Ronald Hyam - Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968

Britains Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 19181968

Britains Declining Empire is an authoritative political history of one of the worlds most important empires on the road to decolonisation. Ronald Hyam offers a major reassessment of the end of empire which combines a study of British policy-making with case studies on the experience of decolonisation across Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. He describes the often dysfunctional policies of an imperial system coping with postwar, interwar, and wartime crises from 1918 to 1945 but the main emphasis is on the period after 1945 and the gradual unravelling of empire as a result of international criticism and of the growing imbalance between Britains capabilities and its global commitments. He analyses the transfers of power from India in 1947 to Swaziland in 1968, the major crises such as Mau Mau and Suez, and assesses the role of leading figures from Churchill, Attlee, and Eden to Macmillan and Wilson. This is essential reading for scholars and students of empire and decolonisation.

RONALD HYAM is Emeritus Reader in British Imperial History at the University of Cambridge, and a Fellow and former President of Magdalene College. He is the author of several books on the British Empire, including most recently (with Peter Henshaw) The Lion and the Springbok: Britain and South Africa since the Boer War (Cambridge, 2003).

The Viceroys Palace, New Delhi, designed by Sir Edwin Lutyens

Ronald Hyam

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Ronald Hyam 2006

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First published 2006 Reprinted 2008

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Illustrations

Acknowledgements: Royal Commonwealth Society Photographic Collection, by permission of the Syndics of the Cambridge University Library, including mostly Crown Copyright pictures, by permission of the Controller of HM Stationery Office (1.2, 2.12.3, 3.1, 3.3, 4.14.8); Associated Press (5.1); Swaziland Information Service (5.2); Magdalene College Archives (1.1, 3.2), by permission of the Master and Fellows.

Dismantling the wardrobe

The house-clearance people refused to take my parents huge wardrobe. So I set about breaking it up before burning it. The job was much harder than I expected. A good friend of mine, who knows a thing or two about furniture-making, later commented that of course dismantling a wardrobe is not easy the secret is to know how it was put together. Something I had not known. It struck me that he was making an essential point not just about pulling a wardrobe to pieces, but about my field of study: that you cannot properly understand the dismantling of the British empire unless you know how it was constructed. Explanations of end and decline must show a continuity and congruence with the beginnings and the heyday, the dynamics of empire-building and the principles of imperial management. The empire is itself to be defined by the manner of its dismantling.

Although this book takes up more or less where Britains imperial century, 18151914 leaves off, it is a sequel with a different character, focused more upon a single theme, the end of empire in its political aspects. And it is more closely based on archival research. In a sense it is the finished product: Britains imperial century can be regarded as the users handbook.

There are already many books on the general theme of the decline, fall, eclipse, end, liquidation, collapse, dissolution, or decolonisation of the British empire. The main excuse for this one is that we now have before us the massive documentation of several major projects operating between 1970 and 2005: the Transfer of Power series for India (TOPI: twelve volumes) and for Burma (BSI: two volumes), the British Documents on the End of Empire Project (BDEEP: to be completed in eighteen volumes in thirty-eight parts),

The emphasis here is on the twenty years or so after the Second World War, but a scene-setting introduction and the first chapter aim to give draws heavily on my introduction to The Conservative government and the end of empire, 19571964 , published in 2000, but now out of print. The political and constitutional (but not the economic) sections of its editorial commentary are mostly reproduced here, with additional material on Nigeria and on the departure of South Africa from the Commonwealth. The notes to it have been comprehensively revised and extended. Finally, an epilogue provides a kind of de-briefing.

Historians have offered four main options for explaining the end of empire. These may be put in the form of a cricketing analogy. Either the British were bowled out (by nationalists and freedom-fighters), or they were run out (by imperial over-stretch and economic constraints), or they retired hurt (because of a collapse of morale and failure of will), or they were booed off the field (by international criticism and especially United Nations clamour). Except for unregenerate Marxists and nationalist patriots, few historians think the violent assaults of freedom-fighters were decisive or can provide a sufficient overall explanation of imperial retreat. Equally, however, few would try to write out entirely nationalist protest in the broader sense. After all, not many states got independence without asking for it. The important question perhaps is how the British government arrived at the point where they were prepared to open the door to whoever knocked. Plainly, it would be silly to ignore the implications of scarce resources and the continuing metropolitan need for financial economies. Although this motive was not much in evidence for African territories, it clearly was influential in Cyprus, in Malaysia, in the West Indies, and ultimately East-of-Suez, where policy was driven by the requirement for military and other cut-backs. Failure of will is perhaps the weakest of the explanations; some historians even postulate periods of revival for the imperial dream. More persuasive is the theory that international pressures and constraints were highly significant, even if not operating uniformly.