#51 1914-1945 The Unforeseen Consequences: The Collapse of the British Empire
Why Did the British Empire Collapse after 1945?
People still ask the question: why did the British Empire collapse? So often the answer comes back to the following:
The British Empire was too extended
They spread their resources too thinly
Britain alone could not face the German threat
India broke free of colonial rule
The uncontrolled expansion was sure to over-reach itself
These answers have been doing the rounds for 50 years or more. However, they illustrate a lack of coherent understanding of the dynamics of global industrialisation, how the British empire was managed, and they lack a sense of history or in-depth knowledge about the British Empire itself.
The British Empire in 1921.
The fall of the British Empire was unlike that of any of the ancient empires around the world that these blogs explained before in this series. Britain’s genius had been to prepare her social and political system for industrialisation by herself; she had removed the power of the monarchy, James 1st in1649, and managed to put aside ancient moral axioms around property and interest on money as illustrated in earlier blogs. But then at the height of her global reach at the start of the 19th century, she had entered two wars that undid all she had previously achieved in terms of power and wealth. By 1944, Britain's political economy was at such a low ebb that she handed over the keys of global power to the USA without a fight.
Global power is itself something extraordinary. It imbues those people who have experienced it with arrogance and self-confidence that is hard to exaggerate. First Britain, and then the USA, have behaved on the global stage as if their role as a world leader has been ordained by God. For Britain to give up her empire so easily in 1944, some devastating events had to have occurred.
It is important to understand just how important the Empire was to the British ruling cadres. We need to ask what they were willing to sacrifice to maintain the Empire. Britain had created world hegemony; would she stop at any point to defend it? Would she create chaos in Germany for these ends? This is a question that cannot be answered with clarity.
Losing global ascendancy and status as a 'Great Power' was a big deal by any standard. Britain’s world power position had taken centuries to obtain. The events that led to the collapse of the British Empire were catastrophic for almost everyone in Europe: two world wars and 20 years between near-total economic and international chaos. It is probably correct to argue that ever since Britain's ruling classes have never truly come to terms with the facts that she is only a smallish island in the North Atlantic. Still hugely wealthy by any historical standard of comparison, she has nonetheless moved back to where she began in the 1600s to being only a small island. How else can her Brexit behaviour be explained?
Britain’s Lost World Power
We need to explain how this loss of power occurred. Paul Kennedy's The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, published in 1988, is the best starting point. Kennedy's general conclusion is that empires sooner or later overreach their ability. The Rise and Fall is rightly considered a classic of its kind. The author handles understanding the complexity of this history with the similarities and differences of countries and empires. Regarding the position of so-called ‘Great Powers’, Kennedy argues that:
“…to be a great power - by definition a state capable of holding its own against other nations - demands flourishing economic base. In List's words, 'war or the very possibility of war makes the establishment of a manufacturing power an indispensable requirement for a nation of the first rank.... Yet by going to war, or by devoting a large share of the nations 'manufacturing power' to expenditures on 'unproductive' armaments', one runs the risk of eroding the national economic base...”
- Epilogue page 697
This argument is relevant to considering Britain’s loss of her empire and to what is occurring again to the USA in the 21st century.
From 1815 to 1870, the British Empire was the most powerful nation on earth. She stood as the established world power. Her bid for global power had been made in the 18th century: by 1815 victory allowed the country to luxuriate in the consequent half century of virtually unchallenged maritime and imperial pre-eminence. By 1900, Britain possessed the largest empire the world had ever seen, some 12 million square miles of land, and perhaps a quarter of the population of the globe. Since 1870, she had added 4.25 million square miles and 66 million people to her empire. At the time, Britain was the world’s colonial power bar none.
The indicators of British strength included increases in the royal navy, the unparalleled network of naval bases, largely island spread across the world; the largest merchant marine which was a part of being the largest trading nation worldwide; critical financial services through the City of London which included bankers, insurers, and commodity dealers. Britain had been the first country in the world to industrialise. It was this fact that had provided the resources for everything else. Her strength worldwide rested on a vibrant economy in advance of her competitors. She could not maintain her economic lead that ultimately led to her demise as the world’s leading power.
Britain Failed to keep her Place as Leading World Power
As we have already illustrated, Britain had a vibrant economy, but it was falling behind both Germany and the USA, which were growing faster. Britain had failed to educate her people beyond a small elite at private (so-called ‘public’) schools. She had failed to provide supports for her ailing urban poor. In all the key areas of manufacturing, she had failed to keep pace with the competitive economics of Germany. In a competitive economic environment, these failures were crucial.
