Britain, the Commonwealth and the End of the Empire

http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/modern/endofempire_overview_01.shtml


By Dr John Darwin
 Last updated 2011-03-03

Britain may have emerged victorious from World War Two, but at what cost to its global

1945: End of World War Two
The collapse of British imperial power - all but complete by the mid-1960s - can be traced directly to the impact of World War Two.
The catastrophic British defeats in Europe and Asia between 1940 and 1942 destroyed its financial and economic independence, the real foundation of the imperial system.



Britain had survived the war, but its wealth, prestige and authority had been severely reduced.

It also erased the old balance of power on which British security - at home and abroad - had largely depended.
Although Britain was one of the victorious allies, the defeat of Germany had been mainly the work of Soviet and American power, while that of Japan had been an almost entirely American triumph.
Britain had survived and recovered the territory lost during the war. But its prestige and authority, not to mention its wealth, had been severely reduced.
The British found themselves locked into an imperial endgame from which every exit was blocked except the trapdoor to oblivion.
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1947: Partition of India
An early symptom of the weakness of the empire was Britain's withdrawal from India in 1947.
During World War Two, the British had mobilised India's resources for their imperial war effort. They crushed the attempt of Mahatma Gandhi and the Indian National Congress to force them to 'quit India' in 1942.
Nonetheless, in an earlier bid to win Congress support, Britain had promised to give India full independence once the war was over.



Britain hoped that a self-governing India would remain part of the imperial defence.

Within months of the end of the war, it was glaringly obvious that Britain lacked the means to defeat a renewed mass campaign by the Congress. Its officials were exhausted and troops were lacking.
But the British still hoped that a self-governing India would remain part of their system of 'imperial defence'. For this reason, Britain was desperate to keep India (and its army) united. These hopes came to nothing.
By the time that the last viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, arrived in India, Congress and its leader Jawaharlal Nehru had begun to accept that unless they agreed to partition, they risked a descent into chaos and communal war before power could be transferred from British into Indian hands.
It was left to Mountbatten to stage a rapid handover to two successor governments (India and Pakistan) before the ink was dry on their post-imperial frontiers.
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Repairing Britain
The huge sense of relief at a more or less dignified exit, and much platitudinous rhetoric, disguised the fact that the end of the Raj was a staggering blow for British world power.
Britain had lost the colony that had provided much of its military muscle east of Suez, as well as paying 'rent' for the 'hire' of much of Britain's own army.
The burden of the empire defence shifted back to a Britain that was both weaker and poorer than it had been before 1939.



Britain was overshadowed by two new superpowers, the United States and Soviet Union.

For these reasons, it may seem strange that the loss of India did not lead to a drastic reappraisal of Britain's world interests and a 'timely' decision to abandon its far-flung commitments from the Caribbean to Hong Kong.
Britain was now overshadowed by the United States and Soviet Union, its domestic economy had been seriously weakened and the Labour government had embarked on a huge and expensive programme of social reform.
In fact British Prime Minister Clement Attlee and his cabinet colleague Ernest Bevin, who dominated Labour's foreign policy at the time, drew quite the opposite conclusion with regards to the future of Britain's oversees interests.
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Help from the Commonwealth
Attlee and Bevan believed Britain's economic recovery and the survival of sterling as a great trading currency required closer integration with the old 'white' dominions, especially Australia, New Zealand and South Africa.
The 'sterling area', which included the empire, Commonwealth (the main exception was Canada) and some other countries, accounted for half of the world's trade in the early post-war years.



British leaders had no doubt that Britain must uphold its status as the third great power.

