Dear Stephen,
I trust this letter finds you in good spirits and health and that you and Vivian are enjoying your holiday in the highlands.
Regarding your frustrations expressed in our last meeting and letters before you left, I can only agree that the situation of Great Britain and our sprawling empire is far less rosy then the government, the pro-establishiment or pro-governmental newspapers or the general opinion of the public at large would have anyone - who is truly acquainted with the facts - believe.
Yes, I know you think that my prior fourteen years of extensive military service, with it's consequent many injuries and illnesses (including the loss of my left hand and fore arm) which resulted in me finally being invalided out of the service in '83, following our national misadventures in the 2nd Anglo-Ottoman war of '82, in various parts of our empire has made me into an incorrigible and absolute cynic. I do not and probably never will share the often delusional, self-aggrandizing ideas of many of my parlimentary or military collegues and peers that the Empire is either wholely belevolent in it's intentions or even it's day to day administration or for that matter wholely secure from a strictly military standing point. Then again unlike many of them, I was actually on site in various places and in various campaigns when we were building a great part of it over the last decade and a half.
While our terrestial empire (I will not even get started on our stellar empire, that would take another letter by itself) is vast, and spans the globe having holdings just about anywhere one looks on a map. Our empire has been refered to as "the Empire on which the Sun never sets", with a fair amount of reason it has to be said. The very diversity of regions this implies, also means our empire is physically and geographically deeply scattered and only held together against any external threat by the power of the Royal Navy, our air and sky fleet services and our land armies. Just as importantly this collections of colonies, enclaves, dominions and protectorates is held together by a common framework of civil administration and civil law, a common financial and monetary system and our very considerable merchantile marine fleet.
In a nutshell our possessions and holdings can be broken down into the following seven regional groups:
1) British North America: the provinces of Alaska (annexed in 1867), the Yukon, British Columbia, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba, Ontario (Lower Canada), Quebec (Upper Canada), the Northwest Territories, Newfoundland and Labrador, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, North Maine (annexed to New Brunswick in 1867), Northwest Penisular Michigan (annexed to Lower Canada in 1867)
2) Central and South America: British Honduras (Belize), Jamaica, the Cayman Islands, the Bahamas islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the British Virgin Islands, the Leeward and Windward Islands (the Lesser Antilles Islands), Trinidad and Tobago, British Guiana
3) Africa: the Cape Province, the Basutoland Protectorate, the Bechuanaland Protectorate, Sierra Leone, British East Africa, British Somilialand and our (very nominal if the Boers have anything to say about it) suzerainty over the Orange Free State and Transvaal Republic
4) North and South Atlantic: Bermuda Island, Ascension Island, St Helena Island, the Falkland Islands, South Georgia island, the South Sandwich Islands, the South Shetland Islands, the South Orkney Islands, the Tristan da Gunha Islands, Gough Island and the British Channel Islands
5) The Orient and Indian Ocean: Socotra Island, the Maldives Islands, the Chagos Archipelgago, the Seychelles Islands, the Maruritius Islands, Ceylon, the British Indian and Burmese States (excepting the Portuguese, French, Austrian and German Enclaves, Trade Concessions and Treaty ports), the Andaman Islands, the Cocos Islands, Christmas Island
6) East Asia and the Pacific: Australia, Tasmania, New Zealand, British Malaysia, Sawarak, the Singapore Enclave, the Hong Kong Enclave, the Fiji islands, the Solomon Islands Protectorate, the New Hebrides Islands, the Pitcairn Islands, the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Protectorate
7) The Mediterranean: the Gibraltar Enclave, the Maltese Islands
This collection of territories would keep any of the great powers busy enough just administering to, but in season and out of season, various British governments (regardless of political stripe) are committed to adding still more to it! The fact that the administrtation of the empire is divided between three different and often ruthlessly competing governmental departments hardly helps or inspires confidence to my mind. The Colonial Office, directs and administers to our various dominions, colonies and enclaves, while all our possessions in the Orient and Indian Ocean fall under the control or oversight of the India Office. While our various African or Asian protectorates come under the control and/or direction of our Foriegn Office via their appointed minions, the Resident-Commissioners.
In my personal experience, the officials assigned to duties in our empire can be divided into three broad categories: those from the Colonial Office are thorougly incompetent, the India Office are thoroughly corrupt and the Foreign Office are thoroughly useless! While, I will admit, that not all of these officials fall into these categories, and the last three governments have spent considerable effort (and I have to say a fair amount of success) to improve our empire's administration and clean out a great deal of the entrenched incompetence and corruption within the machinery of administration. Enough of them still do however fall into these catego to make the matter academic and explains why our empire has so frequently been troubled by rebellions, uprisings and crisises over matters which while viewed as of no importance or consequence by their political and administrative overseers are viewed rather more seriously, if not matters of life and death, by the local inhabitants!
