Here we are, already, in May with the third instalment of my ongoing series of monthly comparative investigations into the impact of various empire's demises on their former peoples, the states that emerged from their ruins and on international order.
As anyone familiar with the previous two Issues (Habsburg and Ottoman Empire's) will know, it is my intention to draw from comparisons across a range of empires, while not attempting to define all-encompassing and scientific laws governing empire's demise and aftermath, but to hopefully discover patterns across empire's and to use comparisons to sharpen understanding of individual cases. Which will hopefully yield more and more fruit as the series develops and more empires are compared.
This month's issue introduces an important extra dimension, that of the colonial empire, as it focuses on an empire which was the largest the world has ever seen. Its capitol city was not especially elegant like Vienna and certainly was not exotic like Constantinople but it's overseas empire amply made up in mystery and exoticism what its industrial capitol lacked. This is of course the British Empire, comprised of the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom. It originated with the overseas colonies and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. For over a century it was the foremost global power, by 1922 the British Empire held sway over about 458 million people, one-quarter of the world's population at the time, and covered more than 33,700,000 km2 (13,012,000 sq mi), almost a quarter of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its political, linguistic and cultural legacy is widespread and the most profound of any empire to be examined in this series -which has led to a much lengthier investigation.
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| The British Empire |
The end of Empire was much less traumatic for the British than for the Turks or the Austrians, or indeed for the French. It was not accompanied by revolution or civil war in the UK. Britain's traditional political institutions -parliamentary government and constitutional monarchy- were untouched. Britain was not flooded by White settlers from overseas colonies ethnically cleansed in the course of their liberation from imperial rule. Decolonisation entailed some humiliations, of which the fiasco at Suez in 1956 was probably the worst, but Britain suffered no equivalent of Dien Bien Phu ( although proponents of the Batang Kali massacre would disagree), let alone of defeat in a world war. The 1950s and the 1960s were decades of rising prosperity, full employment and the benefits of the new welfare state: life for the ordinary man and woman was much more comfortable than it had been in the era when Britain was the world's leading imperial power. The end of empire did not even in the short term require the Englishman, unlike the Turk or the Austrian, to think afresh about what it meant to be English and how to identify with the British state.
An English nation had existed well before the British Empire, the vernacular Bible, the Spanish Armada and the seventeenth-century consolidation of parliamentary monarchy were key elements in the creation of this nation and of its political identity. The late nineteenth-century advocates of imperial federation, Arthur Seeley and his followers, had dreamed of developing a 'Greater British' nation and identity but they had never succeeded. Very few Englishmen thought of Australia, let alone Nigeria, in the same way as they thought of Kent. The strength of emotional identification with English soil was totally different from the commitment to overseas empire. In constitutional terms the United Kingdom and the overseas empire were always sharply distinct. The loss of empire therefore had minimal constitutional implications for Britain. For most British people the impact of two victorious wars was far greater than the loss of empire. Victory legitimises institutions and a communities established ways. It had this affect in post-1945 Britain too. The retreat from empire was for the most part presented to the public as the culmination of Britain's long-held commitment to democracy and self-government, in other words as a satisfactory conclusion to a well executed mission of trusteeship. There was just enough truth in this, and just enough dignity and mutual goodwill in Britain's retreat from most of its colonies, to make the myth acceptable. For a time too, the Commonwealth was a fig-leaf to hide Britain's declining status, as was perhaps the pomp and circumstance that continued to surround the monarchy.
Britain's diplomatic, military and political elites understood and experienced a sense of declining status and shrinking horizons. In this sense they were more like the Austrians than the Turks, for whom the loss of empire was almost a liberation. But the gloom and partial loss of confidence that affected sections of the governing elite had as much to do with Britain's relative economic decline in comparison to the rest of Europe as it did with the loss of empire. If empire's loss mattered before 1960, in the 1970s and 1980s economic decline was a much more burning issue. In any case Britain's loss of status was far less dramatic than Austria's. As a victor in 1945, Britain was one of the 'big three' though admittedly the junior member of the triumvirate. For more than a decade after 1945 it was much richer than devastated continental Europe. It retained a global role and influence for at least two decades after 1945. It was the key US ally in the Cold War and this overshadowed the loss of empire, contributed to a continuing British sense of global mission, and reinforced the wartime sense of unity with the Americans, a sense which went beyond a mere military alliance of convenience. The British brokered the 1954 Geneva peace in Indochina and defeated the communist insurgency in Malaya. Suez was a shock but it was really the economic crisis and the radical shift in morals and culture in the 1960s that marked a clear break with the past.
