The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (91 page)

The instinct to build on their established position was sharpened by opportunity and also by fear. There were numerous signs before the end of the war that Stalin would demand more control over the Straits, an old Russian ambition. It also seemed likely that Russia's military presence in Northern Iran (part of the Anglo-Russian occupation imposed in 1941) would be used as a lever to enlarge Russian influence. At the same time, the British were determined that Libya should not be restored to Italy, and that Russian claims to a share in its post-war control should be firmly resisted. Instead, it should form part of Britain's great arc of influence extending all round the Eastern Mediterranean, and stretching away to the Gulf and Iran. In the three-way division of global power that was widely predicted (China's great power capacity was somewhat discounted), the share of the British was bound to be large, indeed had to be large. But the readiness to contemplate a burden on this scale really depended on two unspoken assumptions. The first was that Britain would be able to bear the costs that would follow. As we have seen, an illusion persisted until the defeat of Japan in August 1945 that American aid would fund Britain's revival as a great trading economy. The second assumption proved even more fragile. It was that the British would be able to ‘manage’ the nationalisms of their Middle East client-states, and ‘rally the moderates’ by artful concessions. It was easy to think – especially while the war lasted – that uncooperative locals would be brought to their senses by the threat of coercion.
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In so divided a region with such deep social differences, it was hard to imagine a common nationalist front strong enough to evict them.

There was one other assumption that should not be forgotten. Since their first invasion of Egypt in 1801, the British had counted on India for part of the military means to exert their power in the region. They had often been tempted to attribute their presence to the need to defend India or uphold the prestige of its (British) government. ‘Why’, asked Lord Curzon in 1918 (in one of those questions that only he answered), ‘should Great Britain push herself out in these directions? Of course the answer is obvious – India.’
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It was a short step from this to insist that what was in India's interests should be paid for by India, and guarded by its army. After the First World War, there had been imperative reasons to reduce the military burden on India, then in the throes of political upheaval and constitutional change. But, in the Second World War, India had become once again a huge reservoir of military manpower, and an army of two million men had been raised. Indian divisions fought in the Middle East, North Africa and Italy as well as in the Southeast Asia campaigns and the bloody defence of Imphal. India was the main base from which the reconquest of Burma, Malaya and the Dutch East Indies was launched. Yet its political future was deeply uncertain. The Cripps Mission had failed to win Congress support for the war. The Quit India movement that Gandhi unleashed as a mass insurrection was crushed by the British, and large numbers of Congress activists gaoled. Gandhi's prison fast was a ‘flop’ without the activists’ backing.
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The British ruled by decree or with Muslim support. ‘Politically the position is very easy here at the moment’, reported the Viceroy in mid-1943 to Leo Amery, the Secretary of State.
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Only one thing was clear. The British had committed themselves irrevocably (in the Cripps Mission ‘offer’) to full Indian self-government at the end of the war. What that would mean for India's role in Britain's world-system was shrouded in mystery.

For Amery in London, this was the key issue. ‘To keep India within the Commonwealth during the next ten years is much the biggest thing before us’, he told Churchill in April 1943. ‘If we can keep her for ten years I am convinced we can keep her for good.’
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Amery was anxious to reform Indian politics while the Congress was banned. He was eager to give the Viceroy's Indian ministers more political influence and to make them more credible as the voice of Indian opinion. But his real objective was a drastic revision of India's constitutional future. Parliamentary-style government was completely unsuitable for the Indian centre, he told the House of Commons in March 1943, because it meant party government. The federal government should ‘emanate’ from the states and provinces. Like the Swiss executive, it should be non-party and enjoy independence from the federal assembly. Amery's scheme was transparently obvious: a non-party executive chosen by the units of a ‘looser’ federation much at odds with each other would have little will to sever the British connection completely. It would be much more likely to acknowledge India's need for British assistance, and much more willing to sign an Anglo-Indian treaty of the kind London wanted. The new Viceroy Lord Wavell (1943–47) shared Amery's zeal for a political move and his geostrategic perspective. ‘The future of the Commonwealth, from the defence point of view, and also perhaps economically, will depend to a great extent on what happens in India in the next ten years or so’, he pronounced in July 1944.
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But he and his advisers thought Amery's scheme futile. The answer instead lay in drawing the Congress and the Muslim League into a coalition government for the phase of transition. But, as Wavell complained, the will was lacking in London to push matters forward: ‘Winston had no intention of helping it on.’
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Churchill's own view was characteristically blunt: ‘Victory is the best foundation for great constitutional departures’.
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So India's politics waited on victory: how triumphant a victory remained to be seen.