The British were also determined to exploit the tropical colonies more effectively due to the fact that their cocoa, rubber and tin could be sold for much-needed dollars.
Nor was it simply an economic imperative. Britain's strategic defence against the new Soviet threat required forward air bases from which to bomb Southern Russia - the industrial arsenal of the Soviet Union. That meant staying on in the Middle East even after the breakdown of British control in Palestine and its hasty evacuation in 1948.
In Egypt, Iraq, Jordan and the Gulf, the British were determined to hang on to their treaties and bases, including the vast Suez canal zone. They wanted help from Australia and hoped for Indian support against Soviet influence in Asia.
Across the whole spectrum of party opinion, British leaders had no doubt that Britain must uphold its status as the third great power, and that it could only do so by maintaining its empire and the Commonwealth link. Europe, by contrast, they saw as a zone of economic and political weakness. It was Britain's overseas assets that would help to defend it.
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1950s: Suez Crisis
In the 1950s, British governments struggled to achieve this post-war imperial vision. They had already reinvented the Commonwealth in 1949 in order to let India remain a republic, overturning the old rule that the British monarch must be head of state in a Commonwealth country.
They accepted the need to grant increasing self-government and then independence to some of their most valuable colonies - including Ghana and Malaya in 1957 - on the understanding that they remained in Britain's sphere of financial and strategic influence.
The British governments took up the challenge of anti-colonial revolts in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus. They invested heavily in up-to-date weaponry and fretted over the slowness of the British economy to resume its old role as the great lender of capital.



The 1956 Suez Crisis was a savage revelation of Britain's financial and military weakness.

By the end of the decade, things were not going well. Staying in the Middle East had led step-by-step to the confrontation with President Gamal Abdel Nasser in Egypt, and the disastrous decision to seek his overthrow by force in collusion with Israel.
The 1956 Suez Crisis was a savage revelation of Britain's financial and military weakness and destroyed much of what remained of Britain's influence in the Middle East.
In the colonial territories, more active interference in social and economic matters, with a view to speeding the pace of development, had aroused wide opposition and strengthened nationalist movements.
It was becoming much harder for Britain to control the rate of political change, especially where the presence of settlers (as in Kenya and the Rhodesias) sharpened conflicts over land.
Britain's position as the third great power and 'deputy leader' of the Western Alliance was threatened by the resurgence of France and West Germany, who jointly presided over the new European Economic Community (EEC).
Britain's claim on American support, the indispensable prop of imperial survival, could no longer be taken for granted. And Britain's own economy, far from accelerating, was stuck in a rut.
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1960s: Loss of the Colonies
With conditions as they stood, it was now becoming increasingly difficult to maintain even the semblance of British world power. In the 1960s, British governments attempted forlornly to make bricks without straw.
Britain tried and failed twice to enter the EEC, hoping partly to galvanise its stagnant economy, partly to smash the Franco-German 'alliance'.



Britain was finding it too costly to protect its remaining colonies.

To avoid being trapped in a costly struggle with local nationalist movements, Britain backed out of most of the remaining colonies with unseemly haste. As late as 1959, it had publicly scheduled a degree of self-government for Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika. All became independent between 1961 and 1963.
British leaders gamely insisted, and no doubt believed, that Britain would remain at the 'top table' of world power - a status guaranteed by its nuclear deterrent and its continuing influence in the ex-colonial world, and symbolised by the Commonwealth which the ex-colonies had joined.
The situation did not go as planned. Britain's failure to stop the white settler revolt in Southern Rhodesia in 1965 was a huge embarrassment and drew fierce condemnation from many new Commonwealth states.
In South East Asia, protecting the new federation of Malaysia against Indonesian aggression became more and more costly.
Meanwhile the British economy staggered from crisis to crisis and the burden became unsustainable. Devaluation of the pound in November 1967 was followed within weeks by the decision to withdraw Britain's military presence east of Suez.
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1970s to the Present: End of Empire
When Britain finally entered the European Community in 1973, the line had been drawn under Britain's imperial age.
But the ending of an empire is rarely a tidy affair. The Rhodesian rebellion was to last until the late 1970s, Britain fought a war to retain the Falkland Islands in 1982 and Hong Kong continued, with tacit Chinese agreement, as a British dependency until 1997.



Britain experienced a large inflow of migrants - a legacy of its imperial past.

The British at home had to come to terms with an unforeseen legacy of their imperial past - the large inflow of migrants, mostly from South Asia.
In the 21st century, old imperial links still survive, particularly those based on language and law, which may assume growing importance in a globalised world.
Even the Commonwealth, bruised and battered in the 1960s and 1970s, has retained a surprising utility as a dense global network of informal connections, valued by its numerous small states.
As the experience of the empire recedes more deeply into Britain's own past, it has become the focus of more attention than ever from British historians.