What was the Impact on Britain and its Interests of the Decolonisation of the British Empire in 1947?

At the end of the Second World War Britain’s armed forces were larger than ever and were spread over an immense sweep of territory, and her prestige as one of the three leading victorious countries was very high (Lloyd 2007: 321)

Whatever elation Britain may have felt following the Allies’ victory over Nazi Germany in 1945, and whatever pedestal Britain found itself elevated to, the arduous process of decolonisation that was soon to follow would serve as a harsh reminder of the reality of the new and disrupted global order.

Bemoaning a lack of nuance in the literature, Kent accurately notes that ‘the possession and subsequent loss of a colonial empire has been conflated with the loss of British power’ (2006: 268), whilst Hill dismisses explanations that draw a straight causal link between decolonisation and a reduction of Britain’s ability to defend its best interests as ‘very crude’, especially ‘over a long time-period’ (1988: 31).  Some commentators, for instance, point to Britain’s entry into the European Economic Community as proof of Britain turning its back on its imperial past (Marshall 2006: 334) whereas others imply Britain’s subordination by the new American superpower dictated a change in foreign policy direction (Panitch and Gindin 2004: 9).  Certainly the decolonisation of the British Empire signified a shift in Britain’s global position and undoubtedly necessitated a reassessment of its interests, but it will be proposed here that there is a tendency to grossly overestimate the extent of these adjustments.  Throughout the decolonisation process Britain’s position as a key international player remained intact, if not as prominent, and its interests stayed relatively consistent (Smith and Smith 1988: 17), even if the means of ensuring their realisation altered rather more dramatically.

Informal Empire as a Continuation of Pragmatism

The fact that ‘empire was just one facet of Britain’s unique and constantly evolving interface with the world’ (2007: 1351) gives credence to the general assumption that ‘[p]ragmatism has always been widely regarded by practitioners and commentators alike as the chief characteristic of British foreign policy’ (Shlaim 1975: 838).  Despite heralding the end of the British Empire, the seemingly-unstoppable process of decolonisation failed to disrupt Britain’s practical outlook on foreign affairs.  S.R. Ashton asserts that ‘[i]f policy was not carefully planned or too closely defined there were none the less guiding principles’ (2006: 37) whereas Darwin refers to Britain’s continued ‘pragmatic imperialism’ (Darwin 2006: 23).  The promotion of the “special” Anglo-American relationship and closer engagement with its European neighbours were results rather than causes of decolonisation, results intended to enable Britain to pursue the same interests without the financial and military burden of empire.  Tomlinson asserts that ‘whilst the Empire may have imposed substantial costs on British possessions, […] at least there were no commensurate benefits to Britain lost by imperial decline’ (2003: 202)

Nevertheless, the bold assertion that Britain had nothing to fear during the process of colonisation is easily applied retroactively yet belies the opportunistic and often frantic manoeuvring the British government made during ‘a period of shifting global power and massive national budgetary deficit’ (Morris 2011: 326); the rushed transfer of sovereignty to India and the 1956 Suez Crisis in particular highlight Britain’s occasional failure to fully appreciate its diminished status and how this placed unfamiliar limits on its previously unbridled global reach.  Darwin even goes so far as to suggest that it was ‘the constant struggle to adapt its internal politics to the relentless demands of exogenous change’ (Darwin 2006: 16-17) that drove much of Britain’s colonial history.

These irregularities in Britain’s approach are negated and overcome, however, by the substantial extent to which decolonisation and the dissolution of formal European empires was met with the spread of informal, invisible empires (Hopkins 2008: 215).  Smith terms it, “neo-colonialism” which denotes ‘continued economic domination of newly “independent” territories by their formal imperial overlords’ (Smith 2001: 159).  Indeed, writing in 1909, well before the decolonising trend took root, Pollard emphasised that ‘the question for any time we can foresee is not whether the British Empire shall continue, but how the business of the British  Empire is to be carried on’ (1909: 767).  The Anglo-American relationship and the turn towards Europe, as well as the development of the Commonwealth, can all be understood as the growth and supplement of this informal empire with the protection of vital interests through new means.

In the case of decolonisation 1947 is a pivotal year because, especially in traditionalist interpretations, decolonisation can be viewed as a continuous process with a contested starting point (Hill 1988: 31; Hyam 2006: 263; Jackson 2007: 1351) but one that ‘accelerated after the Second World War and became irreversible with the loss of India in 1947’ (Hopkins 2008: 216).  India was commonly referred to as “the jewel in the crown” of the British Empire (Hodgkins 2002: 242) and so even were we to dislocate the event from its geopolitical context, its removal from the British sphere of control remains culturally and symbolically significant.

