Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970
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475 / Holding the centre, 1927–1937
deeply disturbing. The rise of India’s mass politics had been a political
shock. The surge of new ideologies on the Left and the Right had unset-
tled old loyalties. The aggressive ambitions of the ‘revisionist’ powers
exposed the weakness and confusion of the guardians of world order.
But (except to ideologues and visionaries) it was hard to determine the
collective significance of these unwelcome developments. Indeed, it was
only in the late 1930s, from 1937 onwards, that the pattern became
clearer, and their meaning more ominous. Even then, as we will see, it
took a strategic catastrophe to inflict irreversible damage.
In the meantime, even the most hard-headed of realists might
have hesitated to write the British system’s obituary. In the more
‘British’ dominions, there might be impatience with London’s zigzag
foreign policy, but the sense of British community remained deeply
entrenched, with the common Crown as its focus. The coronation of
King George VI in 1937 was covered in Canada by twenty-three hours
of continuous broadcasting.
209
In India, the Congress had abandoned
mass agitation and settled for the constitutional politics in which the
British had been trying to entrap it for more than a decade. In much
of the ‘tropical’ empire, the adoption of indirect rule had anaesthetised
politics. Nor was it obvious that there was any escape from the grip
of the City on its ‘dominions of debt’: the economic obligations that
bound so many producers to the market in London and to dealing in
sterling. British expansion might have come to an end, and a form of
stalemate set in across the colonial dependencies. But in a fragmenting
world it was not unrealistic to expect that the British ‘bloc’ might hold
the balance of economic and geopolitical power for an indefinite time.
If history was a guide, it would outlast its parvenu rivals. But history
was not.
11
THE STRATEGIC ABYSS, 1937–1942
At the beginning of 1937, Britain was the only global power with
interests in every continent and, in theory, the means to defend them.
The British system was a close approximation to a world empire. Its
prestige had been dented by recent events, and its wealth diminished
by depression. But no other great power could match its combination
of military (mainly naval) and economic strength or its latent ability
to coerce its enemies. The intimidating scale of its territorial extent,
including its self-governing member states and colonial possessions,
made it hard to imagine the ultimate defeat of such a global leviathan.
Indeed, life outside the limits of empire seemed scarcely conceivable to
the sturdiest nationalist – at least as a realistic prospect in the foreseeable
future. In what was still an imperial world across much of Afro-Asia,
there were few free places on the map.
But empires can disintegrate with astonishing speed. The col-
lapse of the Soviet empire at the end of the 1980s took almost everyone
by surprise, not least the school who had proclaimed the imminent
decline of American power. In the British case, the change was almost
as sudden. By the middle of 1942, Britain, the imperial centre, was
effectively bankrupt and dependent upon American aid. With the fall of
Singapore in February, the invasion of Burma, and the German advance
into Egypt (the battle of Alamein was fought scarcely 100 miles from
Cairo), the British system looked set to collapse. Its precarious survival
and the eventual victory of 1945 were a tribute to its residual strength,
but not the sign of a full recovery. The post-war empire was a pale
shadow of its former self. The cohesion of its constituent parts had
been badly damaged. Much of its wealth had been lost or redistributed.
By 1968, the last vestige of its world power status had vanished.
477 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942
Revolution and Empire
It is commonplace to attribute this dramatic descent to the overex-
tension of imperial power, the final cause in Gibbon’s account of the
decline of Rome. At best this is a truism, at worst a tautology. The
British system was sustained not by the unique resources of Imperial
Britain, but by a combination of elements not so much ruled as man-
aged from London. It is the failure of the combination that needs to
be explained. A more serious objection to the ‘overstretch’ explanation
is its determinism – as if the downfall of the British system was an
inevitable outcome which contemporaries were too blinkered to see for
themselves. Of course, the British system broke up because it lacked
the resources to overwhelm its enemies. But that is only half the story.
No less important was the fact that the struggle to survive was waged
in an age of revolution: a Eurasian revolution that cumulatively (but
very quickly) destroyed almost all the global preconditions on which
the British system had depended since the 1830s.