Imperial Labour

Of course, it was not to be Churchill or his Conservative colleagues who wrestled with the fate of the British world-system, or the independence of India, when the war finally ended in August 1945. In July 1945, a vast electoral wave swept the Labour party to power, giving it (for the first time) an absolute majority in the House of Commons. This political earthquake was widely understood to mean that British opinion was impatient for social reform. As a ‘patriotic’ party whose leaders had been central to the war effort at home, Labour was trusted to implement the wartime promises on social insurance, education and employment, as well as reorganising under public control the services and industries whose performance was vital to economic and social recovery: the mines, the railways and the provision of healthcare. The scale of the task and the need to preserve the apparatus of central control were visible in the damage suffered by almost every major city. The popular hope that the sacrifices of the war would bring a fairer, more equal and more secure society was combined with the fear that without a strong centralised system reconstruction would be slow, inefficient and unfair, destroying in the process (as after 1918) the promise of change.

Yet it was certainly not true that the new Labour leadership was preoccupied with domestic over external priorities, or indifferent to the requirements of British world power. The Prime Minister, Clement Attlee, had served on the Simon Commission in 1927–30, and was keenly concerned with the Anglo-Indian relationship. He had wanted the Cripps Mission in 1942 to save India as ‘[Lord] Durham had saved Canada.’
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He was keen to enlist the dominions’ post-war help especially in defence. Ernest Bevin, the new Foreign Secretary, had been a leading pre-war trade unionist and a stout defender of the need to protect British overseas markets. He quickly embodied an all-but-Churchillian view of Britain's place in the world and of the need to defend its claims and prerogatives. This did not mean a passive endorsement of the colonial
status quo
. Labour's leaders had sympathised with the vigorous attack on British colonial practice that had burst out in the open after the fall of Singapore in February 1942. The fierce critique launched by Margery Perham, the African expert and protégé of Lord Lugard, and published in
The Times
, lambasted the failure to meet the aspirations of colonial peoples, to develop their economies or to democratise their politics. Economically and socially, colonial rule had created ‘tropical East Ends’ and promoted the colour bar, ‘an attitude of mind that, at its worst, regards other races of men almost as if they were other species’.
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Perham's strictures chimed with the dislike of Labour's colonial experts – whose ties were closest with missionary and humanitarian interests – for white settler communities and the reactionary ethos (as they saw it) of indirect rule, which aligned the colonial power with chiefly authority against educated commoners.
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A ‘progressive’ policy of social advancement and political partnership was as much a necessity in the colonies as at home. But this reformism coexisted with a reaffirmation of faith in the ‘British system’. There was ‘no fixed line between Dominions and dependencies’, declared Herbert Morrison in his Newcastle speech of January 1943. India ‘can have full self-government for the taking’ at the end of the war. ‘We are no greedy exploiters.’ The real burden of his speech was to warn against the ‘myth of a self-sufficient empire’, and to insist on the need for international cooperation between all the great powers. The strongest claim of the ‘British system’ on other nations, he concluded, was that its long-term interests were the same as those of international society as a whole.
⁴⁵
No Victorian could have phrased it better.

