The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (82 page)

Nevertheless, in the mid-1930s, the British ability to exploit the political rivalry between the Wafd and the Court was no longer enough to safeguard their interests. Part of the reason was their troubles in Palestine, the one Middle East state where their favoured retreat to indirect rule was thoroughly barred. Under the terms of their Mandate, the British had to provide a ‘national home’ for the immigrant Jews. But it had been obvious from the beginning that the Arab majority was deeply opposed to Jewish land settlement and still more resentful that it had denied them self-rule. Since a shared legislature was out of the question, the British practice had been to deal with Arabs and Jews separately through the Supreme Muslim Council and the Jewish Agency. But this had not prevented fierce communal tensions and recurrent outbreaks of violence. The violence was fuelled by rising rural unrest. By 1930, nearly one-third of Arab peasants were totally landless and more than three-quarters had less than the level of subsistence required.
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The Palestine peasants, reported a British commission, were ‘probably more politically minded than many of the peoples of Europe’.
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Their resentment was probably aimed as much at the Arab notable class (who were selling the land) as at the Jewish intruders. The problem was compounded by the bitter divisions among the Arab elite, between ‘Husseinis’ (the Husseini family were the hereditary
muftis
of Jerusalem),
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and ‘Nashashibis’, who were supported by larger landowners and businessmen. When rural violence burst out into the open with the murder of two Jews in the spring of 1936, bringing reprisals, a general strike and a state of emergency, armed peasant bands began to appear in the highlands. Amin al-Husseini called for the non-payment of taxes and denounced the police presence in Palestinian villages. The British were forced to deploy some 20,000 men (a tenth of their army) to try to restore their control.

This was not the only anxiety. From late 1935, and the breakdown of the Anglo-French plan to surrender Ethiopia to Italy, the British had to court the risks of a Mediterranean war and suffer the propaganda bombardment from Italian radio. Almost at the same moment, the High Commissioner in Cairo, Sir Miles Lampson, detected an ominous shift in the political climate. All the main parties formed a ‘United Front’ to demand restoration of the 1923 (parliamentary) constitution, and treaty negotiations with London.
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To stand in their way, argued the key British expert on internal security, might mean a return to the massive uprising of 1919. London accepted the case. By May 1936, the Cabinet was debating the prospective treaty in detail. The main attraction on offer was an Anglo-Egyptian alliance, to defend Egypt ‘jointly’. The main stumbling block was the demand by Nahas, the Wafd leader, that the British renounce their claim to occupy the Canal Zone indefinitely, and accept League of Nations arbitration if the two sides disagreed over the treaty's renewal.
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The thought of the backbench reaction to a fresh imperial ‘scuttle’ made some ministers quake. But, by the middle of June, that midsummer of madness, they had steeled themselves for it. A treaty was ‘indispensable’, said Neville Chamberlain, a previous critic, now a key convert. They should accept the twenty-year term on Britain's military rights in the Canal Zone.
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Not to settle with Egypt, said Baldwin, would mean locking 30,000 men in the country ‘during the very critical five or six years immediately in front of us’.
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Nahas, too, was eager to win the great treaty prize. He offered a perpetual alliance (only its terms to be varied in future) and unlimited British reinforcements in an ‘apprehended international emergency’.
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It was enough. At a further Cabinet meeting on 23 June, Baldwin summed up the argument. ‘The immediate reasons for the early conclusion of a treaty’, he told his Cabinet colleagues,