The Foreign Office is committed to establishing still more protectorates in the next few years, if not sooner and often in intense competion with the Colonial and India Offices which would rather annexed some of these places directly. These nations in question, are quite fully independent and automonous and quite naturally wish to remain as such. In theory much of this is supposed to assist the empire in securing many of it's overseas possessions against encroachment by other powers, and while I understand the theory, the practical difficulties this policy presents are immense and in the long run might make our empire, less secure not more so, given the rivalries and problems it will create or exacerbate.
I refer of course to the confidencial though hardly in any way secret governmental and parlimentary discussions (given that both Number 10 and Westminister leak like sieves these days) for the long term acquisition of political and economic control over Tibet, Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan to build up a line of buffer or (very) nominally independent clientale states along our long Indian and Burmese borders with Qing China. As well as the establishment of independent, pro-British regimes in Afghanistan or even Persia to secure our Indian possessions western and northern borders with both the Russian and Ottoman Empires! In the first case, Tibet has already firmly and violently resisted attempts by the India Office to annex them, and there is no reason to expect that to change anytime soon. If the Foreign Office, expects the Tibetians to accept a protectorate, they are absolutely daft! Nepal, Sikkim and Bhutan are currently friendly enough to us (despite past conflicts), that neither annexation or a protectorate is required to serve our purposes, and all three of them are quite capable of putting up a stubborn if not crippling fight against any invader, from either side of their borders.
Quite how the Ottoman Sublime Porte will likely react to us meddling in their empire (yet again... and quite probably as unsuccessfully on all previous occassions) and having two of their most important eastern provinces detached from their empire, has as far as I know, never been properly discussed! Given our empire's past failures to do just that at various times and via various wars, and considering the Ottoman Empire's iron grip on both provinces, this is a project that in the long run will neither prosper, give us what is wanted or improve Anglo-Ottoman relations. How the Russians who have had their eyes on both Persia and Afghanistan for many long years will react has not been thoroughly discussed either, though it has entered the heads of at least some of our governmental ministers, state and under secretaries and parlimentary officials that their reaction will not be positive!
I am begining to wonder if there are those in both the India Office and Foreign Office, who think that the second Anglo-Ottoman and proceeding first and second Afghan Wars were not sufficient trouble for one century, already! While further to the east coverteous eyes are cast at establishing protectorates over the Sultanate of Brunei, the Kingdoms of Tonga, Siam, Samoa and Hawai'i, as well as outright annexation of Noble's Isle well to the east of Australia and New Zealand. Never mind, there are other great powers with vested interests in all these places.
While a protectorate over Tonga, might be accepted by the other powers in East Asia and the Pacific, Siam will put us at daggers drawn with France (and we have quite enough problems with them already! Africa, Europe, the Caribbeanean, the Mediterranean, Madagascar, India to name just a few places we currently have quarrels with them), which also has eyes on the Kingdom and it's neighbour Laos, to secure their Indochinese possessions. Samoa, drags us into a potential conflict with Germany, Japan, Hawai'i and France, all who eye those islands with interest and will not welcome us taking them, nor will the Samoans come to that!
Hawai'i being of course, the other powder keg, they will not accept a protectorate or out right annexation by any of the dozen or so powers that have an interest in those prosperous and strategic islands, and will like the Siamese resist any attempt to do so, more importantly, Hawai'i can reasonable call on the politcal, economic and military assistence of both the Empire of Japan and of Austria-Hungary, both close and trusted friends to the Hawaiians to prevent any covert or overt takeover (the disasterous 1887 'Bayonet Constitution affair', that idiot, the American minister to Hawaii unsuccessfully tried to mastermind comes vividly to memory).
Brunei is a similiar situation, it shares borders with our colonies in Sawarak, as well as German Borneo and Austro-Hungarian Borneo. Both the Germans and the Austrians are friendly to the Brunei (and all three reap considerable economic benefits from this arrangement), and have consistently worked quietly behind the scenes to give the Sultan every economic and political support in shore up his country's position against British economic and political encroachment, but the Brunei's position is beginning to get desperate (with both the Foreign Office and the India Office throwing everything they have at them, this is hardly surprising), so they may soon turn to their friends for more overt support, particularly military support or ask for protectorate status from either the German or Austro-Hungarian Empires to thwart our empire's designs upon them.
