# Was the decline of the British Empire inevitable? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 25, 2019, 7:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372 "2019-01-25T07:27:55Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 3
**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:** [January 27, 2019, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/41 "2019-01-27T14:13:19Z")
> [@silenus](#): > > Exactly. Which makes _defending_ the Empire all that much more expensive, while every rebellion can now afford serious weaponry. Really, RPGs, MANPADs and AKs killed the idea of massed armies. When every mother’s son (and every mother, for that matter) can take out a Hind, Abrams or platoon, it is just too bloody _expensive_ to try to maintain a global empire. Hell, think about how much richer the US would be if we didn’t piss away mega-trillions sticking our noses into everybody’s business all over the planet. I’m not seeing it. The cost of defense is the cost of maintaining a strong military force. If a strong military force means having a big army and navy then defense costs a lot. If a strong military force means having air power then defense costs much less. So the costs of defending the Empire were greatly reduced after WWII. Really it was even earlier; the British used airpower instead of troops to put down uprisings in Iraq in 1920 and they openly acknowledged they were doing this for the cost saving. ---
**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:** [January 27, 2019, 2:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/42 "2019-01-27T14:16:18Z")
> [@carnivorousplant](#): > > A Prime Minister gave President Obama a desk set carved from the wood of a captured slave ships. Obama gave him some DVDs. > [@orcenio](#): > > And yet, he’s still loved more than Bush or Trump. I don’t see how a discussion of Obama and Trump have any relevance to the topic of this thread. So could we please not get sidetracked. ---
**Author:** ![carnivorousplant](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/carnivorousplant/32/3563_2.png) [@carnivorousplant](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/carnivorousplant)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2019, 3:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/43 "2019-01-27T15:05:08Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > I’m not seeing it. The cost of defense is the cost of maintaining a strong military force. If a strong military force means having a big army and navy then defense costs a lot. If a strong military force means having air power then defense costs much less. So the costs of defending the Empire were greatly reduced after WWII. Really it was even earlier; the British used airpower instead of troops to put down uprisings in Iraq in 1920 and they openly acknowledged they were doing this for the cost saving. The British raised a formidable army in India, used against rebellious tribes in the nineteenth century, and fought the Japanese in WW II, ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2019, 7:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/44 "2019-01-27T19:19:51Z")
> [@MichaelEmouse](#): > > The most effective way to suppress rebellions is like the Nazis did in Eastern Europe and Russia: Are you under the mistaken impression the British _didn’t_ do this in their Empire? Are you aware of the British history with civilian concentration camps? ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 27, 2019, 7:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/45 "2019-01-27T19:27:00Z")
If you’re smart, you use colonial troops raised in the colonies and supported by taxes on the colonies to suppress and loot the colonies. So you raise troops in Locality A who are shipped over to Locality B to oppress the locals, and troops from Locality B are shipped over to Locality C to oppress those guys, and troops from Locality C are shipped over to Locality A. That way the Empire funds itself, and it’s a technique going back to the Persians. The problem comes when your colonial troops mutiny. Then you’ve gotta bring in troops from a fourth place to put down the mutiny, but what happens when your Locality D troops join the mutiny? This is why Empires often tend to collapse all at once. But also note that this means you’re spending the riches of the Empire mostly on oppressing the Empire. Sure, there’s a bit of profit siphoned off for the metropole, but not that much, and it tends to end up in private hands somehow instead of enriching the general population. Take a look at how the conquests of the Roman Republic made senatorial class fantastically rich, while the yeoman farmers became impoverished and lost their farms, which were bought up by the newly rich senators. That didn’t exactly happen in the British Empire, but the profits accrued to the elites rather than the general population. But eventually people realized that direct political control over remote resource exporting regions wasn’t necessary. Yes we need rubber for our factories. But we don’t need to conquer a tropical region and set up rubber plantations. Instead there’s a global market for rubber. 19th Century mercantilist thinking was that you wanted exclusive rights to a resource, and you needed to keep your rivals from getting that resource. Nowadays we’ve mostly given up on that. It’s much easier to just buy commodity goods on the world market than it is to conquer and enslave and administer some far off tropical country. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2019, 9:01pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/46 "2019-01-28T21:01:19Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > How is that going to work, with 300 million heathen Hindoos with one representative, and 40 million Brits with 669 representatives? The problem is that the non-white subject peoples of the colonies had ten times the population of the metropole. So any system where the subject peoples had any real kind of real say would mean they’d run the Empire rather than the Brits. > > So that would never happen. I mean, it would be one thing if white Canadians and Australians had a say, but you can’t extend real political rights to the Indians and Africans without turning the Empire on its head. > > Of course it wasn’t until 1918 that you got male universal suffrage in the UK itself. Up until then most of the criteria to restrict suffrage would exclude 99% of subject people. Maybe a type of federalism might have worked. India would have had it’s own parliament, but initially only small representation in London. As the Indian people begin to see themselves as more British the number of representatives in the London parliament would increase until they had full representation. In order for the people in England to avoid complete rule by the Indian representatives, there could be a separate English parliament, along with the Indian, Scottish, Burmese, Kenyan, etc. parliaments. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2019, 9:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/47 "2019-01-28T21:16:17Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > As the Indian people begin to see themselves as more British… I notice one small problem with your proposal there, Flik. It’s one thing to devolve power into a federal system. It’s another when you know the first act of a genuinely empowered local government would be to vote for full independence from the Empire. So you can’t have a real Indian parliament with real power. It can only be a sham parliament. Although it certainly is true that you can have a Parliament that isn’t representative of the people, because Parliament in the UK only became that over a long process of evolution. It was originally just a meeting house for various power centers. The house of commons didn’t represent the people, it represented varied monied interests but who weren’t aristocrats. So it’s possible to imagine an Indian Parliament that doesn’t represent the Indian people, but rather the various members of the ruling classes of British India. But if you’re going to do that, why bother? You’re not fooling anyone, you’re just granting even more direct power to the local British authorities. ---
**Author:** ![FlikTheBlue](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/fliktheblue/32/10972_2.png) [@FlikTheBlue](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/FlikTheBlue)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2019, 9:43pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/48 "2019-01-28T21:43:39Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > I notice one small problem with your proposal there, Flik. > > It’s one thing to devolve power into a federal system. It’s another when you know the first act of a genuinely empowered local government would be to vote for full independence from the Empire. > > So you can’t have a real Indian parliament with real power. It can only be a sham parliament. > > Although it certainly is true that you can have a Parliament that isn’t representative of the people, because Parliament in the UK only became that over a long process of evolution. It was originally just a meeting house for various power centers. The house of commons didn’t represent the people, it represented varied monied interests but who weren’t aristocrats. So it’s possible to imagine an Indian Parliament that doesn’t represent the Indian people, but rather the various members of the ruling classes of British India. But if you’re going to do that, why bother? You’re not fooling anyone, you’re just granting even more direct power to the local British authorities. Perhaps it’s taking the hypothetical to far, but my solution to that problem would have been to make it beneficial for Indians (and all the other colonies) to remain as part of the Empire rather than immediately deciding to leave. Perhaps, as with the US civil war, the issues of the day were to great to be resolved peacefully, but it couldn’t have hurt to try. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2019, 9:55pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/49 "2019-01-28T21:55:25Z")
Sure, but they would have had to have started trying in 1858, not 1947. And of course, in our timeline the issue WAS resolved peacefully. There was no war between Britain and India. ---
**Author:** ![MrDibble](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/mrdibble/32/114_2.png) [@MrDibble](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MrDibble)\ **Post date:** [January 28, 2019, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/50 "2019-01-28T22:32:12Z")
> [@Lemur866](#): > > And of course, in our timeline the issue WAS resolved peacefully. There was no war between Britain and India. The latter is true, the former, [definitely not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre). ---
**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:** [January 28, 2019, 11:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/51 "2019-01-28T23:32:41Z")
the Government of India Acts 1919 - 1935 showed that representative government was coming, however slowly. ---
**Author:** ![Lemur866](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/lemur866/32/434_2.png) [@Lemur866](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Lemur866)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2019, 6:28am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/52 "2019-01-29T06:28:15Z")
> [@MrDibble](#): > > The latter is true, the former, [definitely not](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jallianwala_Bagh_massacre). Yeah, peacefully wasn’t the correct word. You can’t conquer and rule a subject people peacefully. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [January 29, 2019, 6:50am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/53 "2019-01-29T06:50:27Z")
> [@FlikTheBlue](#): > > Perhaps it’s taking the hypothetical to far, but my solution to that problem would have been to make it beneficial for Indians (and all the other colonies) to remain as part of the Empire rather than immediately deciding to leave. Perhaps, as with the US civil war, the issues of the day were to great to be resolved peacefully, but it couldn’t have hurt to try. If the British couldn’t even make it beneficial for the Irish to remain in the United Kingdom (where they had the vote, and full political equality) how could they possibly have made it beneficial for India to remain in a colonial relationship with the UK? ---
**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:** [January 29, 2019, 8:01am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/54 "2019-01-29T08:01:02Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > where they had the vote, and full political equality Not really. British laws put strict limitations of the political rights of Catholics in Ireland. Which meant that the majority of Irish people did not have political equality. ---
**Author:** ![UDS](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecae2f/32.png) [@UDS](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UDS)\ **Post date:** [January 30, 2019, 1:10am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/55 "2019-01-30T01:10:23Z")
> [@Little\_Nemo](#): > > Not really. British laws put strict limitations of the political rights of Catholics in Ireland. Which meant that the majority of Irish people did not have political equality. Catholic Emancipation was in 1829, after which there were negligible formal limitations on the political rights of Catholics in the UK. A hundred years the British couldn’t hold on to Ireland, but that had little to do with political limitations imposed on Catholics. ---
**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:** [January 31, 2019, 9:19pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/56 "2019-01-31T21:19:47Z")
> [@UDS](#): > > Catholic Emancipation was in 1829, after which there were negligible formal limitations on the political rights of Catholics in the UK. A hundred years the British couldn’t hold on to Ireland, but that had little to do with political limitations imposed on Catholics. There were still plenty of legal and political restrictions on Catholics after 1829. Anti-Catholic laws weren’t formally repealed until the Government of Ireland Act was enacted in 1920. And by that point it was too late to try to fix things. And as with Jim Crow laws in America, repealing the laws didn’t make the effect of those laws disappear. People who had been forced into poverty by laws were still poor after the law was formally repealed. ---