It is arguable that the roots of this revolution lay in the very
changes from which the British had profited so much in the past: the
gradual integration of the world’s politics and economics into a uni-
versal system. As the world became a single market, and more and
more of its regions came to depend upon international trade, com-
mercial rivalry had become more intense. The strains of economic
transformation were felt more deeply; the threat posed by commer-
cial disruption to social stability became more obvious. At the same
time, the ‘globalising’ climate in trade and diplomacy intensified the
trend towards competitive state-building, since only well-organised
states could secure social order, economic development and interna-
tional sovereignty. Partly because of the easier diffusion of ideas and
values across districts, countries and continents that technology made
possible, socio-economic change and state-construction provoked rival
forms of cultural mobilisation: to make states or break them; to build
new communities, or refurbish old ones. Ethnic nationalism became
the secret weapon of modernising states, and also a potent means of
subverting them.
Before 1914, these sources of tension in world affairs had been
eased by three countervailing influences. First, the rapid growth of
international trade softened the impact of economic competition and
478 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
enhanced the appeal of the open economy. Secondly, the political struc-
tures that had grown up since the 1870s survived the stresses of external
rivalry and internal revolt. The European great powers who had par-
titioned so much of the world had settled their differences peacefully
if grudgingly. Partly for ideological reasons (a shared conceit about
their civilising mission), partly from self-interest, they showed little
desire (though some) to stir up trouble in each others’ empires. Despite
alliance systems, war plans and mobilisation timetables, they preferred
to rattle their sabres rather than use them. Thirdly, the conservative
elites who retained their grip over the dynastic empires of East and
Central Europe had kept in hand the ethnic nationalisms that threat-
ened the stability of the European states-system. The result had been
not a durable peace but an uneasy equilibrium whose fragility was
eventually revealed in the July Crisis of 1914. In the four years that
followed, much of Old Europe’s political architecture was abandoned
or destroyed. As the war reached its climax in 1917–18, it seemed as if
the progressive collapse of political, social and economic order would
spread a revolution across Europe and ignite a revolt of the subalterns
in the colonial lands beyond. If this terrifying prospect had receded by
the mid-1920s, as we saw in the last chapter, it did not vanish for long.
The peace of the 1920s was the prelude to a revolutionary age, although
it was not until the mid-1930s that its full global meaning had begun
to emerge and the prospect of ‘holding the centre’ grew increasingly
faint.
The revolution of the 1930s was the overthrow of the inter-
national regime so laboriously reconstructed between 1919 and 1925.
Economic in origin, the revolution was systemic in scope, affecting
almost every aspect of international order. Its most obvious dimension
was in geopolitics. After 1930, the ‘weak’ powers became strong and the
‘strong’ powers weaker. Less than three years after Hitler’s accession
to power in January 1933, Germany had repudiated the terms of the
Versailles treaty and began to create a great-power army, an air force
and a modern navy one-third as large as Britain’s. By reoccupying the
Rhineland in 1936, and building the ‘West Wall’ (the ‘Siegfried Line’),
Hitler made Germany far less vulnerable to an attack from France,
and much freer to pursue his designs in the East. The German revolt
against Versailles had been closely followed by Italy’s. Although Italy
was the weakest of the three European victor powers of 1919,her
479 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942
strategic position bisecting the Mediterranean, fear of her air power,
and the new alignment between Rome and Berlin (the ‘axis’ of Novem-
ber 1936) created a new military balance in the Mediterranean Sea. The
third great change was the growing might of the Soviet Union. Amid
the gross upheavals of collectivisation after 1928, rapid industrialisa-
tion, the Stalinist terror and the purges (which had led to the murder of
some 40,000 officers in the Soviet army by 1938), the Soviet Union had
become a great military and industrial power whose military spending
ranked second only to that of Germany.
1
The rise of Stalin’s state held
a profound significance for the successor states of Eastern Europe, for
East Asia, and above all for Nazi Germany.
The growth of Soviet power was the link that connected
East Asia to Europe. It helped to provoke the Japanese conquest of
Manchuria and the rapid dissolution of the Washington regime. After
1931, much of North China was caught up in the escalation of Soviet–
Japanese rivalry.
