Can Peace Be Bought with Money? (4)
You may well find yourselves wondering. What could the British Empire—that vast dominion spanning the five oceans and six continents, the empire on which the sun never sets—possibly want from our fledgling republic?
Let me give you the answer first. From the mid-1880s through the eve of the First World War, we had more than a few cards we could lay on the table before the British Empire—enough that I wouldn't be stretching the truth to say so.
"Gold, grain, and alliance."
"...Gold, grain, and alliance, you say?"
"That's right."
At my confident tone, Cecil's face clouded with confusion, plastered over with question marks.
Gold, well—in this era it was a gift that would light up the face of any nation or government, so we can set that aside. The other two, though, you may find yourselves puzzled by as well.
Now then. Let me start with the alliance.
"The only nation in the Far East that can successfully obstruct Russia's southward expansion—no, the only nation that has no choice but to stake its very survival on stopping it—is us."
"I-is that so...?"
"In that brief hesitation, you thought of Japan, didn't you? Drawing on the thin intelligence your predecessors gathered through their rather modest capabilities and connections in the Far East. But I'll be blunt: that's wrong. It will take them at least thirty years before they can stand against a Russia coming down through Siberia to seize ice-free ports in Manchuria and the Maritime Province."
"..."
It was a somewhat exaggerated timeline, perhaps, but it wasn't wrong. If the British Empire wanted the picture they preferred—their own cultivated Japan projecting power across the peninsula into Liaodong and Manchuria to check Russia's southward push—there were several inflection points that would have to be passed first.
I held up three fingers before Cecil, whose expression had gone rigidly stiff. To persuade a man like him—someone who viewed the entire world as a business—what you needed was rational logic.
"First: Japan is not ready. The loans and debts they borrowed from the United States and the French Republic during the shogunate era, along with their considerably unequal trade terms, must be resolved as a matter of first priority."
"That can be guaranteed by Britain. Don't underestimate the City of London. Even if those two nations throw a tantrum, the reason and insight of London's financiers will teach them a lesson."
"I wouldn't dare dismiss the British Empire's power to mobilize capital. But if you said something like that in front of France and America—who are currently huddled together across the Atlantic—you'd get nothing but some very sour looks."
If he'd thrown that kind of talk in their faces, France and America—whose relationship had grown even stickier than in the original history—would almost certainly hammer Britain even harder through the Paris financial markets, a Britain that had already weathered several minor economic panics from the 1860s through the 1890s. And with labor unrest, unemployment, and a food crisis piling social problem upon social problem, Britain's already chaotic political world would see more than a few storms break.
This is Gladstone's last term, isn't it?
Once the Gladstone cabinet—which had at least operated on the basis of moral politics, leaving room for active intervention in the outside world—collapsed, Britain would spend the next twenty years adhering to a passive foreign policy under the doctrine of Splendid Isolation.
Which is to say: the time was approaching when the Royal Navy, that voracious consumer of government budgets, would be reduced from a grand fleet dominating the five oceans to a "stranded fleet" tied up in port. And in the wake of that, the likelihood of unrest in Britain's overseas expeditions and colonies would steadily rise.
And that wasn't all. If the Imperial fleet that guaranteed Britain's great sea lanes found itself tied down at home and at key stations, maritime insurance premiums would naturally explode. That would be the signal flare announcing a collapse in British overseas trade—and for an industrial nation that imported every raw material from its colonies except iron ore, coal, and tin, a surge in commodity prices would be a catastrophe of the first order.
No wonder they're losing ground to America and Germany.
Perhaps it was a natural conclusion. A fleet swollen to useless bulk by excessive naval budgets and habitual construction programs. A food crisis triggered by the Irish Question and the aftermath of the Corn Laws' repeal. Labor unrest and the suffrage question. A credit squeeze originating in New York. Exploding maritime insurance premiums and rising raw-material prices.
The truth was that for all its grandeur, the British Empire was an unstable empire, barely keeping a considerable number of internal problems submerged beneath the surface.
"Ambassador, as you well know, the world economy is now a single body. Oh, you might call that a rather arrogant and excessive turn of phrase, but it is simply the truth. The reason your empire so desperately extracts gold from its overseas colonies is to protect the economy of the home country, is it not?"
And in the end, the British Empire's obsession with gold would conclude in blood. The infamous Second Boer War.
