If you look at a map of the world from 1905 or 1925 or even 1945, you’ll see that a significant portion of the world used to be controlled by London. That’s no longer the case. The United Kingdom still has a few overseas territories but they’re mostly just dots on the map. And there are several independent countries which are part of a Commonwealth which Britain is the symbolic leader of. But the Empire is gone.
Was that inevitable? Picking the end of World War II as a starting point, where there things the Britain could have done differently that would have resulted in the British Empire still being around today? Or were the forces that broke up the Empire too strong for Britain to have withstood?
If you think 1945 was too late, feel free to suggest things Britain could have done at an earlier date that would have resulted in the Empire surviving.
If you think the answer lies outside Britain, tell us what decisions by other countries could have kept the Empire intact.
And putting aside the issue of whether the British Empire could have survived, do you think it should have survived? Do you think the break-up of the Empire was a good thing? If you think the break-up was a good thing, do you think changes were possible that would have kept the Empire intact and made its continued existence a positive thing? Or do you feel that while the break-up was inevitable, it was still a bad thing that it happened and that the British Empire would have been better than what we now have in its place?
eta: Posted this in the wrong forum. I’ve requested a move to Great Debates.
The result of the war made imperial responsibilities unpopular at home, destroyed the reliably Imperial Liberal party, put the Labour party in as the second party oin their place, people who opposed Empire.
Oh, and it made the UK indebted to some place called Divided Nates? United Weights? United States!
I will argue that the World Wars were the proximal cause of the Empire’s collapse but not the ultimate cause.
Rather, throughout the 18th and 19th centuries we saw a steady march of progress towards the idea of “human rights.” Authors and philosophers became increasingly concerned with the idea of universal morality. Abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison wrote about universal freedom and human rights, while Henry David Thoreau wrote about civil disobedience. So Britain always had a conundrum. They were trying to control a vast Empire while simultaneously witnessing a shift in public thinking about foreign exploitation and universal rights. These ideas reached maturity in the 20th century, which saw great strides for the rights of laborers and minorities. At that same time, the World Wars made it increasingly difficult (from a resource perspective) to continue domination and administration of foreign countries.
So, TLDR: The World Wars sapped Britain’s resources, but the mood of citizens and political thinkers were turning against the idea of foreign exploitation anyway.
Running an empire is fairly easy while all the vassal states are reasonably compliant, but as soon as they start to rebel and assert their independence, it starts to cost the ruling state more than it benefits. Add in ideas about universal freedom and human rights and it’s best to negotiate a tactical withdrawal.
(But in this case, the empire was ultimately making claims for itself that could only be resolved, in the age of democracy, by moving, however slowly, towards independence for its constituent colonies).
Just to be clear: The British had used trickery and military power to impose themselves on countries like India and Burma, and exploited the native population for British profit. Correct?
There still would of been a relative decline, but the only way in which I could see the British empire surviving is being a congregation of white dominions with political power centered in London, with the many Black and Asian colonies independent, but allied to more closely associated with the UK with a sprinkle of bases around the world. Probably would still rule Singapore.
Nevertheless, the British Empire was the largest Empire ever seen in history and lasted for hundreds of years.
And many of the countries that were ruled by Britain are now happily part of the Commonwealth showing that there were distinct benefits to British rule.
Indeed there are still 16 countries which have Queen Elizabeth as their Head of State.
So the Empire was much more complicated and beneficial than you describe.
No, it was not inevitable. There is no ‘long arc of freedom.’ Certainly there were currents toward such things, but as we’ve seen in places such as Russia (both now and early 20th century) or late 18th century France or Xi Jinping’s China and one might even argue in 21st century America. The current toward freedom can quickly become arrested and become a current toward less freedom. A very simple ‘moment in time’ that could have happened to arrest such things would be the failure of the Russian Revolutions. If Nicholas had given more power to the Duma and cracked down on corruption, the world might be a far different place. If there were no Soviet Union, the ‘pro-Democracy’ rhetoric would likely have been less among the Western populace and resources from the Soviets to various rebel groups wouldn’t have existed. With a failure of Marxism in Russia, does the lack of Communist support change the Indian Independence movement? Does the Leninist call for self-determination ring as loudly in the third world? I don’t know, but it’s at least a possibility worth pondering.
Not quite exactly correct, the sticking point is “British profit”. The empire made many British people fabulously rich, but at what cost? It actually cost Britain more to maintain the Empire than they expropriated from the Empire. Private profits, public costs.
If you read stuff by George Orwell from the 30s when he talks about the moral imperative to break up the Empire, he simply accepts as fact that the loss of the empire would result in a permanent lowering of the standard of living in Britain. But that didn’t really happen, did it? All that effort spent in subjugating and looting India, and the net result was a wash. Your average Briton today is better off not having to subsidize the empire for the benefit of a few people.
The saddest part of the British Empire is how little Britain got out of the Empire. It would be one thing to loot the world and become fabulously rich, but to loot the world and gain almost nothing?
Note that British style colonial government is one of the seeds of its own destruction.