2
Japan’s military intervention in Shanghai (1932)and
the attack on the Kuomintang government’s authority in the northern
provinces presaged the drastic remaking of East Asia’s political geogra-
phy. In 1935–6, Tokyo’s search for allies against the Soviet Union led
to closer relations with Germany, and then to the Anti-Comintern Pact
of November 1936. When the Sino-Japanese War broke out in earnest
in July 1937, and Japanese control extended remorselessly over China’s
coastal regions (Hangkow and Canton were occupied in October 1938),
the political revolution in East Asia was all but complete. There, as in
Europe, the champions of the post-war settlement seemed weak and
divided, reluctant to challenge the revisionist powers, let alone to match
their military power. For all the fragility of its industrial base (carefully
noted in London), Japan’s military spending between 1933 and 1938
exceeded that of Britain or America.
3
The revolt against the geopolitical order was also a revolt
against liberal capitalism and its two great centres in London and New
York.
4
By the mid-1930s, a new world economy had emerged, bring-
ing a drastic reversal of the post-war ‘normality’ of the late 1920s.
Commercial liberalism was replaced by economic nationalism. Almost
every state had built a wall of controls to reduce its exposure to exter-
nal pressures – trade competition, capital movements and currency
fluctuations – and the domestic unrest that followed closely behind.
Instead of the old multilateral pattern, which allowed export earnings
480 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
from one country to be spent in another, and paid for in freely con-
vertible gold-backed currencies, world trade was more and more seg-
mented into blocs that discriminated against each other by tariffs or
exchange controls: the sterling area, the dollar bloc, the gold bloc,
the Soviet world, the German sphere,
5
the Japanese empire.
6
It was
widely assumed that, as a proportion of output, international trade
was bound to decrease and all economies become more and more self-
sufficient.
7
In abstract principle, as one contemporary noted, the drift
towards autarky might be expected to reduce economic friction. But
only in theory, since autarky sharpened the difference in living stan-
dards between the less well endowed and their more fortunate neigh-
bours, and increased the incentive to bring economic resources under
political control.
8
Worse still, by trapping the producers of primary
products within a single bloc, it lowered their prices, reduced their pur-
chases, restricted their growth and dried up investment.
9
In the brave
new world of declining trade, there would be less and less scope for the
globe-wide trade in services, shipping and capital on which Britain had
waxed fat in the recent past.
The third great mine to explode beneath the liberal order was
the violent escalation of ideological warfare. The conflict of ideas was
itself nothing new. What made the 1930s an ideological battleground
was the widespread fear of catastrophic change. The political appeal
of revolutionary Marxism, somewhat muted by the late 1920s, was
hugely inflated by the visible signs of the collapse of capitalism. To
anti-communist parties, interests and opinion, the massive scale of the
social crisis required an urgent riposte to the Marxist challenge. The
new mass media, their assumed domination over mass opinion, and
the comparative novelty of democratic politics in Europe and East Asia
(Japan adopted universal manhood suffrage in 1925) made the war of
ideas (or slogans) the vital front in the political struggle. But there was
no grand alliance against the communist threat. The striking feature
of the European scene was the ferocity with which the anti-communist
ideologues of fascism and Nazism attacked ‘bourgeois’ liberalism as
decadent and corrupt, and parliamentary government as an obsolete
sham.
10
On Europe’s imperial periphery, the devastating impact of the
economic crisis on agrarian communities, and similar fears of social
catastrophe, exposed colonial and semi-colonial regimes to a rhetorical
onslaught from both Marxists and nationalists.
481 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942
Ideological warfare had a seismic effect on international pol-
itics. It turned diplomatic differences into wars of manoeuvre and
territorial disputes into set-piece campaigns. To the ideological war-
riors of the 1930s, secret diplomacy and the squaring of interests in
smoke-filled rooms were as repellent as they had been to the most ide-
alistic Wilsonian. In the crowded cockpit of European diplomacy, the
three-way split between fascist, liberal and Marxist governments made a
firm coalition against aggressor powers impossibly difficult. Ideological
‘programming’ brought a widening gulf in the language and assump-
tions of national leaders and governments. As the tensions increased,
the fog of incomprehension grew thicker. The familiar landscape of
great-power diplomacy disappeared in the mist. Negotiation in the era
of ideological war became a journey without maps.