Nonetheless, India’s loss triggered a repositioning of the British empire in Africa, Malaya and the Middle East as part of a “second colonial occupation” ‘devised to provide imports of raw material and foodstuffs that were vital to the British economy’ whilst ‘defence strategy was adjusted to assimilate the colonial empire into Anglo-America plans for countering the expansion of the Soviet Union’ (Hopkins 2008: 217). Furthermore, the loss of India ultimately meant that there was no need to keep Aden and Singapore within the imperial fold to defend the western and eastern approaches to India because it was simply not worth paying to maintain isolated pockets of influence in the Third World (Sanders 1989: 116).  As Darwin is quick to point out, for a Britain crippled by maintaining a war economy for the best part of a decade, ‘there was no escape from the painful fact of economic weakness’ (Darwin 2006: 20) and this certainly steered the direction and scope of Britain’s post-war imperial policy.

As alluded to above, however, there exists a line of argument which, whilst easily dismissed as conspiratorial, rather convincingly argues that:

[t]he modern post-Second World War Commonwealth was designed by the British political establishment to compensate those in Britain who mourned the loss of Empire, and to provide a surrogate for colonial rule (Srinivasan 2006: 257).

In other words, whilst representing a very real blow to Britain’s international standing and imperial potential, the granting of independence to India was rather more superficial than would first appear and masked Britain’s retention of substantial influence.  This was not a phenomenon unique to India.  Indeed, British policymakers were less concerned with whether the colonies would be free, ‘but rather which local nationalist factions they would favor […] and over what piece of territory these new political elites would be permitted to rule’ (Smith 1978: 71).  In India especially, Britain’s penetration and reshaping of political culture not only facilitated British rule, but it also meant that ‘the period of British hegemony had a lasting effect on Indian politics’ (Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990: 287).  Indeed, in 2010 UK Prime Minister David Cameron expressed a wish to develop a new “special relationship” with India which has thus far been well-received in the former colony (Nelson 2010).

Flint refers to this as the dependentista thesis and states that ‘Britain was hardly likely to foster the growth of revolutionary communist parties to which it might transfer sovereignty’ (1983: 391-392).  Smith rather more tellingly calls this model ‘reform in order to preserve’, noting that ‘London made concessions more usually to subvert opposition to British rule than to prepare for its demise’ (1978: 73).  This cultivation of a preferred model and type of post-colonial elite served a dual purpose: it ensured that newly independent states would not become a new opponent in the ongoing ideological Cold War battle whilst simulteneously keeping former colonies amiable to British ideas, influence and interference.  For instance, Butler (2007: 460) suggests that this was the logic behind Britain’s eventual support of the creation of the Central African Federation in 1983 as it allowed Britain to maintain a certain degree of hold on the Northern Rhodesian copper that was ‘strategically and financially vital to Britain’.  Furthermore, it would explain the apparent about-face Britain made when London not only withdrew its veto on the political union of the Rhodesias, but actually facilitated with the birth of the Central African Federation (Darwin 2006: 26) which would ‘in theory, allow for gradually increasing African political participation, while preserving effective white hegemony for the foreseeable future’ (Butler 2007: 461).

Within Flint’s and Smith’s theses, then, British withdrawal from India can be understood as ‘a realpolitik-inspired recognition’ that, rather than staving off the inevitable in conditions of internal anarchy and violence, actually assisting with the transition to independence ‘would be more likely to leave behind regimes relatively well-disposed towards British interests’ (Sanders 1989: 96-97).  As Frantz Fanon has infamously written, ‘decolonization is always a violent phenomenon’ (1963: 35) and for those less committed to the maintenance of Empire, the post-war turmoil in India, China, Turkey, Egypt, Iraq and Ireland was proof that the British empire had become a ‘lost dominion’ (Darwin 2006: 19), seemingly prompting Britain to ‘cut and.run’ (Mackenzie 2007: 22). Indeed, Britain only proved unwilling to fight to maintain its dominance when its interests would realised just as effectively were they to remain on the periphery.  For instance, Britain was unwilling to intervene when Muammar Gaddafi ousted the Libyan monarchy in a coup in 1969, with some openly remarking that a new political regime ‘might better preserve UK interests’ (Van Genugten 2011: 71). Similarly, Britain did not act when Idi Amin’s coup in Uganda deposed Milton Obote’s government (Sanders 1989: 121-2), with one author suggesting that Britain’s subsequent relationship with Amin was ‘more concerned with financial interests than violations of human rights’ (Nayenga 1979: 134).

