The end of The end of
the British the British
Empire
Empire
In the last decade of the Victorian era, an obscure public schoolboy made a prophecy about the British Empire's fate in the coming century:
“I can see vast changes coming over a now peaceful world; great upheavals, terrible struggles; wars such as one cannot imagine; and I tell you London will be in danger – London will be attacked and I shall be very prominent in the defence of London ...
I see further ahead than you do. I see into the future.
The country will be subjected somehow to a
tremendous invasion ... but I tell you I shall be in
command of the defences of London and I shall save London and the Empire from disaster”.
WINSTON CHURCHILL was just 17 when he spoke those words to a fellow
Harrovian, Murland Evans.
They were astonishingly prescient.
Churchill did save London, and indeed Britain.
But in the end, not even he could save the British Empire.
By the time Churchill died in 1965, all the most important parts of the British Empire had gone.
WHY?
Throughout the 20th century, the principal threats to British rule were not national
independence movements, but other empires.
These alternative empires were significantly harsher in their treatment of the subject peoples than Britain:
Belgian rule in Congo had become a byword for the abuse of human rights.
Such was the rapacity of King Leopold II's Regime that the cost in human life due to murder, starvation, disease and reduced fertility has been estimated at 10 million – half of the existing population.
There was nothing hyperbolic about Joseph Conrad's portrayal of the 'horror' of this in Heart of Darkness.
The French did not behave much better than the Belgians in their part of Congo: population loss was comparably
huge.
In Algeria, New Caledonia and Indochina too, there was a policy of systematic expropriation of native land.
German overseas administration was no more liberal.
The Herero population, who sought to resist the
encroachments of German colonists, was reduced from around 80,000 in 1903 to just 20,000 in 1906.
A proclamation was issued which declared: 'every Herero, whether found with or without a rifle, with or without cattle, will be shot'.
Japanese colonial rule in Korea was conspicuously illiberal.
When hundreds of thousand took to the streets to
demonstrate for the Declaration of Independence, the Japanese authorities responded brutally.
Over 6,000 Koreans were killed, 14,000 were injured, and 50,000 were sentenced to imprisonment.
We should also remember the quality of Russian rule in Poland, where they pursued aggressive policies of
'russification'.
Yet all this would pale into insignificance alongside the crimes of the Russian, Japanese, German and Italian empires in the 1930s and 1940s.
By the time Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the most likely alternatives to British rule were:
Hirohito's Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere;
Hitler's Thousand Year Reich;
Mussolini's New Rome.
Nor could the threat posed by Stalin's Soviet Union be discounted.
It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that ultimately ruined the
British Empire.
In other words, the Empire was dismantled not because it had oppressed subject
peoples for centuries, but because it took up arms for just a few years against far
more oppressive empires.
It did the right thing, regardless of the cost.
After World War I, the Empire had never been bigger.
But nor had the costs of victory.
No combatant power spent as much on the war as Britain, whose total expenditure
amounted to just under £10 billion.
That was a steep price to pay.
Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to most people, on balance, to outweigh the costs.
After the war the costs suddenly,
inescapably, outweighed the benefits.
On 23 April 1924 King George V opened the British Empire Exhibition.
It was intended as a popular celebration of
Britain's global achievement, an affirmation that the Empire had more than just a glorious past but a future too, and in particular an economic future.
More than 27 million people flocked to the 100- acre site of the exhibition; indeed it was so
popular that it had to be reopened in 1925.
Visitors could marvel tangible examples of the Empire's continuing vitality – above all, its
economic vitality.
The exhibition cost £12 million was the largest ever staged in the world.
The irony was that, despite a government
subsidy of £2.2 million, the Exhibition made a loss of over £1.5million, in marked contrast to the profitable pre-1914 exhibitions.
Indeed, in this respect, there were those who saw unnerving parallels between the Empire Exhibitions and the Empire itself
Perhaps, even more worryingly, the
exhibition became something of national joke.
The creeping crisis of confidence in
Empire had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for its victory over
Germany in the First World War.
The death toll for the British Isles alone was around 3 three quarters of a million, one in sixteen of all adult males between the ages fifteen and fifty.
The economic cost was harder to calculate.
Now, after all, it proved extremely difficult to restore the foundations of the pre-war era of globalization.
After the war, restrictions to the
international freedom of movement of labour proliferated and became tighter.
The biggest economic change of all
wrought by the war was in the international capital market.
Britain resumed her role as the world's banker.
But the great machine that had once worked so smoothly now juddered and stalled.
One reason for this was the creation of
huge new debts as a result of the war: not just the German reparations debt, but also the whole complex of debts the victorious Allies owed one another.
At the nadir of the Depression in 1932 nearly 3 million people in Britain, close to a quarter of all insured workers, were out of work.