**Author:** ![filmstar-en](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/50afbb/32.png) [@filmstar-en](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/filmstar-en)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2019, 11:53am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/57 "2019-02-02T11:53:50Z")
It is rather easy to have a simplistic view of colonialism based on how it was practised in the 1880s onwards during the ‘Scramble for Africa’, when the industrialised European nations used guns and gunboats to carve out colonial empires at the expense of the native populations. Some were very grim examples of exploitation. British India had been around over a century longer by that time and the dynamics were quite different. The British Empire took the place of the declining Murghals and took advantage of the established machinery for collecting taxes. This was a fast way of making money and created a class of British who had made fortunes in India and returned with spectacular fortunes which caused a lot of resentment amongst the British establishment. This first phase was really selling military expertise to established rulers in return for tax collection and trading rights. India was not a centralised state, it was a large number of principalities and the British exercised influence over a large part of India by proxy through these right up until independence. There is no way the British could control a huge territory with a large population alone. They needed the support of local rulers and were able to exploit the differences between them, progressively extending control. After a failure of this policy that led to the Indian Mutiny, there were many reforms and an attempt to create a more Imperial political system replacing the East India Company. This required an educated class of Indians in order to run a modern state with institutions and a bureaucracy. All the ingredients were there for Independence, it just required a common agreement amongst these lawyers about how to go about it. Britain drained of wealth and exhausted by war was in no position to resist. Once India was gone, the whole basis of the rest of the Empire was open to question, it took until Suez and the wave of nationalism sweeping through colonised regions for that to become clear to the British, the French and other countries with colonial territories. But again that was not simply a case of the British packing their bags and the locals running the country by themselves. Some of these colonies had settlers that had long established governments and controlled the state. Some declared independence and went on to wage long wars against nationalist movements in the native population who saw little difference between the settlers and any other foreign invader. Kenya was a very bad settler war. France had it worse with Algeria, the country was almost torn apart by that war which still has echoes to this day. The US was the first settler colony to claim independence. Rhodesia was a couple of hundred years later. They were contentious. But between these there were many other independent states formed from the British empire that were achieved by negotiation and were peaceful, many taking the British system of government and adapting it to their requirements. These countries still maintained a close relationship the UK through emigration and had extensive trading links. There is still a close relationship with Canada, Australia, New Zealand. The decline of the British Empire was inevitable, but it was necessarily a failure and it did not always end in war. In its wake some very successful states were established based on the same machinery of government and trade. There were also some notable failures. There is always a tendency for a state that has economic or military power to extend its influence where ever it can. Eventually, it over extends or loses its advantage or there is war with a rival and a decline in influence. Some empires last longer than others. A more interesting question would be why some empires endure for centuries. I guess part of the answer to that is avoiding conflict with other powerful states. For the British, the rival European powers were always a threat and being drawn into two hugely damaging global conflicts dealt a mortal blow to the British Empire and most of the other European empires. We still have empires, they are mainly economic. They are written into unfair trade treaties and contracts where weaker states are exploited by stronger ones. Some things don’t change.☹ ---
**Author:** ![GreenWyvern](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/greenwyvern/32/2834_2.png) [@GreenWyvern](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GreenWyvern)\ **Post date:** [February 2, 2019, 12:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/58 "2019-02-02T12:18:27Z")
It would be interesting (but too time-consuming for me to attempt) to compare the decline of the British Empire with the decline of the Spanish, Portuguese, French and Dutch colonial empires. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2019, 7:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/59 "2019-02-03T19:29:43Z")
transitioning from a monarchy to a democracy pretty much guarantees autonomy of conquered lands over time. But consider WWII. Which countries sided with the British? It was a solid base of former colonies. I would posit that “decline” is the wrong word. The empire didn’t decline, it evolved. Compare the successes of former colonies of the British Empire to that of Spain or other major world powers. As colonies broke away they did so with the political/social influences of the ruling empire. Compare North and South America. Both parts of the continent are resource rich but it’s the English colonies that remained the most politically stable. Around the world the language of commerce is dominated by English. The language of flight is English. to say the British Empire declined ignores the influence it has in today’s world. ---
**Author:** ![nightshadea](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/7ba0ec/32.png) [@nightshadea](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/nightshadea)\ **Post date:** [February 3, 2019, 9:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372/60 "2019-02-03T21:37:16Z")
heres a question …what if the treaty of the opium war hadnt put a time limit on hong kong ? would the uk of let it be a semi independant city state or ould they still own it? i wouldnt see them giving it total independance because of communist china… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372.md?page=2) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/was-the-decline-of-the-british-empire-inevitable/828372.md?page=4)