The notion that decolonisation was a continuation of specifically economic pragmatism carries significant weight:

Just as economic interests had once facilitated the acquisition of territory, so now they operated in reverse.  Territories could be given up when nothing essential seemed to be lost by transfer of political power – a conclusion reached for India by the 1940s and Africa by the 1960s (Hyam 1999: 46)

One view contests that withdrawal from the imperial “circle” was partly the result of an autonomous shift in the pattern of Britain’s overseas trade from the late 1950s onwards (Sanders 1989: 100; 289).  This would certainly account for the diminished British presence in the Middle East which just so happened to encompass a small area around the north-east and south-east coastline of the Arabian peninsula that was abundantly rich in the oil vital to post-war economic recovery (Lloyd 2007: 339).  Furthermore, White points that, rather than threaten British business, decolonisation actually presented new development opportunities which were ‘reflected in the portrayal of late-colonial Africa in UK corporate advertisements during the 1950s’ (White 2006: 105).

Old Interests, New Methods: Britain’s Engagement with the New International Order

If one considers that ‘the British Empire is best understood not as a territorial phenomenon but as the grand project for a global system’ (Darwin 2006: 28) it becomes clear Britain’s determination to influence international affairs did not wane as formal decolonisation advanced.  The process of decolonisation was simply a recognition that the post-World War II global order was no longer conducive to the maintenance of an expansive Empire enforced through military presence.  Instead Britain sought its national interests through ‘the protection of an international system that it had been at the forefront of creating’ and through new organisations in which it was a key member (Jackson 2007: 1354). For example, Lloyd notes that upon gaining independence Burma declined to join the Commonwealth ‘out of a belief that this made independence even more complete’ (2007: 329), alluding to the notion that the British Commonwealth was merely ‘the old and hated empire in disguise’ (Capet 2005: 237).  Furthermore, Tomlinson (2007: 208) suggests that Empire gradually came to be associated with the past whereas entry into the European Economic Community signified modernisation and the key to reversing the decline of the British economy.

McGrew (1988) and Benvenuti (2006) take this argument one step further and make it clear that Britain’s engagement in Europe and international engagements was not a result of economic decline as is often suggested, but was a calculated move.  McGrew, for instance, asserts that the ‘concentration of British defence efforts within NATO can be seen as a significant enhancement of Britain’s security’ (1988: 112), whereas Benvenuti emphasises that ‘Britain’s most vital strategic interests lay in Europe’ and ‘the defence of the British Isles was closely intertwined with the security of the European continent’ (Benvenuti 2006: 420).  Inclusion in NATO and the European project was thus Britain allocating its resources where it would see the greatest return and where they were needed most: in 1957 the cost of the colonies to Britain was £51 million compared to the £1,550 million spent on defence (Ashton, S.R. 2006: 40-41).

Nevertheless, despite all intentions to remain an assertive international actor, Britain failed to fully grasp the intricacies of the balancing act it had to perform to convincingly maintain this position.  The Suez crisis, for example, was a startling reminder that Britain, ‘one of the principal founders of the United Nations, had undermined the purpose of the organisation itself’ (Louis 2006: 192).  As a result, the President Eisenhower of the US was unwilling to back Britain because it did not want to interfere with Egyptian autonomy (Robertson 1965: 41) or resort to unnecessary military action (McDermott 2001: 135; Hahn 2004: 70) and thus risk violating the UN Charter.

At the end of the Second World War, ‘Western Europe, this historical fountainhead of imperialism, lay in ruins, with France and Britain, the “greatest” imperial powers, exhausted and weak, dependent on the financial generosity of the USA’ (Flint 1983: 390).  The scenario often portrayed at this point is that Britain was at the financial mercy of an anti-imperialist superpower (Flint 1983: 390; Ikenberry and Kupchan 1990: 294) and owed the United States a certain level of international support in exchange for such benevolence.  In addition, Irwin (2009: 909) points out that ‘[a]s the most powerful member of the Western bloc and the dominant state at the United Nations’ the US held an influential role in the fate of Britain’s colonial legacy.  Furthermore, the cultivation of a ruling class dependant on international capitalism dominated by multinational corporations generally regarded as being linked to the US (Flint 1983) seemingly placed the United States at the centre of the newly-entrenched informal empire.

