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

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565 / The price of survival, 1943–1951

double crisis over Egypt and sterling, it had been possible to think that,

by subtle diplomacy, Spartan economics, and the vigorous deployment

of Britain’s imperial ‘assets’, Britain would regain its old position as

an independent centre of world power. But the crippling weakness at

the core of their post-war system had now been revealed, with little

hope of relief. Without a strong sterling economy or the great power

leverage conferred by their Middle Eastern imperium, the British claim

to world power would look threadbare indeed. The huge expansion of

the Cold War conﬂict that Korea had signalled sealed their geopolitical

fate. It marked the ﬁnal arrival of the bipolar world that had advanced

in stages since 1943. It meant that British dependence on American

power would not lessen but grow. It forced British policy into a stance

both defensive and brittle, and driven more and more by the search

for prestige. After 1951, the best they could hope for was to be the

third world power: within a few years, they had become something

different – a power in the third world.

THE THIRD WORLD POWER,

1951–1959

An empire of inﬂuence

As the economic crisis unleashed by the Korean War and the strain of

rearmament began to intensify, a new government came to power in

London. It was headed by the indomitable Churchill, now seeking to

crown his career by a summit conference with Stalin to end the Cold

War – a plan regarded coldly in Washington and by his own Foreign

Ofﬁce. The Conservative party had won the election under a populist

banner – ‘Set the people free!’ – that decried the bureaucratic auster-

ity of the Labour regime. Rationing was indeed abandoned in 1954,

and Labour’s late nationalisation of the steel industry reversed. But

there was no major departure from the domestic priorities of the previ-

ous government. Full employment remained at the centre of economic

policy. The welfare state, its social corollary, was politically sacrosanct:

indeed, one of its main Conservative architects, R. A. Butler, was Chan-

cellor of the Exchequer from 1951 to 1955. The tax system was left

much as it was.

No great ideological shift separated the two phases of

British post-war politics between 1945 and 1963, even if over particu-

lar issues (like the Suez crisis or entry into the Common Market) there

was sometimes a wide gap between the two major parties.

In their approach to the management of British world power

and what remained of Britain’s world-system, Churchill and his col-

leagues displayed what might be called a limited pragmatism. The

senior ministers – Churchill himself, Anthony Eden (the new Foreign

Secretary), Lord Salisbury, Lord Swinton (who became Secretary of

State for Commonwealth Relations in 1952), Oliver Lyttelton (Colonial

567 / The third world power, 1951–1959

Secretary) – had direct experience of the crushing burden of war on

British prestige and resources. They knew at ﬁrst hand how the aston-

ishing scale of American wealth had tipped the balance of power in

Anglo-American relations. Lyttelton had been Minister of Production

in the second half of the war; as Minister of Civil Aviation, Swinton

had struggled to defend Britain’s imperial air routes against American

demands for the ‘open skies’. Coming to power amid the third great

crisis of the British economy in six years of peace, they had good rea-

son to think that Britain’s commitments must be brought more into

balance with its available strength. They were also bombarded with

their ofﬁcials’ advice: a litany of warnings about the ever-growing con-

straints of economic weakness, ‘Asiatic’ nationalism, and the demands

of Cold War. Churchill himself played an ambivalent role. His impul-

siveness and unpredictability alternately enraged and intimidated his

cabinet colleagues and drove Eden, his ‘crown prince’, to ineffectual

despair. ‘The fact is’, said Lord Salisbury, ‘the PM is much tougher

than Anthony.’

Churchill’s instincts were to conserve British energy

(by ending the Cold War) but also maintain British imperial claims by

outright force if need be (his view about Egypt). The question of when

he would go (or die) hung over his government like a fog. His extraor-

dinary position and the intrigues of the Churchillian ‘court’ made the

task of decision in any area that attracted his interest one of exceptional

difﬁculty.

It would be a mistake to suppose that Churchill’s ‘die hardism’

frustrated every new policy, and wrong to assume that Churchillian

reaction was the primary obstacle to more radical thinking about

Britain’s place in the world. His colleagues believed that better man-

agement was the key to reducing the strain on a hard-pressed economy.

