I must express my sincere thanks and lasting friendship. Without their combined tutelage and patience I would not have made it this far. Corey’s candid and open approach teaching, which I first experienced in my third year as an undergraduate, and his continuous encouragement and help, led me to pursue history as a postgraduate. Over the last year in particular Kim has become an ever-present mentor and friend, providing ad hoc supervisions over coffee and generally doing far more than I could have hoped in order to help me in all aspects of my academic career. I would like to express my sincere gratitude to the School of History and Cultures and the University of Birmingham. I hope to have paid back some of the investment they have made in me with the successful completion of 7 years study. The Arts and Humanities Research Council funding which I have gained through the department has made this whole thing possible. Furthermore, the willingness of all of the staff I have encountered to provide advice and support is invaluable; thanks especially to Nick Crowson, Ben White, Sadiah Qureshi, Elaine Fulton, Matthew Hilton, Berny Sebe and Julian Greaves. I also owe much to the staff at Queen Mary, University of London, where much of this thesis was written. The kindness and encouragement shown to me by all of the fantastic people there, as part of my teaching and support roles, is sincerely appreciated; thanks go in particular to Miri Rubin, Emma Yates, Chris Sparks, Saul Dubow, Joel Morley and Reuben Loffman. Another group who have helped to make my PhD liveable have been the History and Cultures Workshop/JHAC postgrads at Birmingham. The efforts of the group helped my own progress extensively, and also provided a vital outlet to share and develop thoughts and opinions; thanks must go especially to Jamie Perry, for many free stays and some excellent whiskey. Most of all I must also thank my family and close friends. I owe a debt of gratitude to my parents, Carolyn and David Longson, to whom I would like to dedicate this thesis; they offer constant and unquestioning love, support and enthusiasm for everything I do. They have also been immensely important over the whole three years, and have made my life immeasurably easier and happier. They have listened and advised wherever possible with my studies and their advice on the thesis has been instrumental in the final stages. My brother Duncan, and sister Maria, have also been rocks upon which I have relied throughout my life and whom I have always been able to turn to for help and support; also thank you to my Granddad, Ken Longson, for the company on long trips home to Sheffield and for the repeated kindness and financial support. Thank you all for everything. I would also like to thank the whole Pierce family who have provided me with a roof and a base of operations since my move to London. More so, they generously offered me a second home and at various times have helped me out of low spots, and shown enthusiasm for my studies way beyond what I could have hoped for. And finally I would like to express my enduring love and thanks to Isobel Pierce. My life has been a happier and more joyful place as a result of her abiding affection, enthusiasm and energy; furthermore, she has offered unquestioning and unrelenting moral and emotional support throughout this whole PhD. Introduction In December 1902 the most prominent British imperialist of his era, Rudyard Kipling, publicly condemned British cooperation with Germany during the British-German blockade of Venezuela. The Times, 22 December 1902 His poem, ‘The Rowers’, published in the Times chastised the British Government. Kipling invoked the language and ideology of the ‘German Menace’ in order to express his disgust at British association with Germany; this thesis will uncover the process by which these ideas came into being, and how they grew to become a powerful force in culture and politics. The idea of a German Menace was not simply a product of concerns about the defence of the British Isles, but rather that it was born out of the mentality of imperialism. Between 1896 and 1903 imperial 1 2 Introduction antagonism between Germany and Britain, in various contexts around the globe, inspired the popular perception of the German Menace as a distinctly imperial threat. Where the established historiography locates the beginning of the Anglo-German rivalry within the development of the naval armaments race after 1904, this study traces the British fear of Germany much earlier and, crucially, much further from the shores of the North Sea. The German Menace emerged from the context of imperial anxiety and crises in the empire, both in formal territories and areas of informal influence. By 1902 the stereotypes of German covetousness, autocracy and efficiency coalesced to form a powerful force in British society. Furthermore, through the study of this phenomenon, the interplay between political decision-making, popular sentiment and the media will be revealed. In the pre-war period Germany was imagined as a holistic menace to empire. For much of the long and diverse historiography of Britain and Germany before the First World War, the story has so often centred on dreadnoughts, invasion scares and European diplomacy. The ‘Age of Empire’, as Jan Rüger has termed it, is often treated as distinct from the era of Great Power politics.1 The imperial and global origins of the German Menace have yet to be examined within the context of domestic politics and popular debates in the imperial metropole. British domestic and imperial anxieties coalesced into a repertoire – akin to what John MacKenzie has described as an ‘ideological cluster’ - of anti-German tropes.2 A widely-recognised anxiety about a German Menace developed in popular culture formed out of apprehensions about German foreign policy and imperial aspirations. This impression of a threat to empire was constituted from themes common to other external imperial anxieties; the jealousy, autocracy and alleged conspiracies attributed to Britain’s traditional colonial rivals - France and Russia – were transposed onto Germany after 1896. Within existing scholarship the imperial dimensions of this menace have yet to be explored. Concerns about Germany should be viewed as part of a tradition of imperial anxiety which focussed upon both internal insecurity (revolutionary nationalism, criminality, miscegenation, degeneration and national efficiency) as well as external dangers (imperial rivalry in Africa and Asia). During the pre-war era British media culture was periodically gripped by imperial anxieties of this nature, which were based upon deep-seated concerns about the stability, strength and durability of the British Empire. This was especially the case during international crises when such stereotypes were voiced, often angrily, by the majority. But even during periods of calm, polemicists, fiction authors, politicians and journalists promulgated an anti-German message that informed, and was sustained by, nascent anti-German sentiments. The Empire was commonly imagined as a single entity; any encroachment upon the periphery was by extension an attack upon its centre. By tracing the development of the popular perception of a German Menace to Britain’s Empire and its concomitant themes, from its emergence during the Kruger Telegram Crisis (1896) until the beginnings of domestically focussed anxiety about Germany after 1903, it will be possible to reveal more about the early development of stereotypes which dominated twentieth- century perceptions of Germany in Britain. The Kruger Telegram Crisis, along with the subsequent declaration of a world empire by the German Kaiser, Wilhelm II, in January 1896, represents a paradigm shift in British perceptions. This incident, more than any other, laid the foundations for the increasing association of Germany with a threat to empire. A major contention of this thesis will be to suggest that from the popular perspective, the impact of the Kruger Telegram has been vastly underestimated. Rather than quickly dissipating, the popular anger during the crisis scarred British perceptions of Germany for a generation; it precipitated the crystallization of disparate themes into a more coherent notion of the German threat to Britain.