The cumulative effect of this triple assault on the post-war order
was the rapid erosion of its perceived legitimacy – perhaps the most
insidious influence on the decade’s diplomacy. After 1930, it seemed
more obvious than ever that the humiliating treatment handed out to
Germany in 1919, and the attempt to deny her a great-power status,
were unjust and unwise. As the value of empires rose in a world of
trading ‘blocs’, it became harder to deny the imperial claims of ‘civilised’
states like Germany, Italy and Japan. It became commonplace to speak
of ‘have-not powers’ whose unequal share of international wealth was
widely seen as the primary source of international tension. But it was
one thing to acknowledge that legitimacy was lacking in international
politics, quite another to find ways of repairing the deficit. Almost
everything conspired against a new equilibrium. It was hardly surprising
that the effort to agree on a revised post-war settlement in Europe
and East Asia should have come to nothing. Instead, the pressures
of geopolitical ambition, economic crisis and ideological struggle had
created a revolution in the making in Europe and East Asia by the
later 1930s. At opposite ends of the Old World, new imperialisms had
emerged that were far more powerful than those of fifty years earlier
and much more disruptive of the existing order. Far from being confined
to a remote periphery, they concerned the fate of Eurasia’s heartlands.
Far from being restrained by the European balance of power, they
rejected its claims and aimed to destroy it. Far from doubting the value
of new colonial possessions, they treated territorial expansion as the
key to survival. And, since the world was already partitioned between
482 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
sovereign states and established empires, this new imperialism meant
the forcible overthrow, by war or coercion, of the existing pattern of
international property.
Dilemmas of containment
With the advantage of hindsight, we can see that the revolutionary
crisis of the 1930s was dissolving the Eurasian preconditions of British
imperialism. The peculiar evolution of the British system, and the secret
of its viability, had depended upon two vital corollaries. First, that a
strategic balance would prevail in Europe, precluding a single conti-
nental empire in West Eurasia. Secondly, that East Asia would remain
‘passive’, more acted upon than acting, confined within its regional
bounds, with its sea communications under foreign control. It had
been these conditions that had allowed the British to push their lightly
defended bridgeheads of trade and settlement into the Asia-Pacific, to
concede self-rule to their settler colonies without a levy for external
defence, and to construct their extraordinary Indian Raj. Only under
conditions of exceptional stability in Europe could they have dared to
keep so much of their army so many weeks away in their Indian gar-
risons. It was those garrisons that (in the last resort) had secured their
claim on India’s resources to help build a secondary ‘Anglo-Indian’
empire in Afro-Asia.
British public attitudes towards the defence of empire and of
Britain’s world interests were complex and ambivalent. On the one
hand, there was after 1930 a widespread revulsion against the thought
of war. On the other, except among a very small minority, there was
no sign of revolt against the imperial system or the commitments it
imposed. The key assumptions of the late-Victorian outlook were still
in place. Indeed, their persistence may help to explain why the imperial
system was so rarely discussed as a dispensable burden, or as an entity
separate from the British Isles. Despite the rise of American power,
it was still widely thought that Britain held the ‘central place’ in the
world economy. She remained after all the world’s greatest trader and
investor, with the most diverse portfolio and the largest business net-
work. The economics of sea transport and the flow of communications
still worked in her favour. In geopolitical terms, this centrality meant
an intermediate position between Continental Eurasia and the Outer
483 / The strategic abyss, 1937–1942
World. In the early 1930s, the benefits of this had seemed more obvious
than ever. In the Home Islands, the Middle East and India, the British
held forward bases from which to intervene in the Continental world,
but without becoming part of it. This was the crucial advantage. To be
wholly in the Outer World (like the United States) without purchase
in Eurasia, was to risk commercial exclusion from the wealthiest and
most populated parts of the globe. Without any influence in Continen-
tal politics, an Outer power might find the Old World unified against
it, driving it into defensive isolation, or threatening it with encirclement
and attrition.