Indeed, at the end of the war, there was no obvious conflict between the needs of domestic reform and the task of upholding the substance of British world power. It was axiomatic that Britain's global trading economy should be restored as quickly as possible to its pre-war position (at least), and that domestic prosperity depended on overseas markets more acutely in Britain than anywhere else in the industrial world. The immediate need for food and raw materials could only be met by keeping in place the wartime version of the imperial economy with its bulk purchases from the dominions and official control over the price and supply of colonial produce. The demands of war and the stringent restrictions imposed under lend-lease had largely confined British trade to Empire and sterling area countries after 1940. The most practical reasons dictated the need to preserve these imperial connections as the platform on which economic recovery could be built. From that point of view, reforming the Empire (along the lines that Perham had urged) – to make it more dynamic, efficient and productive – seemed a perfect combination of profit and virtue. In an era of shortage, economic growth in the colonies would supply Britain's needs and fund their own modernisation. Secondly, it was quite easy to believe in the first months of peace that the costs of remaining a great power in the world would not be prohibitive. If the United Nations were to function (as British leaders intended) primarily as the instrument of Great Power cooperation between the United States, the Soviet Union and themselves, with tacit spheres of influence and sanctions against territorial aggression, the crippling burden of imperial defence would become far more bearable. It was precisely in this spirit that Attlee was to urge (in September 1945) Britain's military withdrawal from the Middle East.

In fact, the uncertainties soon began to pile up, and with them the costs. The British had harboured deep suspicion of Stalin well before the war ended. It quickly became clear that friendly recognition of Britain's spheres of influence was not on Moscow's agenda. Stalin demanded a role at the Straits (as the counterpart to British control of the Suez Canal); his army remained in northern Iran; and Moscow laid claim to a share in the trusteeship of the Italian colonies in Libya (the prize the British had reserved for themselves). The Soviet Union had all the old Tsarist ambitions in the Middle East, warned the British ambassador.
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There was hardly any doubt, recorded another senior diplomat in February 1946, ‘that Russia is intent on the destruction of the British Empire’.
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Britain was being dragged willy-nilly into confrontation with a power of awesome military strength and possibly limitless ambitions. At the same time, it was also deeply uncertain (or so it seemed in London) what part the United States might play in resisting Soviet aggression. The rapid demobilisation of American forces, America's interest in exploiting erstwhile British markets and the security conferred by its nuclear weapons, might make its leaders indifferent at best to the survival of the British world-system, content perhaps to carry off the spoils if it collapsed under the strain of a confrontation with Russia. Thirdly, the failure to agree upon a peace treaty with Germany, and the strength of communist movements in both France and Italy (in part a reflection of economic distress), wrecked any hope that Europe's old powers would balance Soviet strength. On the contrary, it seemed that their divisions and weakness had opened the way for the Soviet penetration of the south and west of Europe as much as its east and centre.

These were worrying signs that the favourable geopolitical position that the British might have hoped would be theirs at the end of the war would turn into the nightmare envisaged by Smuts in 1943. A British world-system, poised between two continental ‘superpowers’ (the term was coined in 1943), might have hoped to exploit their rivalry and exact favourable terms, economically at least, from the United States. Instead, it was the British themselves who felt the pressure of Soviet expansion. Worse still, they did so at a time when they lacked the means to pay for the essential dollar goods needed to sustain their domestic economy and their overseas burdens, not to mention the programme of industrial and commercial recovery. With the lapse of lend-lease, this became in fact the most urgent priority. Nor could British leaders assume that the ‘internal’ politics of their imperial system would remain passive while they grappled with its economic and geostrategic crises. In India, the Middle East, and in the reoccupied colonies in Southeast Asia, British authority was soon under strain. Among the white dominions, as the wartime prime ministers meeting had signalled, their ties with Britain were bound to be mediated by the logic of self-interest in a world of such geopolitical uncertainty and when Britain was no longer their ultimate geostrategic protector. The solid British Commonwealth ‘bloc’ assumed in some visions of a three-power world was no more than a pipe-dream.