Darwin J. The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970

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Map 11 TheMiddleEastin1945

536 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

that Stalin would not revive the designs on the Straits and North Persia,

that he had already revealed, once British power was withdrawn. The

Chiefs of Staff were incredulous at Attlee’s ‘naivety’; Bevin’s answer

was lapidary, almost Curzonian. He dismissed Attlee’s suggestion that

withdrawal from the Middle East would assuage Russian aggression:

‘It would be Munich over again, only on a world scale, with Greece,

Turkey and Persia as the victims in place of Czechoslovakia . . . Russia

would certainly ﬁll the gap we leave empty, whatever her promises.’

It would wreck Britain’s relations with the United States, on whose

aid Britain depended, and whose leaders had just been persuaded that

American interests, like those of Britain, required the Middle East to

be held. ‘If we now withdraw at this moment, I should expect them to

write us off entirely.’ Nor was the Middle East economically valueless:

it was worth £100 million to Britain ‘and possibly a great difference in

our future dollar earnings’. Indeed, the Middle East might take India’s

place as an economic partner for Britain. If, instead, Britain left, hard

on the heels of its departure from India, it ‘would appear to the world

as the abdication of our position as a world power’. India would move

towards Russia; ‘the effect on the Dominions would be incalculable.’

Here was the case, cast in oracular terms, that Britain’s survival as

a power in the world now hinged – in the geopolitical conditions

that Soviet advance had created – on this dangerous salient in Middle

Eurasia.

Ironically, Attlee’s reluctant endorsement of the Middle East

policy occurred on the eve of the annus horribilis, the year in which

British world power seemed less real than the threat of ﬁnancial and

political bankruptcy. A terrible winter brought on a fuel crisis and dam-

aged the export drive (to raise British earnings by 50 per cent above

the pre-war level) on which hopes of recovery were pinned. The Amer-

ican loan was being quickly used up. In March 1947, Stafford Cripps,

the avenging angel of socialism, forecast a long period of austerity.

In July 1947, under the terms of the Anglo-American loan, holders of

sterling could convert their pounds into dollars. The result was disas-

trous. Britain’s dollar reserves, already depleted by the cost of Ameri-

can imports, sank like a stone. Faced with sterling’s collapse, London

abruptly suspended convertibility on 20 August. Rations of petrol and

food were reduced, and potatoes joined the list of rationed supplies. The

Cabinet agonised over how many men could be spared from the civilian

economy, how large the army should be and how long those ‘called up’

537 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

should serve in the armed forces. At Dalton’s insistence, the provision of

aid to Turkey and Greece had already been scrapped: this was the bur-

den that the United States now assumed under the ‘Truman Doctrine’

promising help to those states fearful of Soviet aggression. Against this

background of deepening economic gloom, the government faced an

impasse in its effort to ease India into an agreed independence. With no

sign of a compromise between the Congress and the League, growing

communal friction and rising anxiety that the British in India would be

caught up in a storm of political violence, panic in London began to set

in. The Cabinet Mission had failed. Attlee and his colleagues rejected

the Viceroy, Lord Wavell’s, ‘breakdown plan’ (a staged withdrawal to

the Indian ports, handing power over province by province) as a recipe

for turmoil, but had no plan of their own. The sacking of Wavell and

the choice of Mountbatten were acts of inspired desperation. But Attlee

was forced to give Mountbatten a virtual free hand to decide on the

timing and settle the manner of Britain’s departure. Mountbatten was

lucky. His arrival in India in March 1947 coincided with the grudging

recognition in the Congress that, without an early transfer of power,

and agreement on partition, the spiral of communal violence would

destroy their authority over the Indian masses as much as that of the

British. This was the chink through which Mountbatten would drive

with ruthless diplomacy to impose partitioned independence in August

1947.