Empire's loss had greater implications for the United Kingdom and a British identity than it had for England and the English. An English empire had existed for a hundred years before the Anglo-Scottish Union of 1707. Access to England's colonial trade was one factor in the Scottish desire for union. Under the Union Scottish west-coast industry and the Scottish aristocracy and the professional middle-class had benefited greatly from empire. The British state as a whole and in particular specific institutions such as the monarchy and the armed forces gained additional lustre and prestige from the association with empire. At least as important, however, was that Britain had been the richest and most powerful state in the world, that it -almost uniquely in 1850- lived under a liberal constitutional order, and that it was widely admired and envied. Declining Scottish enthusiasm for the Union after 1965 was linked t the reduced significance of these factors quite as much as to the loss of empire.
All western Europe now had liberal-democratic governments and the European Union offered the prospect of linking a separate Scottish state and identity to a larger unit which would provide a wider market, a sense of security, and an alternative to isolation. The discovery of North Sea oil for a time encouraged the belief that Scotland could manage the economics of independence without difficulty. The decline in religious committment weakened the sense of the protestant British Union's separation from the a Papist Europe. Nor in any case was Scotland unique. In much of Western Europe peoples long subsumed in supposed 'nation states' began to assert their separate identity and even sometimes a claim to statehood: the Flemish, Catalans, Basques and Bretons all belonged to this group. Since Scotland wasn't an ancient kingdom and had always retained under the Union both many distinct institutions and its own cultural identity it is in no way surprising that it should conform to this common West European trend. The devolution of power to an elected Scottish assembly may encourage or may divert the Scottish desire for independence. In global terms it matters little either way. The United Kingdom was a strategic alliance to create a great power. Whatever the Scots do, that great power is dead. The main raison d'etre of the United Kingdom is therefore finished. Democratic institutions and habits are too deeply entrenched in mainland Britain for Scottish independence to be accompanied by violence. The English are quite capable of accepting the Union's ending psychologically. A certain Anglo-Scottish mutual sourness is about the worst one could expect. Moreover, independence within the European Union is a rather different matter from the glories of Bannockburn, though political rhetoric may no doubt sometimes suggest otherwise. What the impact of the Union's ending might be in Ulster is an interesting point: the Protestant settlement there was after all more Scots than English.
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| Irish Free State Treaty Signed, 1921 |
Ireland is a bigger and more complex issue from the perspective of empire. The end of empire in the 26-county Irish Free State (and later Republic) was accompanied by a rapid decline in the size of the Anglo-Irish, Protestant minority. This was 10 per cent of the overall population in 1911, 7 per cent in 1926 and 3.5 per cent by 1981. During the war of independence and the subsequent civil war a very small number of Protestant civilians were murdered, while a considerably larger number felt intimidated or in some cases had their property or business destroyed. Overall, perhaps 1,400 people lost their lives on both sides during the war of independence. The number of deaths in the subsequent war in the Free State and in ethnic conflict between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland was also very small when compared to the awful bloodshed and the ethnic cleansing which accompanied the demise of other empires, though f course Ireland's population was also small. During the Algerian war of independence, for example, the French killed perhaps 140,000 Algerians and the Nationalist FLN about a further 100,000 of their own Muslim people.
Nevertheless, within the republican movement and the republican elite the Civil War of 1922-3 was fought with great viciousness. The IRA assassinated Members of Parliament and the judges, the government responding with 'breathtakingly draconian measures'. Summary executions without trial, on the basis of arbitrary reprisal, were carried out by ex-comrades. Given this history, the strength of democracy and political stability in independent Ireland was remarkable. The new Ireland was unequivocally Catholic and nationalist. Protestants might well find it hard to identify with this Irish nation. But the Irish state bent over backwards not to discriminate against Protestants and there was little ethnic cleansing even during the war, let alone after 1921: less indeed than occurred in Belfast where the victims were the Catholic community.
The British Empire contained three major diaspora peoples, of whom the British themselves were one. The temperate lands which they colonised en masse - Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States, were the basis for the pre-eminence of the English language and of basic British political values and institutions worldwide at the end of the second millennium AD. 'Decolonisation' in Australia and Canada caused no real problems since London had long reconciled itself to their possible eventual independence. The continued existence of pockets of indigenous peoples and their claims to lost lands and rights were an embarrassment to these white post-colonial societies but not a major one. In Australia, Canada and the US most native peoples had been too marginalised and decimated to make major impact on the White society. A far more significant impediment to nation-building in Canada were the Quebecois. A conquered European people with their own national territory were much more difficult to integrate into a anglophone nation than other immigrants from Europe who came voluntarily to anglophone colonies, had no ancestral territorial claims in the new world, and in varying degrees were happy to assimilate to anglophone culture, while at the same time contributing to the creation of new-world anglophone national identities which were different from the British.
