A Protectorate is a plan adopted for extending the political or strategical as distinct from the administrative Frontier of a country over regions which the protecting Power is, for whatever reason, unable or unwilling to seize and hold itself, and, while falling short of the full rights of property or sovereignty, it carries with it a considerable degree of control over the policy and international relations of the protected State. It involves the obligation to defend the latter from external attack, and to secure the proper treatment of foreign subjects and property inside it. To what extent it justifies interference in the internal administration of the State is a question admitting of no law.
The Roman Empire is the classical illustration of this policy, though in a somewhat inchoate form, in the ancient world. In the Western Empire Protectorates, strictly so called, were not required because the enemy with whom contact was to be avoided was the barbarian, formidable not from his organization, but from his numbers; and against this danger purely military barriers, whether in Britain, Gaul, Germany, or Africa, required to be employed. But in the East, where the ambitions of Rome for the first time encountered a rival and civilized Power of almost equal strength with itself, namely, the Parthian or Persian Kingdom, the perils of actual contact were for long delayed by a barrier of protected States, the majority under the political suzerainty of Rome, some of them oscillating from one allegiance to another, according to the degree of pressure applied; the most important of all, by reason of its physical features and geographical position, namely, Armenia, having a career which in its stormy vicissitudes has recalled to many writers the chequered and fateful experience, between the rival Powers of Great Britain and Russia, Frontiers of the buffer kingdom of Afghanistan. The Ottoman Empire in Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when its fortunes began to decline from their zenith adopted an analogous policy of client-states in the Christian territories of Transylvania, Moldavia, Wallachia, and Ragusa.
It has been by a policy of Protectorates that the Indian Empire has for more than a century pursued, and is still pursuing, its as yet unexhausted advance. First it surrounded its acquisitions with a belt of Native States with whom alliances were concluded and treaties made. The enemy to be feared a century ago was the Maratha host, and against this danger the Rajput States and Oude were maintained as a buffer. On the North-west Frontier, Sind and the Punjab, then under independent rulers, warded off contact or collision with Beluchistan and Afghanistan, while the Sutlej States warded off contact with the Punjab. Gradually, one after another, these barriers disappeared as the forward movement began: some were annexed, others were engulfed in the advancing tide, remaining embedded like stumps of trees in an avalanche, or left with their heads above water like islands in a flood. When the annexation of the Punjab had brought the British power to the Indus, and of Sind, to the confines of Beluchistan; when the sale of Kashmir to a protected chief carried the strategical Frontier into the heart of the Himalayas; when the successive absorption of different portions of Burma opened the way to Mandalay, a new Frontier problem faced the Indian Government, and a new ring of Protectorates was formed. The culminating point of this policy on the western side was the signature of the Durand Agreement at Kabul in 1893, by which a line was drawn between the tribes under British and those under Afghan influence for the entire distance from Chitral to Seistan, and the Indian Empire acquired what, as long as Afghanistan retains an independent existence, is likely to remain its Frontier of active responsibility. Over many of these tribes we exercise no jurisdiction, and only the minimum of control; into the territories of some we have so far not even penetrated; but they are on the British side of the dividing line, and cannot be tampered with by any external Power. My own policy in India was to respect the internal independence of these tribes, and to find in their self-interest and employment as Frontier Militia a guarantee both for the security of our inner or administrative borders and also for the tranquillity of the border zone itself. Further to the east and north the chain of Protectorates is continued in Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan: on the extreme north-east the annexation of Upper Burma has brought to us the heritage of a fringe of protected States known as the Upper Shan States. At both extremities of the line the Indian Empire, now vaster and more populous than has ever before acknowledged the sway of an Asiatic sovereign, is only separated from the spheres of two other great European Powers, Russia and France - the former by the buffer States of Persia and Afghanistan and the buffer strip of Wakhan; the latter by the buffer State of Siam, and the buffer Protectorates of the Shan States. The anxiety of the three Powers still to keep their Frontiers apart, in spite of national rapprochements or diplomatic ententes, is testified by the scrupulous care with which the integrity of the still intervening States is assured, and, in the case of this country, by the enormous sums that have been spent by us in fortifying the independence of Afghanistan. The result in the case of the Indian Empire is probably without precedent, for it gives to Great Britain not a single or double but a threefold Frontier, (1) the administrative border of British India, (2) the Durand Line, or Frontier of active protection, (3) the Afghan border, which is the outer or advanced strategical Frontier.