The late summer of 1947 erased any lingering hope that Britain

would quickly regain the substance of its world position before the

catastrophe of 1940. A further turn of the screw was the rapid deterio-

ration of the situation in Palestine. Here the British had struggled to ﬁnd

a settlement acceptable to both Arabs and Jews whilst also reserving an

enclave of their own – in the event of withdrawal from their Canal Zone

bases. There was no question of stopping further Jewish immigration

or preserving Palestine as an Arab-majority state – the ‘solution’ envis-

aged in 1939. That was ruled out by American disapproval, and the

growing intensity of Zionist terrorism, against which the large British

garrison seemed poorly equipped. Even after the bombing of the King

David Hotel in July 1946 – aimed at the heart of the British mandate

administration – the Cabinet rejected the repression of Jewish organisa-

tions for fear of American anger.

Instead, the British found themselves

drifting into the worst of all worlds: as the unwilling executants of a

territorial partition fashioned in New York by the United Nations, but

538 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

whose real sponsor was the United States. The likely costs of this role

for Britain’s relations with the Arab states, at precisely the moment

when the terms of their post-war alliances were being redeﬁned, were

regarded in London with horror. The only solution, it came to appear,

was an ignominious departure, without even the ﬁg leaf of an ordered

transition, leaving the ﬁeld to the local contestants and the war that

followed.

For an imperial system that laid so much stress on the pres-

tige of its rule, and which depended so much on its claim to embody

public order and justice, the events of 1947 were especially damag-

ing. London’s authority – among its ‘subordinate’ allies (like Egypt or

Jordan), its dominion ‘partners’, as well as its colonial subjects (who

enjoyed very varying degrees of local self-rule) – was a function in part

of local opinion. The appearance of strength, the assertion of will, and

the promise of rewards to bestow, were the often invisible strings with

which the British had tied their ramshackle system together. The ‘illu-

sion of permanence’ – that, in any future world order, British power

would loom large – was a vital constraint on the colonial temptation

to ﬂout London’s wishes too rudely. It did not require a Cassandra

to wonder in late 1947 whether the spell had been broken. It seemed

after all that the disasters that the British had suffered between 1940

and 1942 could not be repaired. They might have hoped that victory

would restore the European balance, with the Soviet Union as the great

guarantor against a new Hitler. But, without a European peace, their

domestic security looked increasingly fraught. Their commercial empire

was crippled by weakness and what seemed like hopeless mismanage-

ment. India as an asset was ﬁnally gone. Their Middle East clients

were in open revolt. The dominions resisted commitment to ‘imperial

defence’, doubted London’s dire warnings about Soviet intentions, and

declined London’s anxious request to write down their sterling claims

by up to 50 per cent.

What remained of the Empire might yield wind-

fall gains, but it was a patchwork of colonies, some undeveloped, some

under-governed, and some (like Malaya) barely recovered from foreign

occupation.

This was a gloomy prospectus, but, as it turned out, unrealis-

tically gloomy. The British world-system did not implode. The politi-

cians in London may have resented its costs but they could not imagine

a post-imperial future. They were spared the need for a drastic rethink.

Grim as they looked, the pressures they faced were not unremitting.

539 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

The geopolitical position did not become critical. In Europe and the

Middle East, the Soviet Union was cautious. The British were not driven

back – in the way that Attlee had feared – to the strategic periphery.

Their uncertain defences were not seriously tested. Crucially, too, their

default on the loan agreement was accepted without too much ran-

cour in Washington.

The Truman administration acknowledged the

need to keep Britain solvent, and ideally strong, as the best ally it had

against Soviet expansion. The offer of help had already been mooted

in the famous speech of George Marshall, the Secretary of State, on

5 June 1947 which sketched out what became the European Recovery

Programme. So the British were allowed to seal off the sterling econ-

omy from American competition, to discriminate heavily against dollar

goods, to keep ‘imperial preference’ and put off the day when the pound

was exchanged freely for dollars – precisely those things that Ameri-

can leaders had been so determined to crush eighteen months earlier.

Their departure from India had been swift and involuntary but not

catastrophic. Both Nehru and Jinnah had been pragmatically willing

to accept independence as dominions and not to demand a republic.