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| British Decolonisation in Africa by 1969 |
As is generally the case with the end of empire, the main potential problems for the dominant imperial people came neither in territories that they had swamped with colonists, nor in lands they had left un-colonised and ruled through bureaucrats, soldiers and merchants alone. It was a middle range of territories with sizeable White settler communities but large native majorities whose decolonisation was likely to cause most trouble for London. Above all this meant South Africa and Southern Rhodesia (Zimbabwe). From London's perspective matters were both simplified and complicated by the well-established tradition of granting self-government to sizeable White communities. This allowed the White South Africans and Rhodesians to ride roughshod over native interests. It also allowed these White minorities to proclaim their independence from British, de jure in South Africa and de facto in Southern Rhodesia. In most ways South African independence was a vast relief for the British. Having contributed greatly to the creation of a wealthy (by African standards) but also extremely racist and unjust society, London could avoid responsibility for the consequences. Since in 1965 Rhodesia was still a crown colony, it was not so easy to evade any responsibility for its failure. In comparison to the French or Portuguese, however, the British escaped very lightly from their African empire. They had the good sense not to attempt to hold this empire in the face of serious native resistance. They also never pretended to integrate African, or other, colonies into the British nation state. That is one important reason why unlike not only the French and Portuguese but also the Turks and Germans, post imperial Britain was not faced with an influx of 'overseas British' fleeing the consequences of empire's collapse.
The other two diaspora peoples in the British Empire were the Indians and the Chinese. They spread widely, though not as widely as the British, partly because they were excluded from most of the self-governing White dominions. The mass of overseas Indians and Chinese were often labourers in plantations or mines, work which the indigenous peasantry shunned: they provided too -a mass of peddlers and shopkeepers. Their elite was mainly composed of merchants though most of these later moved to the finance industry.
As with the Jews in post imperial Central and Eastern Europe, the Indians and Chinese were often deeply unpopular with the indigenous peoples in whose lands they lived. Sometimes there were specific reasons for this. In Ceylon, for example, tea plantations with Tamil labour imported from India had been created by the British partly on land expropriated from the Sinhalese peasantry. Not surprisingly, after independence the determination to get this land back added to other causes of anti-Tamil feeling. Uniquely, in 1964 the Indian government agreed on the repatriation of 525,000 labourers over the next 15 years, in return for which a further 300,000 were to be granted Sri Lankan citizenship.
Popular resentment of the Chinese trader and money-lender, was very reminiscent of attitudes to the Jews in Eastern-Central Europe. Above all, Indians and Chinese were resented because of their enormous economic power: in the Indian case this applied primarily in Burma and East Africa, both of which were opened up to Indian businessmen under British rule. In Uganda and Burma the Indians were driven out after independence. In South-East Asia the Chinese had deeper roots, though their numbers and economic power had grown enormously under European imperial rule. Even in the 1980s is was estimated that in Indonesia between 70 per cent and 75 per cent of private domestic capitol was owned by Chinese, who constituted less than 3 per cent of the population. In Malaysia Chinese made up 35 per cent of the population but owned 85 per cent of private domestic capitol. In Malaysia the Chinese were subjected to a major pogrom in 1969 and to a range of discriminatory polices whose declared aim was to reduce inequalities of wealth between the Malay and Chinese communities.
So long as empire appeared permanent and the British had no though of decolonisation, they not merely protected but also often favoured minorities. The Indianan and Chinese diasporas made a huge contribution to the empire's economy, above all to its modern, commercial and export sector. Some indigenous minorities made a disproportionate contribution to empire's administration and military power, sometimes because they had (or were perceived to have by the British) particular skills or qualities such as literacy or valour, sometimes because they were seen as more loyal than the local majority people. It is in the nature of empires to play divide-and-rule to some extent, just as it is also natural for minorities to look to the imperial power for protection against potentially dominant local peoples who may be ancestral rivals. The British did not create religious, ethnic and historical differences among their subjects: in cost cases they could not have erased them even had they tried. The practise of imperial rule did sometimes, however, sharpen ethnic and communal differences and tensions. So too inevitably did the approach of decolonisation, which often causes local majorities to clamour to regain full control of 'their' country and government, and minorities to fear exclusion.