Yet the significant thing about the Depression in Britain is not that it was so severe but that,
compared with its impact in the USA and Germany, it was so mild.
What brought recovery was a redefinition of the economics of Empire.
In 1931 the sterling bloc became the world's largest system of fixed exchange rates, a
system freed from its gold mooring.
There was also a a radical change in trade policy, which consisted in setting
preferential tariffs for colonial products.
Even as the Empire grew more
economically important, its defence sank inexorably down the list of political
priorities. In the 10 years to 1932 the
defence budget was cut by more than a third – at a time when Italian and French military spending rose by, respectively, 60% and 55%.
In 1918 Britain had won the war on the Western Front by a huge feat of military modernization.
In the 1920s nearly everything that had
been learned was forgotten in the name of economy.
The stark reality was that, despite the
victory and the territory it had brought, the First World War had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before.
War had acted as a forcing house for a host of new military technologies – the
tank, the submarine, the armed aeroplane.
To secure its post-war future, the Empire needed to invest in all of these.
It did nothing of the kind.
The politicians got away with it for a time because the principal threats to the
stability of the Empire appeared to come within (Ireland and India) rather than from without.
Yet amid all this inter-war anxiety, there was one man who continued to believe in the British empire.
In his eyes, the British 'were an admirably trained people' who had 'worked for 300 hundred years to assure themselves the domination of the world for 2 centuries.
In Mein Kampf, Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed his admiration of British
Imperialism.
What Germany had to do, he argued, was to learn from Britain's example.
'The wealth of Great Britain', he declared, 'is the result of the capitalist exploitation of the 350
million Indian Slaves.'
That was precisely what Hitler most admired: the effective oppression of an 'inferior' race.
And there was an obvious place where Germany could endeavour to do the same. 'What India
was for England', he explained, 'the territories of Russia will be for us'.
If Hitler had a criticism of the British it was
merely that they were too self-critical and too lenient towards their subject peoples.
As he explained to Britain's Foreign Secretary Lord Halifax in 1937, the way to deal with Indian nationalism was simple: 'Shoot Ghandi, and if that does not suffice to reduce them to
submission, shoot a dozen leading members of Congress; and if that does not suffice, shoot 200 and so until order is established.'
Hitler insisted that he had no desire to bring about the destruction of the British Empire, an act which 'would be of any
benefit to Germany ... [but] would benefit only Japan, the USA, and others.'
The Empire, he told Mussolini in June 1940, was 'an important factor in world equilibrium.'
It was precisely this Anglophilia that posed perhaps the gravest of all threats to the
British Empire.
On 28 April 1939, Hitler made an important speech in the Reichstag.
It was a final bid to avert war with Britain
by doing a deal based on co-existence: the British would be allowed to retain their
overseas Empire if they would give Hitler a free hand to carve out a German Empire in Central and Eastern Europe.
Churchill, to his eternal credit, saw through Hitler's blandishments.
Nevertheless, Churchill was defying not just
Hitler; he was in some measure also defying the military odds.
Granted, the Royal Navy was still much larger than the German.
Granted, the Royal Air Force had enough of an edge over the Luftwaffe to stand a reasonable chance of winning the Battle of Britain.
But in May / June 1940 the 225,000 British troops who had been evacuated from
Dunkirk had left behind not only 11,000 dead and 40,000 captured comrades but also nearly all their equipment.
The British were tankless.
Above all, with France vanquished and Russia on Hitler's side, Britain now stood alone.
The peroration of Churchill's speech to the
Commons on 4 June 1940 is best remembered for its sonorous pledges to fight 'on the beaches ... in the fields and in the streets' and so on.
But it was the conclusion that really mattered:
“... we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large
part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until in God's time, the new world, with all its power
and might, steps forth to the rescue and liberation of the old.”
Europe had been lost. But the Empire remained.
1940 1940
In December 1937 the Chinese city of Nanking fell to imperial forces.
With explicit orders to 'kill all captives', the army ran amok.
Between 260,000 and 300,000 non-
combatants were killed and, in grotesque scene of torture, prisoners were hung by their tongues from meat hooks and fed to ravenous dogs.
Imperial troops competed in prisoner-killing
competitions; one officer challenged another to see who would be first to dispatch a hundred Chines PoWs.
The destruction left half the city in ruins.
Women suffered the most.
This was imperialism at its very worst.
But it was Japanese imperialism, not British.
This tragic historic episode reveals precisely
what the leading alternative to British rule in Asia stood for.
There were degrees of imperialism, and in its brutality towards conquered people Japan's empire went beyond anything the British had ever done.
And this time the British were among the conquered.
Britain built a naval base in Singapore in the 1920s as the lynch-pin of Britain's defences in the Far East.
By the end of 1941, not enough was done to
protect the base from the threat posed by Japan.
When the Japanese attacked the base in Singapore, British defences were totally unprepared.