The transfer of power was thus a constitutional pageant, performed in

London through an Act of Parliament, the Indian Independence Act,

as well as in India. It allowed Attlee to claim that the end of the Raj

was the triumphant completion of a long-matured plan to give the

Indians self-government, a pleasing if transparent ﬁction. It also held

out some hope that the two new dominions would be Britain’s part-

ners across Southern Asia, balancing the new international weight that

China (under Kuomintang rule) was expected to have. In the Middle

East, for all the difﬁculties faced by the British in securing fresh treaties

with their key Arab allies (a proposed treaty with Iraq collapsed in the

face of a popular outburst, the so-called Wathbah), there was as yet

little sign that nationalism was a strong enough glue to unify Britain’s

opponents and break down the suspicions that divided parties and fac-

tions. Among the dominions, Britain’s staunchest allies in the Second

World War, impatience with British imperial attitudes and the desire

to assert their own regional claims modulated gradually into a growing

unease at the scale of American power, and a stark realisation (among

the sterling dominions) that their economic survival was closely tied up

with Britain’s recovery and the fate of the pound.

Much of the ﬂexibility that British leaders had hoped to enjoy

in the war’s aftermath had faded away. But the crucial fact was that the

540 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

scope for an empire had not disappeared. The seismic shift in American

policy meant that Britain’s importance as an imperial ally had been

grasped in Washington, as well as the need to support its imperial

claims, for the time being at least. In a war-shattered world, the sterling

economies also accounted for around half of world trade. For all the

irritation that London’s breach of faith had caused on the other side

of the Atlantic, this was too large an egg to think of killing the goose.

The sterling area had to be given a last-minute reprieve. Nor so far had

there been any great revulsion of sentiment in Britain itself against the

burden of empire, felt most directly in the prolonging of conscription,

abandoned precipitately after the First World War. ‘One should not

overlook the resurgence of nationalism which is characteristic of this

country in its post-war mood’, remarked one thoughtful observer.

It reﬂected not only the conﬁdence that victory had brought but also

acceptance that, for both better (social reform) and worse (austerity),

there would be no return to a pre-war ‘normality’. No major voice had

called for a general withdrawal from overseas commitments – perhaps a

measure of how far the Churchillian idea of Britain’s place in the world

(if not Churchill himself) ruled the political realm (a strong case could

be made that it shaped public attitudes to Britain in the white dominions

as well). Finally, the British had also begun to equip themselves for the

next age of warfare. By early 1947, the decision had been taken to build

an atomic weapon that would deter the most powerful assailant. When

that was in place – a ten-year wait was envisaged – Britain’s scientiﬁc

prowess, hugely developed by the stress of war, could be mobilised fully

behind her claim to world power.

In this brave new world of unforeseen fears, the Labour gov-

ernment shufﬂed uneasily, with American and dominion help, towards

a new version of empire, with a new ideology, a new geostrategy, and

an all-but-new economic system. This we might call the fourth (and

last) British Empire.

The fourth British Empire

There was, of course, nothing that resembled an imperial programme,

still less an announcement that Britain had embarked upon a new phase

of empire-building. This was partly because, as in earlier times, no sin-

gle department or source of authority ruled over all Britain’s multiple

541 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

external connections, or could grasp their full meaning. Labour’s new

empire emerged instead from piecemeal decisions, made in pursuit of

a wide range of objectives. The result was an untidy, even ramshackle,

system like all previous versions of British world power. It was shaped

inevitably by the impress of forces largely outside the control of any

government in London. Indeed, it was mainly the product of an eco-

nomic and geopolitical crisis that was far more severe (from the British

point of view) than that which they had faced after 1918. Its prospects

were decided not only by the means that the British themselves could

commit, but by the help they enlisted inside and outside their impe-

rial system. Indeed, the scale of its dependence upon foreign assistance

became one of its hallmarks, and perhaps the principal cause of its

systemic instability. Indeed, as a ‘solution’ to the problem of restor-

ing Britain’s world position (as an independent great power co-equal

with the United States and the Soviet Union), its shortcomings were

obvious – or had become so by 1952 at the latest.