This pressure placed on Britain by the United States is certainly overemphasised and assumes a clear and decisive attitude to Britain’s imperial policy which simply did not exist in the US; Roosevelt, for example, was vehemently anti-colonial and ‘clamoured for the return of Hong Kong to China’ whereas Eisenhower saw Britain’s grip on its colonies as a means of staving off the communist threat (Mark 2005: 52) despite a ‘cool attitude to empire’ (Childs 2006: 127).  S.R. Ashton (2006: 49) even goes so far as to suggest that a new colony, the British Indian Ocean Territory, was actually created in 1965 to appease the Johnson administration who wanted a worldwide network of defence facilities.

That US financial assistance ‘was provided on the understanding that the empire would act as a bulwark for the West in the Cold War against the Soviet Union’ (Ashton, N.J. 2006: 164) is perfectly clear but it should not be inferred that Britain would not have opposed Communism and the Soviet Union without encouragement from the US; alongside economic growth, ‘British policy-makers were, above all, interested in stability in order to prevent Soviet penetration’ (Heinlein 2002: 299)  Indeed, in his infamous “wind of change” speech to a special joint session of South African Parliament on February 3, 1960 Macmillan explained that the world was being divided into three groups, ‘with the Western powers and Communists now competing to garner loyalty from newly independent non-white peoples’ (Irwin 2009: 902).

Along with good relations with the United States, Smith (1978: 71) suggests that Britain was somewhat insulated from external pressures due to an ideological and institutional fitness to cope with overseas challenges to their rule, a two-party system that leant itself to strong leadership and sheer good fortune in avoiding seriously unmanageable problems in its colonies (until Suez at least).  Additionally, whilst the US held unparalleled sway in the post-war international system, Britain did not stand alone when it did choose to hold its ground against the new superpower; when the Suez Crisis erupted, for instance, ‘Australia and New Zealand showed that they were still willing to stand behind Britain without asking whether she was right or wrong’ (Lloyd 2007: 338).

After Suez, Sanders notes, ‘giving way to indigenous pressures for independence tended to be seen far less in terms of appeasement and far more in terms of ceding sovereignty to peoples who were now “ready” for self-rule’ (1989: 289).  However, the irony of this apparent change in approach is evident in Britain’s retention of Fiji, the Solomon Islands, the Seychelles, St. Helena and the Gilbert and Ellice Islands to prevent unrest and violence in colonies not yet prepared for autonomy (Ashton, S.R. 2006: 43).  Britain ultimately came to rely on their formula of self-determination as a palatable answer to their critics. Louis (2006: 188) points out: ‘In the rocks, shoals and other remnants of empire, what made more sense than to allow the inhabitants of Gibraltar or the Falklands to determine their own future?’ For Britain, permitting particular former colonies to determine their own fate gave the appearance of scaling back the empire, when in actuality it enabled Britain to assert a significant degree of authority over a consenting population.

Conclusion

Morris sums up Britain’s post-war situation perfectly when he claims that ‘at its zenith the British empire was the largest the world had ever seen and so when Britain began to fall, it did so from a very great height’ (2011: 331).  During its imperial prime, Britain was able to simulteneously pursue any number of interests, but post-war decolonisation forced Britain to take a more rigorously cost-benefit analysis approach to its foreign policy.  No longer could it strut on the world stage safe in the knowledge that the fallout from any imperial misadventures could be recuperated from the coffers of colonial subjects.  Instead Britain had to share the spotlight with two new superpowers and accept that the new geopolitical landscape and its relative economic decline meant any moves it did make needed to be more closely scrutinised to ensure they were as effective as possible.  This has, over a prolonged period of time, led to a turn towards Europe and the development of a close relationship with the US.

The fact remains, however, that the impact of decolonisation on Britain and its interests were greatly mitigated by the spread of informal empire through Britain’s rather selective approach to granting independence; Britain returned sovereignty to a former colony only when it was certain that the new government and ruling elite would be amenable to its influence and contribute towards the realisation of its interests.  To paraphrase Louis and Robinson (2006: 451-451), formal decolonisation signified the melting tip of a much larger iceberg hidden under sea level and Darwin suggests that Britain’s informal imperial policy ‘was a last attempt to turn global politics to Britain’s advantage and build a new British system to insure against the uncertainties of the post-war world’ (2006: 29).

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Written by: Richard J. Vale
Written at: University of Leeds
Written for: Dr Victoria Honeyman
Date written: March 2012 

Further Reading on E-International Relations

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• Is Decolonisation Always a Violent Phenomenon?
• Europe’s Biggest Eurosceptics: Britain and Support for the European Union
• Decolonisation and Violence: What It Takes to Decolonise IR
• Violence and Otherness: A New Perspective on Decolonisation Beyond Fanon
• Beyond the Race-neutrality of Prevent: White Britain and the Racialised Threat