"...That is... correct."
Cecil, reluctantly conceding my point, propped his chin on his hand for a long while, his lips twitching.
"At first, none of us understood. As the home country's industry and economy grew, we were simply filled with the hope that the Empire's glory would endure."
"But as a gap gradually opened between the gold deposited in the banks and the volume of bonds outstanding, contradictions naturally arose in the market."
"That's right. Of course, working to keep that gap in check through inertia is the province of the Treasury and the banks. But there are limits to controlling the scale through currency issuance."
"And the fundamental way to reduce that contradiction is to secure more gold."
"Precisely."
In short: unlike other nations, Britain had been the first to reach industrialization, and its body had ballooned as a result—but the "blood" circulating within, gold, was overwhelmingly insufficient. All the more so for a country that, a mere decade ago, had championed the gold standard at the European Monetary Conference and been the first to adopt it.
"The United States had California. Austria and Germany had the Tyrol."
"France recently acquired us."
"South Africa is a spring in the desert for our government. Others dismissed it as just another colonial rebellion, but from the Imperial government's perspective, the Boer uprising was suspected of being sabotage by a foreign power."
And so, here, one could understand why Britain would suppress the two Boer Wars with such cruelty—why they would even condone mass internment camps and slaughter.
By the time the conversation had flowed this far, Cecil was continually avoiding my gaze, his face a mixture of considerable shock and confusion. He was probably flustered that an utter outsider—a twelve-year-old Asian brat from the opposite side of the globe—so clearly had his country's sensitive economic circumstances and social problems down cold.
"Good. So now I should give you the answer. What I wanted to tell you is that Korea holds the answer for the British Empire."
"The answer, you say?"
"That's right."
I'd laid out the grim picture; now it was time to dangle the carrot. I walked over to the world map hanging on the office wall and jabbed a finger at the small mark of the Korean Peninsula.
"In the north of our Republic, undeveloped mineral veins lie scattered everywhere. Ah, don't misunderstand. These are not exhausted mines whose development is complete, nor veins shut down for obsolete productivity. This is the wisdom of our ancestors, who saved them for future generations—and a magnificent gift of nature, left to us by a national temperament that, for reasons of philosophy and ideology, refused to destroy the natural environment."
"I... beg your pardon?"
Cecil tilted his head, his expression making it abundantly clear he hadn't understood a word of my long-winded speech. So I broke into a broad grin and explained it to him more directly.
"One of the world's greatest gold mines—the largest-scale deposit projected to exist before the twentieth century—is in the hands of our Republic. That face. Yes, that's the reaction I wanted!"
Just as I'd expected. True to his reputation as a gold collector who had committed every manner of corporate crime in Africa, Cecil sat with his mouth hanging open, looking back and forth between my finger and the Korean Peninsula.
The look in his eyes, that reaction—it was as if...
He's reacting like America the moment they discovered oil.
You know. The twenty-first century. The America that would offer nothing but civilian aid even as you clung to their pant legs begging for help while suffering under dictators and warlords—but the moment you mentioned oil had been found in the neighborhood, they'd transform into angels of the earth, crying democracy and launching Operation Golden Eagle.
After a long stretch of nothing but uh, uh, he finally collected himself enough to ask me again.
"I-is that true?!"
Would I lie? Who did he think I was, spinning tales?
"Of course it's true. You think I'd make it up? And you think our ally France is such a mark that they'd scatter national bonds and interest-free loans left and right for nothing? They may be less deft than you people, and they may fall for cons more easily, but they're not fools."
Just thinking about the Panama scandal about to explode made my head hurt—but was that our problem? That was their problem. I didn't know anything about Panama, and I hadn't taken any bribes.
"N-no, of course not. Ah, is that so?"
"In any case, we can transfuse the 'blood' of industry that Britain needs—gold. And we can do it in very short order."
"I-I see."
"Next is wheat."
"Eh?"
Leaving Cecil and his all-day foolish expression behind, I moved my finger a little farther north from the Unsan Gold Mine—no, all the way up through Gando, Manchuria, and Liaodong, territory that until quite recently hadn't even been ours—and swept that vast expanse with a look of satisfaction.
"Britain, as an industrial power, has never been free of social problems stemming from its chronic food-supply issues. All the more so now, after natural disasters have swept through."
"That's true."