Labour’s embrace of an imperial destiny may have derived in

part from the innate conservatism of its leaders’ world-view or their

reluctance to challenge the passions and prejudices ascribed to pub-

lic opinion – the loathing for ‘scuttle’ which the Cabinet had feared

would discredit their Indian policy.

But, from mid-1947, their impe-

rial thinking was driven by two more urgent concerns. The ﬁrst was

the danger that Stalin would repeat Hitler’s success in uniting Europe

against them, if by more indirect means, before American help could

be brought to bear. In geopolitical terms, Britain’s weakness in Europe

was bound to make them lean more heavily on their extra-European

resources. The second was the need, felt no less acutely, to secure their

achievements at home, and safeguard Labour’s position as the party of

government. The priority here was economic recovery, or, as it seemed

in the wake of the convertibility crisis, economic survival. But, for Attlee

and his colleagues, there was little real choice in the road to recovery.

The central plank in Labour’s electoral platform, the glue that held the

government, the party and its trade union supporters (the main source

of its funds) together, was the promise of full employment, originally

laid down in the wartime white paper in 1944. Full employment was

the key guarantee that the sacriﬁces of wartime had not been in vain,

and that victory had made possible a better, fairer, Britain. It could

not be repudiated. It was also the essential condition without which

Labour’s whole social programme would quickly unravel. Extending

542 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

social insurance, increasing state beneﬁts for the jobless or sick, and

funding a national health service, assumed a very high level of produc-

tive employment: mass unemployment on the scale of the 1930s would

wreck their ﬁnances. The savage deﬂation through which governments

in the 1920s had sought to rebalance Britain’s trade deﬁcit was no

longer an option. Nor was the mechanism through which that deﬂation

was imposed, the use of high interest rates to restrict the money supply.

Instead, Labour was committed to a ‘cheap money’ policy (interest rates

were kept at 2 per cent) partly to keep employment levels high, partly

because the cost of nationalising Britain’s mines and transport drove up

government borrowing. Cheap money was as vital to Labour’s public

ﬁnances as to its social policy and electoral hopes.

These considerations ruled out defending Britain’s solvency in

the open international economy that the Bretton Woods agreements

had envisaged. Cheap money at home required a closed sterling econ-

omy abroad, to guard sterling’s value and protect the overseas (sterling

area) markets to which much of her exports were sent. Nor was it

just a matter of weathering the immediate threat of a sterling collapse.

The convertibility disaster brought home to ministers and their advisers

that the fundamental imbalance of the British economy required both

immediate action and a longer-term remedy. They had to secure fresh

supplies of food and fuel to improve living standards, ease the huge bur-

den of food subsidies and improve distribution and output at home. But

they had to obtain them from dollar-free sources. They were anxious if

possible not just to save dollars by buying in sterling, but to earn dol-

lars as well by re-exporting sterling imports to the voracious American

economy. Foodstuffs (especially grain and fats), oil, gold (from South

Africa) and high-value minerals like copper and tin, were among their

key targets. The shortage of oil and the otherwise heavy dependence on

American imports made Middle Eastern supplies from British-owned

concessions there a glittering but vulnerable prize. ‘Should Russia over-

run this area’, worried Hugh Gaitskell, then Minister of Fuel and Power,

in January 1948,

[t]here would not merely be insufﬁcient oil for Britain but

for a large part of the rest of the world . . . God knows

when we shall really get our expansion programme going

there, and how precarious it will be even when the output is

doubled.

543 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

‘It is hoped that by 1951 82 per cent of our oil supplies will be drawn

from the Middle East (as compared with 23 per cent in 1938)’, Bevin

told his Cabinet colleagues in October 1949. ‘This will present the

largest single factor in balancing our overseas payments. If we failed

to maintain our position in the Middle East, our plans for economic

recovery . . . would fail.’

This was a game that other ministers could

play. Malaya ‘is by far the most important source of dollars in the

Colonial Empire’, warned the Colonial Secretary in July 1948. ‘It would

gravely worsen the whole dollar balance of the Sterling Area if there

were serious interference with Malayan exports.’