For Britain the choice was between the
horror of a Nanking-style Japanese assault and the humiliation of abject surrender.
On 15 February 1942, despite Churchill's desperate exhortation to fight 'to the
death', the white flag was raised.
Never in the history of the British Empire had so many given up so much to so few.
In the First World War, American economic and then military support had been
important, though not decisive.
In the Second World War, it was crucial.
The wartime alliance with the US was a suffocating embrace; but it was born of necessity.
Without American money, the British war effort would have collapsed.
The system of Lend-lease whereby the US supplied her Allies with arms on credit was worth $26 billion dollars to Britain.
With few exceptions, the British political
elite, unlike the mostly socialist intellectual elite, found it extraordinarily hard to accept that the Empire had to go as the price of
victory.
But Britain's own bank account made it clear that the game was up.
Once Britain had been the world's banker.
Now she owed foreign creditors more than
$40 billion.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
There was something very British about There was something very British about
the Suez Canal military base.
the Suez Canal military base.
–When Egypt's leader, Colonel Nasser, When Egypt's leader, Colonel Nasser, pressed the British to speed up their pressed the British to speed up their withdrawal from Suez, at last they agreed withdrawal from Suez, at last they agreed
to begin the evacuation of the base.
to begin the evacuation of the base.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–However, when Nasser proceeded to However, when Nasser proceeded to nationalize the Canal, British restraint nationalize the Canal, British restraint
cracked.
cracked.
–For their part, the Americans could not For their part, the Americans could not have been much more explicit about their have been much more explicit about their opposition to a British military intervention opposition to a British military intervention
in Egypt.
in Egypt.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–On 5 November 1956 an Anglo-French On 5 November 1956 an Anglo-French expedition landed on the Canal, claiming expedition landed on the Canal, claiming that they were peace-keepers trying to that they were peace-keepers trying to
pre-empt an Israeli-Egyptian war.
pre-empt an Israeli-Egyptian war.
–Nothing could have revealed Britain's Nothing could have revealed Britain's new weakness more starkly than what new weakness more starkly than what
happened next.
happened next.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–Britain could not prevent the Egyptians from Britain could not prevent the Egyptians from blocking the Canal and disrupting the oil blocking the Canal and disrupting the oil
shipments through it.
shipments through it.
–Then there was a run on the pound as Then there was a run on the pound as investors bailed out.
investors bailed out.
–Indeed, it was at the bank of England that the Indeed, it was at the bank of England that the Empire was effectively lost.
Empire was effectively lost.
–As the Bank's gold and dollar reserves As the Bank's gold and dollar reserves dwindled during the crisis, the Chancellor of dwindled during the crisis, the Chancellor of Exchequer had to choose between devaluing the Exchequer had to choose between devaluing the
pound or asking for massive American aid.
pound or asking for massive American aid.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–The latter option put the Americans in a The latter option put the Americans in a position to dictate terms.
position to dictate terms.
–Suez sent a signal to nationalists Suez sent a signal to nationalists throughout the British Empire: the hour of throughout the British Empire: the hour of
freedom had struck.
freedom had struck.
–But the hour was chosen by the But the hour was chosen by the Americans, not by the nationalists.
Americans, not by the nationalists.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–The brake-up of the British Empire The brake-up of the British Empire happened with astonishing speed.
happened with astonishing speed.
–Thus it was that the British Empire was Thus it was that the British Empire was broken up rather than being taken over;
broken up rather than being taken over;
went into liquidation rather than acquiring went into liquidation rather than acquiring
a new owner.
a new owner.
–It had taken 3 centuries to build. It had taken 3 centuries to build.
–It took just 3 decades to dismantle.It took just 3 decades to dismantle.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–When faced with the choice between When faced with the choice between appeasing or fighting the worst empires in all appeasing or fighting the worst empires in all history, the British Empire had done the right history, the British Empire had done the right
thing.
thing.
–Even Churchill, staunch imperialist that he Even Churchill, staunch imperialist that he was, did not have to think for long before was, did not have to think for long before rejecting Hitler's squalid offer to let it survive rejecting Hitler's squalid offer to let it survive
alongside a Nazified Europe.
alongside a Nazified Europe.
–In 1940, under Churchill's inspired, In 1940, under Churchill's inspired, indomitable, incomparable leadership, the indomitable, incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood alone against the truly evil Empire had stood alone against the truly evil
imperialism of Hitler.
imperialism of Hitler.
The transfer of power The transfer of power
–Even if it did not last for the thousand years Even if it did not last for the thousand years that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this was indeed the British Empire 'finest this was indeed the British Empire 'finest
hour'.
hour'.
–In the end, the British sacrificed their Empire In the end, the British sacrificed their Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians
from keeping theirs.
from keeping theirs.
–Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?
Empire's other sins?