The onset of decolonisation somewhat changed British perceptions and priorities. The main aim now was to avoid chaos, which would be bad for British prestige and self-esteem and would offend British officials' real sense of responsibility for the peoples and territories they governed. A stable successor regime had to be found which would as far as possible protect Britain's remaining strategic and economic interests, and would not go over to the Soviet side in the Cold war. Stability, British interests and even perhaps democracy all pointed towards doing a deal with the dominant local people and its elites. Pushing a defence of minority rights or interests too strongly would merely annoy the majority and harm the commitment to the majorities defence, which contradicted one of the key aims of decolonisation, which was precisely a reduction in Britain's worldwide commitments. In any case Britain's own constitution, an inevitable model for British officials, contained no bill of rights, no guarantees for minorities and no proportional representation.
To partition a colony between its peoples would probably infuriate the majority and would reverse a long tradition of trying to create large, economically viable and defensible units. It might well create terrible precedents for other colonies. Moreover, even if the geographical distribution of peoples made partition conceivable, it could very easily degenerate into hideous ethnic cleansing. A further basic point was that the closer decolonisation came, the less room for manoeuvre the British possessed. Native officials and soldiers could not be expected automatically to obey the orders of a departing imperial regime if faced by the opposition of their own people and of their own future political masters. In 1946-7 a major reason for getting out of India quickly was awareness that the Indian bureaucracy and army were no longer wholly reliable weapons in British hands given Britain's imminent departure and spiralling inter-ethnic and inter-communal tensions.
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| Crumbling British Building in Penang |
The history of decolonisation in South Asia illustrates many of these general points but it also showed how
very different the process was from colony to colony. The British had lost Burma to the Japanese in the Second World War. They returned it in 1945 anxious to restore the economy by a period of direct rule and to pay their debts to minority peoples who had often helped them greatly against the Japanese. It quickly became clear, however, that the Burmese majority and its elites controlled most of the levers of power. To dislodge them would only have been possible by the sort of military conquest which the Dutch attempted (and failed to achieve) in Indonesia between 1945 and 1949. Except in Malaya, where they had majority support, the British never attempted this kind of military effort after 1945. Burma was certainly not with such an investment. The colony was essentially abandoned without any effective safeguards for minority rights and without there even being a stable Burmese government to which power could be ceded. Civil was war the immediate and inevitable result. The armed struggle of some of the minorities against the government in Rangoon continues to this day.
The fate of India was far more important to British interests and prestige. By 1945-7 London would have preferred to hand over powers to an undivided Indian successor state. The Congress part was regarded as the best available guarantor of stability and was trusted to have at least relatively favourable attitude post-independence to Britain and her interests. The Congress would certainly oppose the Communist party, stamp on social revolution in the countryside, and keep its distance from Moscow. Having previously looked at the princely states as a possible counterforce to the Congress the British now abandoned them -in terms of Realpolitik quite rightly, since the largely Muslim princes and landed aristocrats were losing ground with every year as industrial and commercial development, a growing Hindu middle class, and the beginnings of mass electoral politics bit into their power. But neither London nor the Congress could impose Indian unity on the Muslim League once the latter had gained the support of the elites in the Muslim majority provinces. By 1946 London was in any case anxious to cut its commitments and be gone. Since it would no longer be ruling India it was Wholly unprepared to commit scores of thousands of troops and vast (and in 1946 non-existent) financial resources to imposing and policing a settlement. Competitive democratic party politics and the mobilisation of religious and communal feeling to gain support in elections greatly worsened tension between Hindus and Muslims in 1946-7. Impending British departure further heightened the tension. The sudden need to draw a new state frontier though territories that were historically united and lived in by Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs caused massacre and ethnic cleansing in Punjab on a vast scale.
Partition on religious and communal lines not only resulted in great immediate suffering but also created a new Pakistani state which was never viable in its post-independence form. Nearly a thousand miles of Indian territory separated East and West Pakistan. Islam was never likely to suffice to hold this state together in the face of geography and of the state's domination by the Punjab and its elite. East Bengal's revolt against rule by an alien Punjab state resulted in further massacres, war between India and Pakistan, and Bangladeshi (East Bengal) independence in 1971. Meanwhile, predictably, amidst the bitterness of communal violence and partition in 1947, conflict erupted between Pakistan and India over possessions of the border province of Kashmir. The province's status remains in dispute to this day and is a key factor in the acute hostility of India and Pakistan, both of which are now armed with nuclear weapons. In both Pakistan and India domestic party political and fears for domestic political stability feed into aggressive foreign and defence policies which could easily escalate into renewed war.
