British class system, he found the English climate of ideas to his liking and went on to college at Cambridge. There he spent long nights arguing socialism and independence as vital needs for India. Returning home, he became swept up in working for the nascent Indian Congress Party and spent a total of sixteen years in British jails for resisting British authority. But he never gave up on the goals toward which he was steering or the peaceful, cooperative course he had always planned to follow. When World War II broke out in 1939 in Europe, spreading to the Far East in 1941 when Japan attacked American protectorates and French, Dutch and British colonies in the Pacific, Nehru never even considered supporting Japan's vaunted Co-Prosperity Sphere. He saw Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy as threats to world civilization and considered British survival and ultimate Allied victory as essential to mankind's hopes for a decent future. The most remarkable thing in this story is simply that Nehru was right in his idealistic hopes. For the first time in the history of the world, a worldwide community existed which could reform itself, admittedly not without pain, failures and backslidings along the way, to meet its own ideals. That community of Englishspeaking peoples, even as its empire was dissolving in the midl 900s, had achieved something far more important than empire-a comity of independent nations able to act together without compulsion and to achieve fundamental change by peaceful and cooperative means. A community dedicated to such ends, however imperfectly, should be recognized as something new under the sun. But there were signs along the sea road we have been traveling that such a new community of sentiment and principle was coming into being. During the American Revolution, some 160 years before Nehru's Toward Freedom was published in 1940, the conservative leader Edmund Burke had remarked that Americans were fighting for Englishmen's rights in America. It took heroic effort and a bitter war to achieve those rights, but when full independence was achieved, people in England knew that the new American power spelled good news for English rights and freedom-in England. We've seen how, acting on this recognition, the English signed a peace treaty with the new United States of America giving the young republic borders far more extensive than America's allies in the War of American Independence wished to see, in particular opening the Ohio and Mississippi river system to American control and navigation, thus assuring the nation's ability to expand into what became America's heartland. Napoleon's sale of western lands to America in the Louisiana Purchase 20 years later, bringing the nation to the Pacific Coast, was characterized by his foreign minister Talleyrand as a recognition that the Americans "will achieve a destiny that we can no longer prevent." But that had been the policy, to confine and crib up American growth so that France might become a power in the Americas. Napoleon used the money he got from the Louisiana Purchase to crank up his war machine. He went on to subdue most of Europe, crowning himself emperor on the way. For years only England stood against him, keeping the seas around Europe so that the French Empire was contained. Those "far-distant, stormbeaten ships upon which the Grand Army never looked, " in the American Admiral Mahan's memorable phrase, did indeed stand 10
between that all-conquering army and the dominion of the world. Those few hundred slow-moving wooden ships had the insatiable emperor in a box. To break out, Napoleon turned east and invaded Russia. This was a bad mistake, for he lost most of his army in the Russian winter-and he'd left the English unconquered behind him. The English, with revived European allies, finally defeated Napoleon at Waterloo in 1815. A new danger soon arose in the formation of the Holy Alliance. Led by the restored French monarchy, this crew of despots, including the Russian Tsar, German princelings and the Austrian Emperor, was pledged to use armed force to crush popular uprisings-leading a Tsar to rise from his dinner table on one occasion, crying: "Saddle your horses, men, there's been a revolution in France!" Comic opera gestures aside, this instrument of oppression was a real threat to liberty, backed by the world's most powerful armies. The English response to this threat, advanced by the conservative foreign minister Castlereagh and his successor the liberal Canning, was to look seaward again and bar European intervention in the Americas, where Central and South American republics were breaking away from European rule. The United States was asked to join in this undertaking and did so, leading to Canning's famous remark that he had summoned the New World into existence to redress the balance of the Old. This compact was announced by the US alone as the Monroe Doctrine for domestic political reasons-but what put teeth in it was the Royal Navy, dominant in all oceans in these early years of the century-long Pax Britannica. We have seen how in that hundred years, 1815-1914, parliaments, railroads and other English expons girdled the world, along with the ever-changing and evolving English Common Law and language. There were fallings-away and betrayals of the cause of freedom, which perhaps I have left understated in this account. But the over-arching achievements of this accidental empire were impressive, and the world is living with its heritage today. A little-noticed aspect of this phenomenon was that the active interplay of the highly varied cultures involved a major achievement of the empire and its most important contribution to the world we live in.
Trial by Fire Europe exploded in World War I in 1914. England had striven to stay aloof from the intricate alliances that seamed the continent, but came in to support France against the powerful German war machine that threatened to sweep all before it. America came in in 1917, tipping the scales of battle to ensure German defeat. A humiliating and punishing peace was then imposed on Germany, over the protests of America's President Woodrow Wilson and a Liberal English politician, Winston Churchill. The inevitable resurgence of Germany was led by a twisted veteran of what was then called the Great War named Adolf Hitler, who preached and carried out a policy of German racial superiority. The German Wehrmacht soon proved itself the most powerful army in the world, having precipitated World War II by invading Poland in 1939. France fell in a lightning campaign spearheaded by tanks and dive bombers, and Winston Churchill, who had warned the world about Hitler and his Nazi creed before
SEA HISTORY 92, SPRING 2000