It may be observed that the policy of Protectorates which I have described is by no means peculiar even in modern times to Great Britain, although Great Britain, owing to the huge and vulnerable bulk of her Empire, supplies the most impressive modern illustration. The policy has been equally adopted by Russia and by France. The Russian scheme of Protectorates includes Khiva and Bokhara: it aims at Mongolia: it broke down from the attempt to incorporate Manchuria and Korea. The French Protectorates in Africa embrace Tunis and would fain embrace Morocco; in Asia they veil with the thinnest of disguises the practical absorption of Cambodia and Annam. Protectorates are also a familiar expedient in the partition of Africa by European Powers, although the phrase more commonly applied in those regions is the less precise definition of a 'sphere of influence'. With what varied objects these different Protectorates have been established, sometimes political, sometimes commercial, sometimes strategic, sometimes a combination of all these, I have not time here to deal. But three curious and exceptional cases may be mentioned: that of the British Somaliland Protectorate, acquired in order to safeguard the food-supply of Aden (just as the Roman Protectorate was extended over Egypt, in order to ensure the corn-supply of Rome), and the British Protectorate of the petty Arab chiefships on the southern shore of the Persian Gulf, established in order to prevent slave-raiding on the adjoining seas. The third case is the anomalous and unprecedented form of Protectorate declared by the United States of America in the extreme assertion of the Monroe doctrine over the Latin States of Central and Southern America. This Protectorate appears to involve a territorial guarantee of the States in question against any European Power; but what measure of internal control or interference it may be held to justify, no man can say.
Protectorates shade away by imperceptible degrees into the diplomatic concept now popularly known as Spheres of Influence. When first this phrase was employed in the language of diplomacy I do not know, but I doubt a more momentous early use of it can be traced than that in the assurance first given by Count Gortchakoff to Lord Clarendon in 1869, and often since repeated, that Afghanistan lay 'completely outside the sphere within which Russia might be called upon to exercise her influence'. Since those days Spheres of Influence have become, notably in Africa, though scarcely less in Asia, one of the recognized means of extending a Frontier or of pegging out a potential claim. A Sphere of Influence is a less developed form than a Protectorate, but it is more developed than a Sphere of Interest. It implies a stage at which no exterior Power but one may assert itself in the territory so described, but in which the degree of responsibility assumed by the latter may vary greatly with the needs or temptations of the case. The native Government is as a rule left undisturbed; indeed its unabated sovereignty is sometimes specifically reaffirmed; but commercial exploitation and political influence are regarded as the peculiar right of the interested Power. No body of rules can, however, be laid down: for it is obvious that a Sphere of Influence in a still independent kingdom like Persia, must be a very different thing from a Sphere of Influence among the semi-barbarous tribes of the Bahr-el-Ghazel or the Niger.
Some of the most anxious moments of modern history have arisen from the vague and grandiose interpretation given to this claim by modern Powers [12]. Sometimes the advance has been so rapid that even the inner Frontiers of the Sphere of Influence are unknown [13], at others the claim itself is so vast that it can be supported neither by reasoning nor by force. At the same time, in an epoch when the rate of advance has so frequently been in inverse proportion to the means for effective occupation or the capacity of military defence, it is probable that on the whole a pacific influence has been exercised by the diplomatic recognition of these somewhat anomalous types, which usually present one very remarkable and highly characteristic feature - that they are constructed by European statesmen with the minimum of reference or deference to the parties prima facie most interested, namely, the occupants of the sphere itself .
The theory of Hinterland is another modern application of the doctrine of Spheres of Influence, resting the case for an advance of Frontier on the ground of territorial continuity. In one sense the doctrine is as old as humanity itself . Every occupation or conquest on a coast may be said to carry with it the presumption to a further inland claim. The Power that occupied Cairo, or built Calcutta, was thereby committed to an advance that could not stop at the deltaic region. The famous controversies between the United States and Spain as to the boundaries of Louisiana, after the cession of the latter to America by France in 1803, and between the United States and Great Britain over the Oregon Territory, revolved round the question of the rights conferred by discovery or settlement. At the Berlin Congress, Bosnia and Herzegovina, though inhabited by a Slav people, were handed over to Austria because she already possessed Dalmatia.