Decolonisation in Ceylon (Sri Lanka) was far more peaceful and orderly than in India or in Burma. There was to inter-communal violence, no whisper of partition and not even a very fervent independence movement. For eight years after independent Ceylon was run by established Sinhalese elites who dominated the United National Party and achieved a modus vivendi with their Tamil peers from the north of the island. With Ceylon there were roughly seven Sinhalese for every two Tamils in three years. The traditional centre of Tamil settlement was in the north. Before the Europeans arrived Ceylon consisted of three kingdoms, the northern one being Tamil and the other two Sinhalese. The island was finally united by the British in 1815.
Upon independence the Tamils inevitably feared Sinhalese domination. Politics within the Sinhalese community became competitive and democratic from the early 1950s. In 1956 the Sri Lanka Freedom Party won the elections on a programme of Sinhalese nationalism, which insisted among other things that the Sinhalese should be the sole language of government. Inevitably this radicalised Tamil opinion. SLFP policy caused Tamil protests in parliament, anti-Tamil pogroms, and a competition between the two Sinhalese parties for the mass nationalist vote. When S.W.R.D. Bandaranaike, the SLFP leader, tried to retreat from confrontation with the Tamils he was assassinated by extremist nationalists in his own camp. A subsequent effort by the United National Party to restore a modus vivendi with the Tamils after the victory in the 1965 elections also ended after violent Sinhalese riots and protests. The Tamil Tigers, the main Tamil armed resistance movement, was founded in 1976. By the early 1980s Tamil terrorism and the equally brutal response of Sri Lanka's overwhelmingly Sinhalese army had brought about a guerrilla war which killed 40,000 people in the north-eastern region of Sri Lanka alone in the years between 1987 and 1993.
Comparisons between the end of empire in India and in Ceylon are an unhappy reminder that although mayhem during decolonisation may lead to decades of subsequent violence and instability, its absence is no guarantee of later inter-ethnic peace. The history of Sri Lanka since independence is also a reminder that one cannot blame the imperial era and its heritage for all subsequent ills. A political system that allows one party, and therefore one people, undiluted power is extremely dangerous in any multinational society. Though conflict between peoples might have been less exacerbated and more repressed under empire's rule , it was also to some extent the product of a process of modernisation which began before the end of Britain's empire and continued after it. In most traditional societies different peoples can live in the countryside in relatively close proximity without having much to do with each other. Modern communications, trade and urbanisation reduce this isolation. In post-independence Sri Lanka as in nineteenth-century Bohemia modernisation has also meant mass education and battles over language and jobs, above all government jobs. In Sri Lanka 87 per cent literacy by 1981 made this a burning issue. There were acute competition for jobs among a newly literate younger generation in a country where half of all those in employment were paid by the state. Young men with some education in employment were paid by the state. Young men with some education but not too much proved excellent terrorists, especially when engaged in a desperate and fruitless struggle for government jobs. Young Sinhalese terrorist moved between armed revolutionary Trotskyism and radical anti-Tamil nationalism with disconcerting ease. Behind the radicalism and the inter-ethnic violence there also to some extent lay other problems common to the Third World, whether or not the countries concerned had passed through a period of imperial rule. These problems included poverty, very rapid population growth, and horrendous mismanagement f the economy by governments determined to use the country's wealth to buy clients, hang on to power and satisfy personal ends.
Further Reading:
Should anyone wish to explore this subject and the themes
highlighted here a little further, here are a few books which I used in compiling the
latest issue of 'After Empire' all of which I can recommend as useful and enjoyable:
The short and sweet introduction:
The British Empire, 1815-1914 (Access to History)
Good broad introductory reading:
Best and latest in historical debate on British
decolonisation:
) That failure, combined with the Shell Crisis of 1915, was to deal Kitchener's political reputation a heavy blow; Kitchener was popular with the public, so Asquith retained him in office in the new coalition government, but responsibility for munitions was moved to a new ministry headed by David Lloyd George. A week before his death, Kitchener confided to Lord Derby that he intended to press relentlessly for a peace of reconciliation with Germany, regardless of his position, when the war was over, as he feared that the politicians would make a bad peace.
, the best latest comprehensive biography.
, won screenwriter Charles G. Booth an Academy Award for the best original motion picture story in 1945.
