The end of the British Empire

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The end of the British Empire

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The end of the British Empire 1940 In December 1937 the Chinese city of Nanking fell to imperial forces. With explicit orders to 'kill all captives', the army ran amok. – PowerPoint PPT presentation

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Title: The end of the British Empire

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The end of the British Empire
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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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1940
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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.

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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.

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The transfer of power

There was something very British about the Suez
Canal military base.
When Egypt's leader, Colonel Nasser, pressed the
British to speed up their withdrawal from Suez,
at last they agreed to begin the evacuation of
the base.

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The transfer of power

However, when Nasser proceeded to nationalize the
Canal, British restraint cracked.
For their part, the Americans could not have been
much more explicit about their opposition to a
British military intervention in Egypt.

44
The transfer of power

On 5 November 1956 an Anglo-French expedition
landed on the Canal, claiming that they were
peace-keepers trying to pre-empt an
Israeli-Egyptian war.
Nothing could have revealed Britain's new
weakness more starkly than what happened next.

45
The transfer of power

Britain could not prevent the Egyptians from
blocking the Canal and disrupting the oil
shipments through it.
Then there was a run on the pound as investors
bailed out.
Indeed, it was at the bank of England that the
Empire was effectively lost.
As the Bank's gold and dollar reserves dwindled
during the crisis, the Chancellor of Exchequer
had to choose between devaluing the pound or
asking for massive American aid.

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The transfer of power

The latter option put the Americans in a position
to dictate terms.
Suez sent a signal to nationalists throughout the
British Empire the hour of freedom had struck.
But the hour was chosen by the Americans, not by
the nationalists.

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The transfer of power

The brake-up of the British Empire happened with
astonishing speed.
Thus it was that the British Empire was broken up
rather than being taken over went into
liquidation rather than acquiring a new owner.
It had taken 3 centuries to build.
It took just 3 decades to dismantle.

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The transfer of power

When faced with the choice between appeasing or
fighting the worst empires in all history, the
British Empire had done the right thing.
Even Churchill, staunch imperialist that he was,
did not have to think for long before rejecting
Hitler's squalid offer to let it survive
alongside a Nazified Europe.
In 1940, under Churchill's inspired, indomitable,
incomparable leadership, the Empire had stood
alone against the truly evil imperialism of
Hitler.

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The transfer of power

Even if it did not last for the thousand years
that Churchill hopefully suggested it might, this
was indeed the British Empire 'finest hour'.
In the end, the British sacrificed their Empire
to stop the Germans, Japanese and Italians from
keeping theirs.
Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the
Empire's other sins?

50
Conclusion

The British Empire is long dead.
What had been based on Britain's commercial and
financial supremacy in the 17th and 18th
centuries and her industrial supremacy in the
19th was bound to crumble once the British
economy buckled under the accumulated burdens of
two world wars.
The great creditor became a debtor.

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Conclusion

In the same way, the great movements of
population that had once driven British imperial
expansion changed their direction in the 1950s.
Emigration from Britain gave way to immigration
into Britain.
The imperial legacy has shaped the modern world
profoundly.

52
Conclusion

Without the spread of British rule around the
world, it is hard to believe that the structures
of liberal capitalism would have been so
successfully established.
Those empires that adopted alternative models
the Russian and the Chinese imposed
incalculable misery on their subject people.

53
Conclusion

Without the influence of British imperial rule,
it is hard to believe that the institutions of
parliamentary democracy would have been adopted
by the majority of state in the world, as they
are today.

54
Conclusion

India, the world's largest democracy, owes more
than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British
rule.
Its elite school, its universities, its civil
service, its army, its press and its
parliamentary system all still have discernibly
British models.

55
Conclusion

Finally, there is the English language itself,
perhaps the most important single export of the
last 300 years.
Today 350 million people speak English as their
first language and around 450 million have it as
a second language.
That is roughly one in every seven people on the
planet!

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Conclusion

Of course no one would claim that the record of
the British Empire was unblemished.
On the contrary it often failed to live up to its
own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in
the early era of enslavement, transportation and
the 'ethnic cleansing' of indigenous peoples.

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Conclusion

Yet the 19th-century Empire undeniably pioneered
free trade, free capital movements, and, with the
abolition of slavery, free labour.
It invested immense sums in developing a global
network of modern communications.
It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast
areas.

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Conclusion

Though it fought many small wars, the Empire
maintained a global peace unmatched before or
since.
In the 20th century too it more than justified
its own existence, for the alternatives to
British rule represented by the German and
Japanese empires were clearly far worse.
And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that
Britain could have withstood them.

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