They did not draw too dramatic a conclusion from the crisis conditions

in which they had come into ofﬁce. They still thought in terms of a

British world-system, necessarily modiﬁed in methods and scope, but

still recognisably global in reach. Behind this ‘conservative’ outlook lay

three connected assumptions. First, in common with most ‘informed’

opinion across the whole Western world, they still drew a distinction

between the political capacities of whites and non-whites. The indepen-

dence of India, Burma and Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the resurgence of China

under Kuomintang and then Communist rule, and the popular appeal

of Arab nationalist movements wrung a grudging acceptance that

‘Asiatic nationalism’ was a force to be reckoned with. They accepted

568 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

that confrontation with it was counter-productive and futile. But they

were instinctively sceptical about how far such nationalism (or its

communist variant) could build a modern nation-state. They thought

that the challenge facing Asia’s nationalist leaders was how to shrug

off obsolete anti-colonial attitudes and acknowledge their dependence

upon Western know-how and cash as the means to transform their

backward economies. The danger they feared was that by bad luck or

bad judgment the West might alienate the new Asian states, delay their

transition to ‘moderation’ and ‘realism’, or even drive them like China

into the communist bloc. British imperial power, on this view of the

world, still had a large role to play in the transformation of Asia – in the

Middle East and Southeast Asia especially. In Africa, where national-

ism lagged far behind Asia in its mobilising potential, that role seemed

likely to loom a lot larger. Here, the nationalist leaders (or so it was

hoped) could be kept at a safe distance from the virus of Marxism, and

coached in the arts of modern state management before being allowed

to drive on their own. In its African version, the empire of inﬂuence

would last a lot longer and compromise a lot less.

Their second assumption also seemed to be vindicated by the

course of events since the end of the war. It was that the world would

remain divided between great rival blocs and between international

groupings that were actually empires or closely resembled them. Sur-

vival outside them would be short-lived and risky. The successor-states

of empire in the Middle East and Asia would be targets of subversion,

and would be forced to choose between rival great power protectors

sooner or later. It was in this context that British leaders found Indian

criticism of their colonial policies particularly irritating, although it

seemed to be driven in part by New Delhi’s special concern for the

rights of Indian communities in African and other colonial territories.

Nehru’s public support for the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya brought

a strong private protest. It was only gradually that the defects of this

geopolitical outlook began to be seen. In 1955, at the Bandung ‘Asian-

African’ conference (to which colonial leaders were invited), Nehru

and Sukarno, the Indonesian prime minister, urged ‘non-alignment’

for Afro-Asian states, rejecting association with either the West or the

Soviet bloc, and calling for the swift end of colonial rule.

By the mid-

1950s, the United Nations was becoming the forum where post-colonial

states could make common cause, and mount a propaganda offensive

against the remaining colonial powers. This trend was dramatically

569 / The third world power, 1951–1959

strengthened by the Suez crisis in 1956 after which Britain became for

many ex-colonial states ‘Public Enemy Number One’.

Their third assumption was also subject to rapid erosion as

the decade proceeded. But, in 1951–2, it was still possible for senior

ministers to take satisfaction in the moral reputation of British colonial

rule and of British foreign policy generally. This strengthened their

resistance to calls for a more rapid contraction of Britain’s imperial

role and deepened their conﬁdence that ex-colonial states would want a

special relationship with their former imperial master. Indeed, Britain’s

adherence to a broadly liberal ideology, newly infused with post-war

social democracy, seemed likely to make it a more ‘attractive’ great

power in certain respects than the United States, the seat of red-blooded

capitalism and race segregation. British policy-makers liked to contrast

their tactful handling of the new Asian states (especially India) with

what they saw as Washington’s ham-handed treatment of post-colonial

sensitivities. Where hubris led, nemesis followed.