Both the F.O. and I.O., think this scenario is unlikely, I for one do not share that optimistic appraisal of the situation. In any case, the last thing we need to do is needlessly antagonize both the Germans and the Austrians, as both countries are currently friendly for the most part and their Central Powers alliance with Italy, makes them one of the more formidble military, economic and political power blocks in Europe! Further all three countries share borders with our overseas possessions and if it comes to a war, they can cause us a great deal of havoc, particularly as we have few permanent friends in the world, a lot of rivals and the empire is still recovering from several wars over the last two decades (not all of which were successful).
In the Americas we have quarrels enough as it is, there is the ongoing borders dispute with Venezuela and our colony, British Guiana, which shows no sign of cooling off anytime soon, particularly as the United States or rather their minister to the Venezuelan government, has made a point of egging the Venezuelans on in their claims against us. Honduras has similar claims against our Belize colony, though unlike the Venzuelans they are prepared to be reasonable about it, and have often discussed utilizing foreign arbitration in whatever venue, we would find acceptable to put an end to the matter, which has vexed both our countries for many long decades. While our relations with the United States of America, are generally cool, not surprising in view of events, particularly our participation in their civil war of 1861-67, and our annexation of parts of two of their states, principally, the part of Northern Maine, that we ceded to them to avoid a war in 1822-23, which we subsequently took back with some interest it has to be said in 1863-67, along with half of the State of Michigan.
While I understand our tacit support of the Union government in their second civil war has gone a long way to thawing relations, there are still outstanding issues such as the Alabama Claims and the return of the portions of the two states we annexed. My knowledge of the political climate in our possessions in British North America, is that while, settling the financial and political claims of the Union government is not unwelcome, returning the annexed parts of Maine and Michigan to the Union are not, and will not win us any friends in Lower Canada especially and could turn considerable elements of the British North American provinces against us, in the long run if we do it. Our political relations with the Confederate States of America, have I am not completely sorry to say, gone to pieces, whatever economic benefits we may still reap from them (even that is distasteful in the extreme, given their failure to honour their wartime committments and treaty obligations) and if we did not need them as a political and military counterweight to the Union, I doubt we would continue any relations with them. The existance of the Independent States of America, the Mormon Republic of Utah, and the Native States of the Navajo and the Lakota complicates our troublesome relations with the United States even further, particularly as we have tacitly politically and economically acknowledged all four of them, though made no overt attempt to support any of them.
Otherwise thankfully our relations with the other central and South America countries are stable and prosperous, on both sides. Although Argentina's continues claims to the Falkland Islands, which they insist on calling the Islas Malvinas, and their attempts to act like they physically own it, is a sore point which is going to continue to fester for some time. Unlike others in government or the military establishment, I am concerned that the Argentinian government, might if the situation allowed for it and conditions within Argentina were favourable and we are distracted by events elsewhere in the world or within our empire, might make a grab for the Falklands via military means. Both the Cabinet's and the Foreign Office's flat refusal, to even enter into political discussions or negotiations concerning the Falklands with the Argentinians, is not helping the matter from their perspective or their collective tempers.
The fact that both Austria-Hungary, Germany and France have substancial holdings in the Carribbeanean Islands is still rather worrying from our prespective. They are so placed as to give the Royal Navy a great deal of trouble in the event of a war with any one of them protecting our colonies and commerce traffic in the region. Austria-Hungary, controls the Austro-Hungarian Virgin Islands, while the Germans hold the all the former Danish Virgin Islands as well as the Dutch colonies in the Lesser Antilles and the Dutch Antilles Islands off Venezuela (following both Denmark and the Netherlands entering the German Confederation/Empire in 1867 and 1882 respectively). The French are the most vexing as they hold Guadeloupe and Martinique, two of the most valuable islands in the Lesser Antilles, although surrounded on all sides by our islands possessions: the two French islands are heavily fortified, heavily garrisoned and well supplied with good harbours for military use and commercial traffic and well placed to allow French cruiser squadrons operating from either one of them to cause considerable havoc to our Merchantile Marine.
I will continue this letter and discussion of our national affairs at a later date, the House of Lords (as is the House of Commons) is presently convening to vote on a new proposed bill before Parliament today even as I have been writing this letter. As the vote concerns one my own parliamentary committee chairmanships, the Special Appellate and Parliamentary Committee for the Consideration of Divorce Cases, it is rather important that I be present for this seccession.
Yours as always very sincerely and affectionately,
Leo
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