were the reactions of failure on the Arab area. The situation in the Near East was one of considerable gravity. There was also danger of disturbance in Egypt…Failure to conclude a treaty would add a disorganized Near East to the existing disturbed state of Europe. It was essential therefore to obtain a treaty…[H]e hoped that in twenty years time…our position in the Eastern Mediterranean would be very much stronger than it was today, with troops near the Canal.
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Baldwin's remarks were intended, no doubt, to quieten the critics. But it would be wrong to assume that even the treaty's most ardent British supporters saw it as marking a real British retreat. The British had agreed to withdraw their troops from Egypt's main cities. But (as the map to accompany the treaty revealed) their Canal Zone ‘training grounds’ conveniently extended to within a few miles of Cairo.
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As for Nahas, within twelve months of the treaty he had been driven from office by the new king, Farouk. He ‘relied too much on British influence to keep him in power’, said Lampson.
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The old game was renewed. ‘With tact and firmness’, he reassured London, ‘British influence should remain the governing factor…under the new conditions of the post-treaty regime.’
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In Palestine, meanwhile, a Royal Commission had come and gone, and its plan for partition considered and scrapped. More British troops fought the Arab insurgents. Far away in the south, the frontier of control in the Aden protectorate was pushed gradually forward. By adjusting their tactics and searching for allies, the British meant to hold their ground in the region they regarded as indispensable strategically, and imperially ‘central’. What really mattered was whether they could hold the ring. Whatever the treaty terms, Lampson told London in May 1936, ‘in twenty years time Egypt would be just as dependent on us as now if we were still the power we now are’.
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The British meant to hold the centre, but would the centre hold?

Dog days of Empire

In 1937, the omens were unclear. With hindsight, of course, it is easy to see the tensions and strains to which the British system was subject. Economic resentments, nationalist fervour, racial antipathy, religious antagonism and the appeal to class hatred: together they threatened to pull the system apart at the seams. On this diagnosis, the chance of survival was slim. Swift devolution might stave off a crisis but not for too long. Crippled economically by the end of free trade, sapped internally by the growth of separatist feeling in the dominions and India, assaulted externally by new and more ruthless imperialisms, the British world-system could only decline, and eventually fall. It was just a matter of time.

Yet, as we have seen, to many contemporaries (both observers and actors), that was not how it seemed. The economic upheaval was deeply disturbing. The rise of India's mass politics had been a political shock. The surge of new ideologies on the Left and the Right had unsettled old loyalties. The aggressive ambitions of the ‘revisionist’ powers exposed the weakness and confusion of the guardians of world order. But (except to ideologues and visionaries) it was hard to determine the collective significance of these unwelcome developments. Indeed, it was only in the late 1930s, from 1937 onwards, that the pattern became clearer, and their meaning more ominous. Even then, as we will see, it took a strategic catastrophe to inflict irreversible damage.

In the meantime, even the most hard-headed of realists might have hesitated to write the British system's obituary. In the more ‘British’ dominions, there might be impatience with London's zigzag foreign policy, but the sense of British community remained deeply entrenched, with the common Crown as its focus. The coronation of King George VI in 1937 was covered in Canada by twenty-three hours of continuous broadcasting.
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In India, the Congress had abandoned mass agitation and settled for the constitutional politics in which the British had been trying to entrap it for more than a decade. In much of the ‘tropical’ empire, the adoption of indirect rule had anaesthetised politics. Nor was it obvious that there was any escape from the grip of the City on its ‘dominions of debt’: the economic obligations that bound so many producers to the market in London and to dealing in sterling. British expansion might have come to an end, and a form of stalemate set in across the colonial dependencies. But in a fragmenting world it was not unrealistic to expect that the British ‘bloc’ might hold the balance of economic and geopolitical power for an indefinite time. If history was a guide, it would outlast its parvenu rivals. But history was not.

11 THE STRATEGIC ABYSS, 1937–1942

At the beginning of 1937, Britain was the only global power with interests in every continent and, in theory, the means to defend them. The British system was a close approximation to a world empire. Its prestige had been dented by recent events, and its wealth diminished by depression. But no other great power could match its combination of military (mainly naval) and economic strength or its latent ability to coerce its enemies. The intimidating scale of its territorial extent, including its self-governing member states and colonial possessions, made it hard to imagine the ultimate defeat of such a global leviathan. Indeed, life outside the limits of empire seemed scarcely conceivable to the sturdiest nationalist – at least as a realistic prospect in the foreseeable future. In what was still an imperial world across much of Afro-Asia, there were few free places on the map.