The arguments that her resources were too thinly spread, or she was too extended, or that India broke free of colonial rule, might have been made at any time in the 19th century. The traditional view fails to grasp two key components of world power that have remained relevant to this day:
The nations of the world competed and had done so from the start of the race for wealth in the 16th and 17th centuries. Competition between nation-states was assumed to be part of the global system, always modified by statesmanship and diplomacy. Colonial competition was a given of the system.
The very essence of the industrial urban system was constant growth and regularly increasing wealth. How that wealth was shared has always been an area of deep debate. By 1870 a range of European societies had begun growing rapidly and were part of the capitalist world. It was inevitable that these new nation-states would initially grow rapidly: inevitable because growth and industrialisation were part of the new system of managing new capitalist societies; and that at least one would compete for world power.
Germany was only the first of the 'contender' states; the USSR followed after the 1917 revolution and China after their revolution, in 1949. The struggle for wealth was written into the possibilities and opportunities that industrialisation offered. The essence of industrialisation was the continuous growth of wealth from production. Go back to any society across the world before industrialisation and no one expected to be wealthier during their lifetime. Industrialisation was revolutionary for all societies that adopted this means of production. Every nation that was free to choose after 1945 wished for industrialisation.
The 1914/18 war was about the competition of the developing capitalist societies to control and own the resources and the wealth of the world. Those nations that had the power to keep the newly created wealth for themselves, and in the case of the 1914/18 war, to monopolise the raw material resources especially oil was bound to lead to violent conflict.
Britain’s Failure
The British rulers failed to understand the basic elemental character of the animal they had pioneered: industrialisation. They attempted to keep the new wealth for themselves, away from their own workers and to deny other nations, especially Germany, a share.
These blogs argue that Britain’s ruling classes, alongside the leading nations of Europe, were still thinking in 19th-century terms. They considered that the most powerful could deny the weaker the resources needed for industrialisation. J M Keynes had another way of saying something similar in 1918 when he published his famous volume, The Economic Consequences of the Peace:
"If the European civil war is to end with France and Italy abusing momentary victorious power to destroy Germany and Austria-Hungary now prostrate, they invite their own destruction also, being so deeply and inextricably intertwined with their victims by hidden psychic and economic bonds"
- page 6
"Their preoccupations, good and bad alike, related to frontiers and nationalities, to the balance of power, to imperial aggrandisement, to the future enfeeblement of a strong and dangerous enemy, to revenge and to the shifting by the victor of their unbearable financial burdens onto the shoulders of the defeated"
- page 29
Abusing victorious power, imperial aggrandisement, enfeebling a strong and dangerous enemy was all about arrogance and attempting to enfeeble Germany.
The British lost their empire because they had failed to comprehend the dynamic of the capitalist world they had created: that any ‘Great Power’ that did not attempt to share the growth of new wealth would sooner or later be overthrown by those who were willing to share.
At that time, the specifics that led to British enfeeblement included the economic chaos between 1918 and 1939, and of course indulgence in the two wars. These latter wars were of such magnitude that British people and rulers have failed ever since to come to terms with them and to take responsibility for the monster they had created. Instead, these wars are remembered as between 'the good and the bad'. Britain and America were on the good side, and Germany and Japan were bad.
The simplification of both wars through endless books, media, films and TV shows, has led to laying the blame on 'the other' side. For instance, we repeat, 'never again' as a synonym of high minded nationalism, without examining our part in both conflagrations. We fail our children and grandchildren in coming to terms with wars we were responsible for creating. We blame Hitler as a one-off experience of German evil; whereas, as these blogs will argue, Hitler as the leader of the German people was the outcome of someone who rose to lead his people out of a situation of intense suffering. Fascism thrived in a situation of poverty and hunger we helped to create. Britain lost her dominant position because she failed to understand the dynamics of war in the industrial age; she attempted to keep her wealth-creating machine for herself and to deny Germany.
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Ideology alone was of course not enough for Hitler to rise to power. The question remains: how was Hitler able to revive the German economy sufficiently to fight a global war in a mere six years? Hitler had taken political power in Germany in 1933. Once this question has been asked, the direction of the answer is obvious: the German economy would have to be supported by the great powers, France, Britain or America; there was no other way.