"Then there are two answers. Round up all the young men who've come up to the cities, shove them into the army, and drive them back to the countryside to raise sheep. Or—"
"...Or import from overseas."
"Exactly."
The British Parliament had neither the method nor the policy instruments to drive young Englishmen who'd come up to the cities back to the countryside to farm. In fact, they had no economic theory or ideology that would even support such a thing. Britain, after all, was not China.
The British Parliament and bureaucracy, which would worship the invisible hand more devoutly than the Church of England itself well into the twentieth century, were vanishingly unlikely to execute economic policies with such a strongly statist coloring—and the backlash and resistance that would follow were of a magnitude that couldn't even be estimated.
Which is why the twentieth-century Chinese Communists and Mao Zedong were remarkable for pulling it off. Of course, that was also why they produced the historic catastrophe known as the Cultural Revolution.
They're quite different from China.
And so the only solution available to a British Parliament that had thoroughly wrecked Britain's agricultural capacity and food supply through the Irish Potato Famine and the Highland Clearances was the import of overseas agricultural products.
The problem was the repeal of the Corn Laws, which had resulted in the wholesale resignation of the Conservative Party—and that had led to a conclusion in which British foreign policy proceeded like a tightrope walk in a state of extreme instability.
The Opium Wars were part of that aftermath. The goods flowing out of the country had grown larger than the manufactured products they made and sold. Think about it: no matter how much porcelain and tea had burrowed into Britain like a drug, how could that alone have flowed to such extremes as to deteriorate an entire nation's balance of trade?
Now then, here's the question. Where were the candidate sources from which the British Empire could import its food?
I opened my mouth, my expression full of a wry laugh.
"America, France, and Russia."
"...I truly have no desire to deal with any of them."
"I know that perfectly well."
Remarkably, every last one of them was a potential enemy—or an outright enemy—of the British Empire. France was the historical rival of tradition, a hostile nation competing in Africa. The United States was an adversary they'd already fought twice in recent memory. Russia was an enemy with whom they were currently playing the Great Game.
It's not as if they went around picking fights in every direction. Why does the map look like this?
Honestly, at this point I was starting to wonder if Britain itself was the problem. How do you end up with hostile nations on every side? Add Germany to the mix and they'd be absolutely thrilled.
The one genuine stroke of luck, perhaps, was that their meat supply came from South America—Argentina and Brazil, nations with no particular quarrel. Even that, though: if they learned they'd soon be competing with a rising German Empire, the Gladstone cabinet, for whom meat had been the sole stable element of the food supply, might well collapse.
In any case: buying Russian wheat meant aiding an enemy's industrialization. Nearby France, for its part, was reducing grain exports as prices and labor costs steadily rose. The British cabinet and political world, already in poor shape, were trapped in a dilemma.
"And so our Republic is the solution."
"How so?"
"The vast gold of the north that you will mine together with us—reinvest it in Manchuria, Liaodong, and Gando. Upgrade that enormous wilderness into the Empire's granary."
"Ah!"
Only then did Cecil, grasping my grand economic design, shove back his chair and surge to his feet.
"Good God!"
"Manchuria's climate is very similar to Europe's. It's an ideal environment for cultivating wheat, your staple grain. And that's not all. The vast land is extraordinarily well-suited to livestock ranching. If the United States has the 'Wild West,' our Republic has the 'Wild North.'"
"The Wild North..."
There was no particular mystery to why I wanted to bind France, America, and Britain to Manchuria. It was simply that the vast territory was far beyond our current capacity to swallow whole; that Russia, which would come slowly down given time, was frightening; and that the Qing, who would be swearing revenge, also had to be kept in check.
So I had to forge every kind of reason that would bind those three great powers to this land side by side, and lock the chains in place. So that later, even if they thought, We're fucked!, they couldn't pull out alone. Britain, especially.
If they concentrate enough capital in Manchuria that their food security is at our mercy, our value goes up by the same measure.
By the same token, the rice produced on the peninsula would squeeze Japan in exactly the same way. From the Japanese government's perspective, the only countries that could solve their rice shortage were the Qing or us—and for the time being, China was headed in the exact opposite direction from a "stable" nation.
I stepped up beside Cecil, who couldn't tear his eyes from the map, and uttered just one word.
And so Britain had no choice but to put its hand to the design I offered.