# Question about the British Empire **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 18, 2006, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689 "2006-12-18T21:11:36Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 10\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Can\_Handle\_the\_Truth](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Can\_Handle\_the\_Truth](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Can_Handle_the_Truth)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/1 "2006-12-18T21:11:36Z")
I have read several sources that state that the dismantling of the British Empire after WWII was the result of the great debts incurred by Britain during both World Wars, such that Britain “could not afford” an empire any longer. I thought the whole idea of having an empire was to bring wealth to the mother country. Colonial posessions are supposed to be a financial benefit, not a drain. Otherwise what’s the point of having them? I assume that each colony originally did contribute a net economic gain, but at what point did they – and in particular, India, “the jewel in the crown” – become economic liabilities? ---
**Author:** ![Mk\_VII](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/5f9b8f/32.png) [@Mk\_VII](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mk_VII)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 9:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/2 "2006-12-18T21:24:40Z")
Correlli Barnett, in _The Audit of War_ , argues that the Empire had always been a net drain on Britain’s finances. Of course, there are some things, like influence, which are hard to quantify in pounds, shillings and pence. After 1918 the defence obligations which far-flung possessions imposed (and even quite affluent Dominions did not assume much responsibility for their own defence) definitely outstripped Britain’s ability to pay for a navy which could effectively defend them. After 1945 the costs of propping up the sterling area haemorraged wealth from the British economy and Barnett argues that Great Britain could, and should, have repudiated its war debts to the Dominions, and accepts that this would have led to the breakup of the Commonwealth ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 18, 2006, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/3 "2006-12-18T22:46:31Z")
As I’ve always understood it, the colonies might have been a drain on the **government’s** finances, but they were maintained because they were profitable for British **businesses** – controlled markets in which to buy raw materials (and labor) cheap and sell manufactured goods dear. From George Orwell’s 1942 [essay](http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks03/0300011h.html#part17) on Rudyard Kipling: > [@](#): > > Kipling spent the later part of his life in sulking, and no doubt it was political disappointment rather than literary vanity that account for this. Somehow history had not gone according to plan. After the greatest victory she had ever known, Britain was a lesser world power than before, and Kipling was quite acute enough to see this. The virtue had gone out of the classes he idealized, the young were hedonistic or disaffected, the desire to paint the map red had evaporated. He could not understand what was happening, because he had never had any grasp of the economic forces underlying imperial expansion. It is notable that Kipling does not seem to realize, any more than the average soldier or colonial administrator, that an empire is primarily a money-making concern. Imperialism as he sees it is a sort of forcible evangelizing. You turn a Gatling gun on a mob of unarmed ‘natives’, and then you establish ‘the Law’, which includes roads, railways and a court-house. He could not foresee, therefore, that the same motives which brought the Empire into existence would end by destroying it. It was the same motive, for example, that caused the Malayan jungles to be cleared for rubber estates, and which now causes those estates to be handed over intact to the Japanese. The modern totalitarians know what they are doing, and the nineteenth-century English did not know what they were doing. Both attitudes have their advantages, but Kipling was never able to move forward from one into the other. His outlook, allowing for the fact that after all he was an artist, was that of the salaried bureaucrat who despises the ‘box-wallah’ and often lives a lifetime without realizing that the ‘box-wallah’ calls the tune. ---
**Author:** ![FRDE](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/e68b1a/32.png) [@FRDE](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FRDE)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 8:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/4 "2006-12-19T08:50:49Z")
The Indians and most of the rest of the Empire was pretty keen on getting independance, the UK had been ‘shown up’ in WWII and according to my uncle who was around at the time the USA was not particularly helpful. Short of fighting a long war of attrition, there was not much that the UK could do apart from pull out, which is a pity in a way as administration was professional and benign (Britain got its act together after the shock of the Indian Mutiny) it was also very lightweight. ---
**Author:** ![installLSC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/i/54ee81/32.png) [@installLSC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/installLSC)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 9:12am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/5 "2006-12-19T09:12:38Z")
I would say the empire became unprofitable between the world wars. Unfortunately, I can’t quote exact authorities but I remember reading up to one quarter of Britain’s exports were cheap textiles to India. This market dropped sharply during the 1920’s and 1930’s, due partly to Indian nationalist “homespun” campaigns and partly being crowded out by cheaper Japanese textiles. (That’s a major reason British unemployment remained high during the 1920’s.) Also, remember a lot of British possesions were kept not because they earned anything, but because they protected transit and communications to the more profible parts of the Empire (India, Mideastern oil fields, Singapore, etc.) With India becoming independent in 1947 and much of the Mideast and Far East becoming an American sphere, the lesser possesions lost their importance. ---