There was, even so, a considerable sense of urgency in the

crisis conditions of 1951. There was little disagreement in principle

that Britain must cut its overseas costs, and ﬁnd a new equilibrium in

those countries and regions where its power and inﬂuence had come

under challenge. Economic and technological change had transformed

the conditions in which British world power had been made. ‘I believe’,

the new Colonial Secretary told his Cabinet colleagues on his return

from Malaya,

that the ever-improving communications of our century –

Singapore will soon be less than twenty-four hours by

Comet from London – the rapidity with which news and

propaganda can now be spread, and above all the

increasing education and literacy of all people make it

impossible to hold any other policy than the creation

of new Dominions, self-governing but part of the

Commonwealth owing allegiance to the Crown . . . Fifty

million islanders shorn of so much of their economic power

can no longer by themselves expect to hold dominion over

palm and pine on the nineteenth century model of power

and paternalism which made us the greatest nation in the

world. We may regain our pinnacle of fame and power by

the pursuit of this new policy.

570 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

In much the same spirit, he pressed ahead with the rapid development

of self-government in the Gold Coast (modern Ghana) under way since

1948, and persuaded the Cabinet in February 1952 that Nkrumah,

the ‘leader of government business’ in its legislative assembly, should

be allowed the title of ‘prime minister’.

To his ministerial colleagues,

Lyttelton sometimes struck a pose of reluctant consent to the force

majeure of events. But, in both the Gold Coast and Nigeria, he

endorsed expectations of a steady advance to independence. ‘It has

been the expressed intention of successive . . . governments’, he declared

in September 1953,

to help the Colonies to attain self-government within the

Commonwealth. The timing and method of attaining this

objective must vary from one territory to another; but the

Gold Coast, with no racial problem, considerable natural

wealth and a popular African Government . . . is offering

. . . enough evidence of ability to manage its own affairs to

deprive [us] of any justiﬁcation for refusing this request.

What mattered was to devise a political system robust enough to sur-

vive the strains of independence and to manoeuvre the local politi-

cians into accepting it. This approach was even more obvious in the

case of Nigeria where the 1951 constitution, designed to promote the

gradual emergence of a uniﬁed state out of the political fragments of

the inter-war regime of indirect rule, broke down almost immediately.

There was no question of falling back on coercion. Here, too, Lyttelton

licensed a major concession. The three regional governments – North,

East and West – were to get self-government by 1956, with the implicit

suggestion that independence for a federal Nigeria would follow soon

after.

The main concern in British policy was to prevent the Muslim

North, where popular nationalism was far less in evidence than it was

in the South, from going its own way. As in the Gold Coast (and in

Malaya), Lyttelton’s aim was the creation of ‘new Dominions’, inde-

pendent and sovereign, but bound in reality to follow the lead of the

‘Mother-Country’.

Of course, there were plenty of colonies where promoting self-

government raised many more difﬁculties. In East Africa, British policy-

makers were attracted to the idea of federating Kenya, Tanganyika (a

United Nations trust territory) and Uganda, partly because they thought

that a federation would hasten economic development, partly because

571 / The third world power, 1951–1959

they hoped it would diffuse settler anxieties in Kenya (where settler

opinion was vocal and organised) and Tanganyika. They certainly

expected that political progress in East Africa would be much more

leisurely than it was in the West African colonies, and the outbreak

of Kenya’s Mau Mau rebellion in 1952 seemed to conﬁrm this. Yet,

even in Kenya, which, said its governor, ‘is and will remain an excep-

tionally explosive country’,

Lyttelton supported the move towards

greater local self-rule and the sharing of power between settlers and

Asians, to be extended in time to Africans as well. It was the only

way, the governor argued, to break down the ‘opposition mentality’

from which the whites seemed to suffer and make government work

better. In the British Caribbean, London had long favoured federation

as the only practicable framework through which a group of small and

impoverished territories could achieve greater self-rule and increased

prosperity. In the early 1950s, it was anxious to ‘manage’ the con-

stitutional progress of the larger islands like Jamaica, Trinidad and

Barbados in ways that would not foreclose the larger objective of a

West Indies Federation – a difﬁcult and ultimately futile endeavour.