But empires can disintegrate with astonishing speed. The collapse of the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s took almost everyone by surprise, not least the school who had proclaimed the imminent decline of American power. In the British case, the change was almost as sudden. By the middle of 1942, Britain, the imperial centre, was effectively bankrupt and dependent upon American aid. With the fall of Singapore in February, the invasion of Burma, and the German advance into Egypt (the battle of Alamein was fought scarcely 100 miles from Cairo), the British system looked set to collapse. Its precarious survival and the eventual victory of 1945 were a tribute to its residual strength, but not the sign of a full recovery. The post-war empire was a pale shadow of its former self. The cohesion of its constituent parts had been badly damaged. Much of its wealth had been lost or redistributed. By 1968, the last vestige of its world power status had vanished.

Revolution and Empire

It is commonplace to attribute this dramatic descent to the overextension of imperial power, the final cause in Gibbon's account of the decline of Rome. At best this is a truism, at worst a tautology. The British system was sustained not by the unique resources of Imperial Britain, but by a combination of elements not so much ruled as managed from London. It is the failure of the combination that needs to be explained. A more serious objection to the ‘overstretch’ explanation is its determinism – as if the downfall of the British system was an inevitable outcome which contemporaries were too blinkered to see for themselves. Of course, the British system broke up because it lacked the resources to overwhelm its enemies. But that is only half the story. No less important was the fact that the struggle to survive was waged in an age of revolution: a Eurasian revolution that cumulatively (but very quickly) destroyed almost all the global preconditions on which the British system had depended since the 1830s.

It is arguable that the roots of this revolution lay in the very changes from which the British had profited so much in the past: the gradual integration of the world's politics and economics into a universal system. As the world became a single market, and more and more of its regions came to depend upon international trade, commercial rivalry had become more intense. The strains of economic transformation were felt more deeply; the threat posed by commercial disruption to social stability became more obvious. At the same time, the ‘globalising’ climate in trade and diplomacy intensified the trend towards competitive state-building, since only well-organised states could secure social order, economic development and international sovereignty. Partly because of the easier diffusion of ideas and values across districts, countries and continents that technology made possible, socio-economic change and state-construction provoked rival forms of cultural mobilisation: to make states or break them; to build new communities, or refurbish old ones. Ethnic nationalism became the secret weapon of modernising states, and also a potent means of subverting them.

Before 1914, these sources of tension in world affairs had been eased by three countervailing influences. First, the rapid growth of international trade softened the impact of economic competition and enhanced the appeal of the open economy. Secondly, the political structures that had grown up since the 1870s survived the stresses of external rivalry and internal revolt. The European great powers who had partitioned so much of the world had settled their differences peacefully if grudgingly. Partly for ideological reasons (a shared conceit about their civilising mission), partly from self-interest, they showed little desire (though some) to stir up trouble in each others’ empires. Despite alliance systems, war plans and mobilisation timetables, they preferred to rattle their sabres rather than use them. Thirdly, the conservative elites who retained their grip over the dynastic empires of East and Central Europe had kept in hand the ethnic nationalisms that threatened the stability of the European states-system. The result had been not a durable peace but an uneasy equilibrium whose fragility was eventually revealed in the July Crisis of 1914. In the four years that followed, much of Old Europe's political architecture was abandoned or destroyed. As the war reached its climax in 1917–18, it seemed as if the progressive collapse of political, social and economic order would spread a revolution across Europe and ignite a revolt of the subalterns in the colonial lands beyond. If this terrifying prospect had receded by the mid-1920s, as we saw in the last chapter, it did not vanish for long. The peace of the 1920s was the prelude to a revolutionary age, although it was not until the mid-1930s that its full global meaning had begun to emerge and the prospect of ‘holding the centre’ grew increasingly faint.