You stabilize the political system, the police system, to some extent the economic system and the people start thinking of themselves as belonging to a country rather than the subjects of a host of petty royals who got put in charge due to their great-something grandfathers having a nice army. Said royals warring against each other all the time.
The “jump” from that kind of system to being a nice normal independent country isn’t that far.
Note that British India wasn’t as well stabilized as one would hope. First there’s plagues and famines. Throw in religious issues and they’re lucky to be have gotten independence when they did. But politically they were a whole lot more modernized than they had been.
Another thing to note: colonizing the good spots (like India) brings in a huge amount of money. At first. It’s still can be a positive net flow but not the big bucks of the early days. If back home you assume that the big money will continue to come in and you do stupid things like build lavish estates with a hundred servants and partying the money isn’t going to last. You’re suppose to put a good chunk of the money back into the business instead.
I would contest that we subsidized India, in fact, it was the Indian tax payer who shouldered the burden of paying for the military of the British.
But the Empire was never for the British as a whole, just those lucky enough to buy into the establishment by doing something abroad what was profitable.
People do not like being colonized. Imperialists exploit. They subdue the natives (any people who lived there, not merely tribal peoples) by force and without justice. They steal riches and import it to the home company. All improvements made are for the benefit of the occupiers. They live as a conspicuous minority elite driven by prejudice. Dissent is punished, rebellion ruthlessly suppressed.
How long can such a state be maintained? Only as long as the colonizer has markedly superior technology.
America is the first modern example of an close-to-equal colony successfully rebelling against an overseas imperialist because the costs of fighting a war on somebody else’s home territory are so high.
Britain saw a never-ending series of rebellions during the 19th century as the natives obtained guns and other weapons. So did other colonizers. The Dutch East Indies were the scene of rebellions as well. The Dutch loosened their strictures; the Brits did not. Could they have done so successfully? Probably not. India was more highly organized than the loosely connected East Indies. Nor was it English-speaking and majority populated by ethnic Brits like Canada and Australia.
The longer Britain kept the colonies, the more dangerous they became. They weren’t ready for self-rule, because the British had spent centuries preventing such capabilities. They couldn’t be let go because Britain was dependent on the money they brought in. That money had to be balanced against the ever-increasing costs of staging troops around the world, needing to be better equipped as the natives gained guns and expertise.
Colonies are a pot on a fire with a lid. The trick is to keep the pot from boiling over. The odds you can do this as the fire gets ever hotter shrink drastically. What can you do differently? Don’t start colonizing.
WW1 seriously weakened Britain with 5 years war, 1 million dead and millions injured.
Then the Great Depression.
It was further drained by 6 years of WW2 when Churchill sold just about every asset he could to buy supplies from the profitably neutral USA.
By 1945 the country was bankrupt and the politics of the country changed markedly towards creating a welfare state rather than rebuilding a trading empire. It simply did not have the resources to support an empire, especially when the US and Soviets were determined to undermine former colonial powers widen their influence. Food rationing lasted until 1954 in the UK.
Empires inevitably fall for one reason or another.
WW1 saw the end of three European empires. WW2 saw the end of most of the others. Britain and France managed to hang on to their colonies for a decade or so afterwards but the political structure and economic basis was no longer sustainable. Once India was lost the British Empire made was broken. This was clear during the numerous colonial settler wars fought until the Suez crisis underscored the US as the dominant economic power. This resulted in decolonisation policies in the UK and France that began shedding their unsustainable colonies very quickly. The world was then left for the US and the Soviets to vie for influence in what became known as the Third World.
i guess if there had been no WW1 and WW2, these empires may have lasted longer.
My own opinion is that the British Empire was bound to fall. Ironically, it was British virtues rather than British vices which I feel destroyed the empire.
Historically, most societies have been based on a small group of people holding power. So most people didn’t see politics as an issue that involved them; they were the ruled not the rulers. And if you see the rulers are a separate group from yourself, you have less concern about who that ruler is. You don’t really care if the people who are running your country are home-grown or invaders because either group is essentially foreign to you. So earlier invaders were able to take over a country and replace the rulers without the majority of the population caring.
Things were different in England. England still had a king and nobility, but the English people had some sense that their government was answerable to them. And that sense grew. And this idea was part of the English culture that the English brought with them when they began conquering their Empire. They inadvertently introduced the idea of government deriving its authority from the consent of the governed into places where it hadn’t existed. And when that idea took root, the local people saw that the British colonial regime was not living up to this British standard.
We saw an early example of the result here in America. When the Americans rebelled against the British government, they said they were doing so to assert their rights as British people. The same thing would later happen in Africa and Asia where people in British colonies decided they wanted the kind of government that the British set up for the British people rather than the kind of government the British set up for Imperial subjects.
I don’t see how the process could have been avoided. The only significant change I think was possible would have been if the British had participated in the change rather than resisting it. That was possible; it happened in places like Australia or Canada where the British government willingly handed all practical political power over to the local population and was able to therefore maintain some symbolic control. But in most of the Empire, the British resisted giving up political power and the result was that gaining political rights became linked with fighting against the British.