Malayan security

was not just a matter of local importance, or even a primarily strategic

matter. It had become one of the crutches of a convalescent British

economy.

For the foreseeable future, then, the Labour government pinned

its hopes of economic revival to closer integration with the ster-

ling Commonwealth countries (mainly Australia, New Zealand and

South Africa), the rapid development of their most valuable dependen-

cies (including Malaya, the Gold Coast and Northern Rhodesia) and

the drastic expansion of output from Britain’s oil concessions in the

Middle East. Only in this way could they restore some equilibrium

between Britain’s dollar income and outgoings, build up the reserves

required for sterling’s eventual return to convertible status, and (above

all) protect the British economy from a drastic slump in employment

and living standards. Pressing arguments of geostrategy pushed them in

the same outward direction. By the end of 1947, the failure of the Coun-

cil of Foreign Ministers meeting in London in November–December,

had convinced British leaders that a negotiated settlement with Stalin

was more remote than ever. Deterring a Soviet advance into, or its sub-

version of, the Western European states meant a military build-up, and

a ﬁrmer commitment by London to the defence of the half-continent. In

the Western European Union in January 1948 and the Brussels Treaty

a few months later, the British pledged themselves more deeply to their

European partners than in any previous peacetime. But they were all

too aware that the military means to make good this commitment were

scanty at best. Without adequate means to defeat the Soviet Union

on land, a ‘Middle East’ strategy to bomb Southern Russia (despite

its manifold shortcomings

) remained the best option. The argument

went wider. On 5 January 1948, Attlee had broadcast an attack on

Soviet imperialism in Europe. A week later, he appealed for Australian

544 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

and New Zealand support. Britain, he told prime ministers Chiﬂey and

Fraser, had proposed a ‘Western European Regional Economic and

Security Group’. Britain would provide the ‘political and moral lead-

ership’, but would depend upon the material support of the United

States and the Commonwealth.

Eager as they were to elicit American

help, both Attlee and Bevin were determined to avoid mere dependence

on Washington. ‘If it is our aim’, remarked the Cabinet Secretary, Sir

Norman Brook, ‘to achieve the leadership of a Western Union sufﬁ-

ciently powerful to be independent of both the Soviet and the American

blocs, we must be at the heart of a Commonwealth of nations which

is as large as and powerful as we can make it.’

Bevin was blunter.

‘More stress should be laid’, he told his ministerial colleagues, ‘on the

need to build up a Commonwealth defence system which together with

Western Union, would result in a bloc equivalent in strength to the

United States or the Soviet Union.’

Defending Britain-in-Europe and

preserving British world power were imperial tasks.

At ﬁrst sight, it seems strange that, at a time of such acute

economic hardship, domestic opposition to the burdens of empire

was not more vociferous. By late 1947, even potatoes were rationed

(bread had been rationed since mid-1946) and the ration of petrol sus-

pended altogether. Quite apart from Britain’s overseas debts, there was

also a mountain of borrowing at home increasing in size from some

£13 billion at the end of the war to more than £15 billion by 1951.

Partly in consequence, the level of income tax remained at a far higher

level than after the First World War. By 1951, six years into the peace, it

had fallen only marginally from 10 shillings (50 per cent) in the pound

to 9 shillings (45 per cent), twice the rate current in 1925. Nor was

it simply a question of feeling the pinch. There was also the matter

of public attitudes to empire. Britain’s impoverishment had coincided

with an ideological conversion to social democracy. After 1918,the

blueprint for social reconstruction had been largely torn up when the

government abandoned most of the levers of economic control at the

onset of depression. This pattern was not repeated after 1945. Instead,

the Labour government embarked upon a huge social programme to

extend educational opportunity, widen access to healthcare and (most

fundamental of all) secure full employment. It also took charge of two

basic industries whose renovation was vital to economic recovery: trans-

port (including railways, harbours and road haulage) and the mines.

The result was high levels of public expenditure for domestic recovery