In Malaya, where the worst of the communist insurrection was over

by 1953, British policy was similarly dominated by two interlocking

objectives. In Malaya itself, they were eager to encourage the forma-

tion of multiracial parties and break down the communal antagonism

of Malays and Chinese. The promise of staged self-government was the

carrot they offered. But they were also determined that Malaya should

be part of a larger federal dominion embracing Singapore and the

Borneo territories (Sarawak and British North Borneo), as a durable

vehicle for British inﬂuence and interests in the post-colonial era.

The larger issue was how that inﬂuence could be maintained in

ex-colonial territories. Lyttelton had talked of retaining their allegiance

to the Crown. The notion that Commonwealth membership would act

as the key source of solidarity between Britain and the post-colonial

states had already been aired during the Labour government. But, after

1951, it assumed much greater importance as the prospect of self-

government in West Africa, the Caribbean and Southeast Asia loomed

larger. In the Churchill government there was more than a little unease

about the effects of ‘admitting’ new African and Asian members into

what was still mainly a white dominions’ club, in which India, Pakistan

and Ceylon still formed a minority. Lord Swinton especially worried

that the intimacy between Britain and the ‘old dominions’, already

under pressure from the new Asian members, would fray to breaking

572 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

point once the Commonwealth became an association mainly composed

of Afro-Asian ex-colonies.

Yet it was really on the support of the ‘old’

members that Britain would have to rely in the event (still not improb-

able) of a third world war. One solution proposed was to create two

grades of members: in effect an ‘old’ and a ‘new’ Commonwealth. The

arguments rattled through Whitehall in 1953 and 1954. The clinching

objection was that a two-tier Commonwealth would fail to achieve the

primary purpose of the whole Commonwealth system. It would anger

and alienate the ex-colonial territories where pro-British feeling was

weakest, and where the prestige of ‘full’ Commonwealth membership

was the most promising way of maintaining the British connection.

To this, Swinton bowed.

In reality, of course, a pragmatic distinc-

tion was made between those Commonwealth countries with whom

Britain worked closely in defence and intelligence, and those outside

the magic circle of old friends. Meanwhile, the Commonwealth idea

became more and more central to British hopes of upholding their sta-

tusasthethirdworld power, comparable to – if certainly weaker than –

the two superpowers, but clearly different in stature from any other

great power. ‘Were the United Kingdom to stand by herself’, remarked

a departmental memorandum in June 1956, ‘her importance would still

be great, but immensely less than it is while she remains the centre of

the Commonwealth’.

Britain’s ‘authority and inﬂuence will continue,

in an increasing degree as its rivals grow in strength and power, to

derive from its headship of, or association with, the world-wide group

of States that compose the Commonwealth’.

It could be objected, of course, that this was so much pie in

the sky if Britain itself were to be drastically weakened by economic

exhaustion or geopolitical crisis, or if the pace of change in the colo-

nial world got out of control. Churchill’s obsession with promoting a

summit conference with Stalin and (after his death in 1953) his succes-

sors worried his colleagues, unnerved the Foreign Ofﬁce and annoyed

the Americans.

It was rooted in Churchill’s belief that his personal

inﬂuence could achieve the breakthrough to a real European peace and

end the Cold War. But it also reﬂected his deep sense of foreboding at

the effects on Britain and British world power of a prolonged ‘armed

peace’. As much as, if not more than, his Cabinet colleagues, Churchill

was conscious of the limits of Britain’s material strength and the vital

importance of economic recovery, on which the huge burden of defence

spending (around 8 per cent of GDP in 1952) hung like an albatross.

Continued Cold War would drive Britain deeper into dependence on

573 / The third world power, 1951–1959

America. Even more worrying was the risk that the American will to

confront communist power would set off a crisis that could not be

stopped. There could be no illusion that either British world power,

or even Britain itself, could survive a third world war in the twentieth

century.