**Author:** ![Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/a587f6/32.png) [@Freddy\_the\_Pig](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freddy_the_Pig)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 3:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/6 "2006-12-19T15:48:26Z")
[QUOTE=Can Handle the Truth] I thought the whole idea of having an empire was to bring wealth to the mother country. Colonial posessions are supposed to be a financial benefit, not a drain. Otherwise what’s the point of having them? [/QUOTE] The question of whether colonies were a benefit or a drain was argued at the time and ever since, without any definite answer. There were other motives besides direct financial gain–national prestige, religious proselytizing, opportunities for advancement for ambitious individuals who were blocked at home, and a desire to spread the English language and culture which was likely to promote long-term military and trade relationships. By the end of World War II, all of these motives were a joke. The British government suffered from an absolutely crushing debt burden, to its own citizens and to Americans. Every ounce of British financial and industrial muscle had been commandeered to war production, and the country could barely feed itself and heat its houses. (There’s a reason why the descriptions of rationing and privation in _Nineteen Eighty Four_ are so vivid.) Europe no longer had the desire, or the civilizational self-confidence, to spread its culture to the Third World, and the Third World was of no mind to listen even if it had been. The British Empire no longer made sense. ---
**Author:** ![Polycarp](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/p/82dd89/32.png) [@Polycarp](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Polycarp)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 4:03pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/7 "2006-12-19T16:03:06Z")
Have you ever run into the “martyr mother” sort of person? (This is quite relevant to the OP, really.) The woman who insists on doing everything _just so_, even though it exhausts her and she bitches about it, and her grown or adolescent children would much prefer to deal with it themselves? England in Victorian and early 20th Century times had a large population of people who felt there was a national obligation to bring the _benefits_ of British rule and culture to the “lesser breeds without the law” in their Empire. Rudyard Kipling is often seen as the poet laureate of this attitude, but it does him an injustice to portray him as totally a jingoistic imperialist – he was an incisive observer of the scene, and many of his poems make scathing comments on the attitudes expressed. When the U.S. began imperialistic tendencies in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, he wrote perhaps the classic poem about the attitude, formally titled “The United States and the Philippine Islands, 1898” but known to nearly everyone as ["The White Man’s Burden](http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/)," in which he addressed the passing of the duty from the U.K. to the U.S. ([about the poem and the attitude expressed in it. Kipling also chronicled the decline of this attitude in the ironically titled [url="[http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm"]Recessional](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_White\_Man’s\_Burden"Wikipedia](http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm%22%5DRecessional%5D(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden%22Wikipedia) article[/url). (A recessional is the hymn at the end of a worship service in which the clergy, acolytes, choir, etc., process out of the church, or at least to its rear. As Britain drew back from empire to the “Little England” philosophy, “Recessional” commemorates the sense of decline and loss.) The above, of course, is intended as _analysis_ of the mindset among two or three generations of British leaders, not as a _defense_ of the attitude. But perhaps most telling about this attitude is Winston Churchill’s opposition to Indian independence – which was **not** so much out of a colonialistic, imperialistic sense of a need to exploit India, but rather in large part out of his foreseeing the conflict, slaughter, and mass migration between Hindu and Muslim that in fact attended the actual granting of independence in 1947. Finally, there is a real sense in which the poor decisions of the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments had forced Britain to “spend down its principal” in the fight against Nazism, and it no longer had the resources to continue the expenditures needed to maintain the Empire. All of this, of course, ties to the economic factors already mentioned. ---
**Author:** ![Bridget\_Burke](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/7cd45c/32.png) [@Bridget\_Burke](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bridget_Burke)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 4:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/8 "2006-12-19T16:56:56Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] England in Victorian and early 20th Century times had a large population of people who felt there was a national obligation to bring the _benefits_ of British rule and culture to the “lesser breeds without the law” in their Empire. Rudyard Kipling is often seen as the poet laureate of this attitude, but it does him an injustice to portray him as totally a jingoistic imperialist – he was an incisive observer of the scene, and many of his poems make scathing comments on the attitudes expressed. [/QUOTE] Some say the “lesser breeds without the law” were the Germans–or perhaps the Italians. I agree that many do not realize that Kipling was sometimes sarcastic. He knew that the English (or Irish or Scottish) soldier usually paid the price for Empire & did not reap the benefits. And _Kim_ was the work of a man who spoke Hindi before he spoke English & loved India–in his own way. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/9 "2006-12-19T17:51:19Z")
[QUOTE=Polycarp] England in Victorian and early 20th Century times had a large population of people who felt there was a national obligation to bring the _benefits_ of British rule and culture to the “lesser breeds without the law” in their Empire. Rudyard Kipling is often seen as the poet laureate of this attitude, but it does him an injustice to portray him as totally a jingoistic imperialist – he was an incisive observer of the scene, and many of his poems make scathing comments on the attitudes expressed. When the U.S. began imperialistic tendencies in 1898 with the Spanish-American War, he wrote perhaps the classic poem about the attitude, formally titled “The United States and the Philippine Islands, 1898” but known to nearly everyone as ["The White Man’s Burden](http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5478/)," in which he addressed the passing of the duty from the U.K. to the U.S. ([about the poem and the attitude expressed in it. Kipling also chronicled the decline of this attitude in the ironically titled [url="[http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm"]Recessional](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The\_White\_Man’s\_Burden"Wikipedia](http://www.web-books.com/Classics/Poetry/Anthology/Kipling/Recessional.htm%22%5DRecessional%5D(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_White_Man's_Burden%22Wikipedia) article[/url). (A recessional is the hymn at the end of a worship service in which the clergy, acolytes, choir, etc., process out of the church, or at least to its rear. As Britain drew back from empire to the “Little England” philosophy, “Recessional” commemorates the sense of decline and loss.) [/QUOTE] 1. Nitpick: From Orwell’s essay (see post #3): > [@](#): > > And yet the ‘Fascist’ charge has to be answered, because the first clue to any understanding of Kipling, morally or politically, is the fact that he was NOT a Fascist. He was further from being one than the most humane or the most ‘progressive’ person is able to be nowadays. An interesting instance of the way in which quotations are parroted to and fro without any attempt to look up their context or discover their meaning is the line from ‘Recessional’, ‘Lesser breeds without the Law’. This line is always good for a snigger in pansy-left circles. It is assumed as a matter of course that the ‘lesser breeds’ are ‘natives’, and a mental picture is called up of some pukka sahib in a pith helmet kicking a coolie. In its context the sense of the line is almost the exact opposite of this. The phrase ‘lesser breeds’ refers almost certainly to the Germans, and especially the pan-German writers, who are ‘without the Law’ in the sense of being lawless, not in the sense of being powerless. The whole poem, conventionally thought of as an orgy of boasting, is a denunciation of power politics, British as well as German. Two stanzas are worth quoting (I am quoting this as politics, not as poetry): > > If, drunk with sight of power, we loose Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe, Such boastings as the Gentiles use, Or lesser breeds without the Law— Lord God of hosts, be with us yet, Lest we forget—lest we forget! > > For heathen heart that puts her trust In reeking tube and iron shard, All valiant dust that builds on dust, And guarding, calls not Thee to guard, For frantic boast and foolish word— Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord! > > Much of Kipling’s phraseology is taken from the Bible, and no doubt in the second stanza he had in mind the text from Psalm CXXVII: ‘Except the lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it; except the Lord keep the city, the watchman waketh but in vain.’ It is not a text that makes much impression on the post-Hitler mind. No one, in our time, believes in any sanction greater than military power; no one believes that it is possible to overcome force except by greater force. There is no ‘Law’, there is only power. I am not saying that that is a true belief, merely that it is the belief which all modern men do actually hold. Those who pretend otherwise are either intellectual cowards, or power-worshippers under a thin disguise, or have simply not caught up with the age they are living in. Kipling’s outlook is prefascist. He still believes that pride comes before a fall and that the gods punish HUBRIS. He does not foresee the tank, the bombing plane, the radio and the secret police, or their psychological results. 1. Nitpick: [“Recessional”](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Recessional_%28poem%29) was written in 1897 when it was far from clear the British Empire was due to be eclipsed by America. He was just lamenting the inevitable mortality of empires in general, not specific, terms: > [@](#): > > Recessional is a poem by Rudyard Kipling, which he composed on the occasion of Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897. The poem expresses pride in the British Empire, but also an underlying sadness that the Empire might go the way of all previous empires. Kipling recognizes that boasting and jingoism - faults of which he was often accused - were inappropriate and vain in light of God’s dominion over the world. > > \ > > The phrase Lest We Forget was popularised in 1887, by Rudyard Kipling; it formed the refrain of Recessional, a warning about the perils of hubris and the inevitable decline of imperial power. > > The burden of the poem was a spiritual one. The history of western Christendom shows a recurrent pattern. When nations rise to wealth and power they are inclined to forget their God. The understanding was that it was Divine Providence who brought them the material and spiritual blessings that nurtured them into a position of greatness among the nations. ---
**Author:** ![Little\_Nemo](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/little_nemo/32/3120_2.png) [@Little\_Nemo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Little_Nemo)\ **Post date:** [December 19, 2006, 6:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/question-about-the-british-empire/384689/10 "2006-12-19T18:24:39Z")
“England”, like any country, is not a monolith - it was a group of individuals with their own situations. Some individuals benefited from and some were burdened by the colonies. Basically, the British “government” (which was not a monolith either) assumed the burdens of running the Empire - it paid the expenses of the bureaucracy and armed forces. Some British business interests derived profits from within the Empire. These businesses in turn were a source of tax revenue that supported the government. So in theory there was a balance. But it was not a closed system. Outside groups could throw the balance off. A foreign company selling its products in Kenya or Canada was “benefitting” from the umbrella of Imperial protection without contributing to its upkeep. On the other hand, companies and individuals who were only conducting business in the UK itself or in foreign markets were paying for the maintenance of an Empire that produced no profit to them. Combined with the rising desire for self-determination of groups within the Empire that were driving up the “cost” of maintaining the Empire, the disinterest of these groups for increased contributions made the colonies not worth the expense.