But it is, again, for the most part, in Africa, arising out of the emulous descent upon its coasts of the principal European Powers, that the doctrine of Hinterland in its modern aspect has taken formal shape. A double question arises in the case of such occupations, namely, how far they may be supposed to extend laterally, and how far inland. The latter is the Hinterland problem. It is often held that the inland Frontier should extend to the water-divide of the rivers debouching within the line of coast occupation. But any such principle must be open to many exceptions: and the actual extent of Hinterland that is held to belong to any Power depends, in the main, upon the degree to which it succeeds in rendering its authority effective in the interval before it is fixed by international agreement. A forward step in the regularization of coast occupation in Africa was taken by the Agreement of the leading Powers in the Berlin Conference of 1885, requiring the notification of any such action in the future to the Signatory Powers, in order to enable them to substantiate any counterclaim of their own, and stipulating for the effective exercise of authority in the region concerned. This Agreement only applied to Africa, nor even there did it cover the interior extension of Frontiers. But it has not been without influence in imparting some measure of propriety to proceedings not everywhere over-imbued with scruple. The most recent instances in which the Hinterland doctrine has been before the public have been the dispute between Great Britain and Venezuela as to the inland boundary; the provisions by which the Great Powers, when leasing naval bases on the coast of China, acquired at the same time an interior zone; and the steps taken a short while ago to define, by means of an Anglo-Turkish Boundary Commission, the Hinterland of Aden, where Turkish troops from the Yemen were constantly encroaching upon the tribes within the British Protectorate.
The reference to China invites attention to yet another form of Frontier extension that has found favour in recent times. This is the grant of Leases, in order to veil an occupation not as a rule intended to be temporary. Great Britain has sometimes made use of this expedient in Native States in India, Quetta, and afterwards Nushki, having been taken from the Khan of Kelat on a quit rent in perpetuity. I also, while Viceroy, negotiated the perpetual Lease of the interior province of Berar by the Nizam of Hyderabad, though this was an act exclusively of administrative and financial convenience, and had nothing to do with exterior Frontiers. Some of the territories of the Sultan of Zanzibar were leased, first for a term of years and afterwards in perpetuity, to Great Britain and Germany. Port Arthur, Wei-Hai-Wei, Kiao Chau, and Kowloon are cases in which the fiction of a Lease has been employed to cover what might otherwise appear to have been a violation of the territorial integrity of China. Sometimes Leases are granted for commercial purposes, or as part of a diplomatic bargain. Such has been the case with the so-called Enclaves, leased by Great Britain to King Leopold on the Nile and to France on the Niger. Experience, though not as yet very old, shows that the tendency of Leases is, from being temporary to become permanent, and, in fact, to constitute a rudimentary form of ulterior possession.
Of these modern expedients the last to be noticed represents the most shadowy form of the Sphere of Influence that has yet been devised by the ingenuity of modern diplomacy. I refer to the promise made by a weaker Power to a stronger not to alienate by lease, mortgage, or cession a specified portion of its territories to any other Power. This does not necessarily, though it may sometimes, imply the exercise of a Protectorate by the stronger of the two contracting parties [14], but it tacitly recognizes some sort of reversionary claim on the part of the latter. At the weakest, it is a sort of diplomatic manifesto to other Powers of a special degree of interest entertained by one. Great Britain's desire to earmark as a potential Sphere of Influence the valley of the Yangtsze in China did not proceed beyond this somewhat impalpable assertion, which was promptly challenged by Germany. A peculiar feature of these arrangements is that the ruler or State who gives the self-denying pledge very often does so under the minimum of pressure, and sometimes with ill-concealed delight. The perils or chances of future deprivation appear to be remote: in the interim his own title to ownership has been reaffirmed by a great Power, and in this fact a useful protection may be sought against the designs or encroachments of other interested parties.
Of all the diplomatic forms or fictions which have latterly been described, it may be observed that the uniform tendency is for the weaker to crystallize into the harder shape. Spheres of Interest tend to become Spheres of Influence; temporary Leases to become perpetual; Spheres of Influence to develop into Protectorates; Protectorates to be the forerunners of complete incorporation. The process is not so immoral as it might at first sight appear; it is in reality an endeavour, sanctioned by general usage, to introduce formality and decorum into proceedings which, unless thus regulated and diffused, might endanger the peace of nations or too violently shock the conscience of the world. I know of no more striking illustration of this tendency than the development of Lord Salisbury's Siamese Declaration of January, 1896, by which the single and uncontested authority of Siam over the unguaranteed Siamese territory lying outside of the Menam watershed was specifically affirmed, with Lord Lansdowne's Declaration of April, 1904, by which this territory was openly divided into French and British Spheres of Influence, in which the two Powers mutually conceded to each other liberty of action. Lord Salisbury's was the first step: this was the second: and if at any time there is a third, its approximate character can be foreseen.