11
A purely Continental power, by contrast, was forced
into constant territorial rivalry. Its frontiers were always at risk. The
fixed costs of its defence were always high. Access to the Outer World
was always in doubt. The scope for political and economic freedom
was narrow, impeding its economic and social development. But the
intermediate power – Britain – had the best of both worlds. It was less
exposed to territorial friction. It was hard to isolate and even harder to
encircle. It could draw on the products of the Outer World and deny
them to the Continent. And, with a modicum of luck or skill, it could
ensure that no Continental combination could be formed against it –
or, if formed, last long.
These assumptions about Britain’s special trajectory in world
affairs – what we might call ‘British exceptionalism’ – meant that main-
stream opinion had been remarkably sanguine that the progressive
devolution of political power to the white dominions, India, the Middle
Eastern states and, ultimately, perhaps, the other divisions of the British
system, would not destroy its ‘natural’ cohesion. It assumed that, under
almost all imaginable conditions, membership of Britain’s imperial
association would be far more attractive than the status of client to
a Continental power or a notably indifferent United States. For small
or weak states in the modern world, isolation was a mere delusion. Even
in India, where anti-colonial nationalism was fiercest in the 1930s, the
British expected a new generation of political leaders to turn its back on
Gandhi’s atavistic utopia once real self-government came into sight.
12
For India’s self-interest, whether strategic or commercial, was bound to
tie it to the maritime world that the British had made, not to Inner or
East Asia. Autarkic self-sufficiency (as the sub-continent’s whole history
seemed to prove) was out of the question.
13
This passive imperialism of
the status quo coexisted amicably with public attachment to the League
of Nations as the guarantor of international peace, and with faith in
484 / ‘The great liner is sinking’
‘collective security’ as the most effective deterrent against a would-
be aggressor. When the Baldwin government seemed on the verge of
betraying the collective principle it had so recently endorsed (in the gen-
eral election of 1935) by agreeing to the dismemberment of Ethiopia,
public outcry forced it to repudiate the Hoare–Laval pact (the offer to
Italy) and sacrifice Hoare as Foreign Secretary. Public fear of involve-
ment in war (fuelled by scares over mass slaughter from bombing)
made the rearmament programme a delicate issue. The British people,
Churchill warned in April 1936, would reject rearmament ‘except as
part of the League policy’.
14
But, as the limitations of the League were
brutally revealed by the fall of Ethiopia, and the threat from Germany
became more explicit, this consensus broke down. An influential section
remained fiercely opposed to the use of force. The veteran campaigner,
Norman Angell, led those who urged a tougher response to interna-
tional aggression in a reconstructed League modelled upon a devolved
democratic British Empire–Commonwealth.
15
There remained a wide
measure of public agreement that the Versailles settlement was unjust
and unworkable, and must be revised by ‘peaceful change’; and a corre-
sponding antipathy to Britain’s involvement in a continental war aimed
at propping it up. Imperial isolationists (the target of Angell’s criticism)
sought to square the circle. Lord Lothian, Leo Amery and Edward Grigg
(all former Milnerites), and The Observer’s editor, J. L. Garvin, wanted
to bind the Empire together as a cohesive bloc and limit any continen-
tal commitment to the barest minimum for Britain’s home defence.
16
They saw little objection to a German advance into Eastern Europe if
it served to promote an Anglo-German d
´
etente. ‘Realist’ appeasement
was even blunter. Its public champion was E. H. Carr, ex-diplomat,
polemicist and a pioneering professor of international relations. Carr
treated collective security as a utopian fantasy and turned a ruthless eye
on Britain’s international weakness. Restoring equilibrium to the inter-
national system required peaceful concession to the have-not powers –
a view that led him to approve of the outcome of Munich.
17
The most subtle exponent of British grand strategy in the 1930s
was Basil Liddell Hart, the leading writer on the theory of war. His
main achievement was to reconcile the contradictions in British pub-
lic opinion: horror at the prospect of another ‘great war’; confidence
in Britain’s ‘manifest destiny’ as a global power. He denounced the
continental campaigns of the First World War as a disastrous depar-
ture from Britain’s ‘historic strategy’. The ‘British way of warfare’, he