In fact, the failure of summitry did not prevent an easing of the

tensions that had made Attlee’s rearmament programme seem so urgent

in 1951. Meanwhile, British leaders drew comfort from the powerful

advantages that Britain’s geopolitical position still seemed to confer.

Despite a niggling sense of American rivalry, they enjoyed Washing-

ton’s general backing for their Middle East policies, and their effort to

keep Britain’s regional primacy there. American antipathy to European

colonialism had already been modiﬁed by the fear that the over-hasty

demolition of European rule would open the door not to West-leaning

nationalism but an East-leaning Marxism. The growing intensity of

Cold War competition by 1950 and ever heavier emphasis on the sup-

ply of strategic materials strengthened the case for keeping key colonial

producers under politically reliable management. The Belgian Congo

supplied more than 50 per cent of the ‘free world’s’ uranium (all of

it destined for the United States) and 75 per cent of its cobalt. Even

Fortune magazine, mouthpiece of American big business, choked back

its dislike of the Belgian cartels that controlled the Congo’s economy

in light of these facts.

Even the French, on whose colonial methods

Franklin D. Roosevelt had once lavished his vitriol, enjoyed the support

and extensive largesse of the American government in their Vietnamese

war. There was good reason to think that Britain’s contribution to

global ‘containment’ would earn Washington’s goodwill for as long as

the Soviet threat lasted.

Thus London could hope for far greater leverage in Washington

than any other Western country. It could also exploit its special position

in Europe. This was not just a matter of being (for the moment) eco-

nomically stronger than other European countries. It derived in great

part from the deep rift of mistrust between France and West Germany,

and French opposition to the rearming of Germany or the German

admission to NATO. So long as this rift lasted, France was bound to

look to Britain as its most reliable ally: after all, the Germans might

be bribed into pro-Soviet neutrality; and American willingness to pay

the full price of keeping France free could never be more than a matter

of faith. But British self-interest bound them to France against both

the Soviet threat and the danger of German aggrandisement. It was the

574 / ‘The great liner is sinking’

British undertaking (in the Paris agreement of 1954) to keep 50,000

men in West Germany (the ‘British Army of the Rhine’) that cleared

the logjam and won French agreement to recruiting a West German

army, the vital reinforcement of NATO that Washington wanted. The

British were the key (or so it appeared) to the internal solidarity of

the West European members of NATO. Their blessing was needed (or

so it appeared) for any West European project. Their cooperation was

vital if the United States was to manage its cumbrous European com-

mitments alongside its burdens in Northeast and Southeast Asia and in

Latin America.

Finally, the British could take some satisfaction, in the early

1950s at least, from the fact that their colonial empire was still little

exposed to direct assault from outside. Hong Kong was perhaps the

greatest exception. Elsewhere, for the most part, it was the risk of

internal subversion that threatened colonial authority and the efforts to

orchestrate colonial politics. Nor had their colonial power yet become

the embarrassing archaism that it later appeared. The British could

point to the French, the Portuguese and the Belgians as practitioners of

colonialisms far less liberal than their own, and far less likely to lead

to the self-governing nation-states, the ideal form of polity enshrined

in the Charter of the United Nations. Much effort was expended in the

reinvention of empire as the preparatory school for colonial adulthood,

ﬁnally recognised with the key to the door – sovereign membership of

the (British) Commonwealth.

These aims and plans belonged to the world of ‘high’ policy-

making: they drew on the products of a Realpolitik calculus. But how

far were they ‘viable’ in terms of public opinion? In Britain itself, the

rough rule of thumb for working politicians remained much as it had

been for decades. British opinion was largely indifferent to the detail

of what happened in ‘remote corners’ of the Empire. But it could be

quickly aroused by reports of the murder or mistreatment of other

(white) Britons, and expected the smack of ﬁrm government to be felt

by the miscreants. On the other hand, intervention that went wrong

or produced heavy casualties for little return, would damage a gov-

ernment’s prestige, perhaps very badly. It might be better in those

cases to stage a rapid retreat from an untenable salient (like Pales-

tine or Abadan) and hope that this would be seen as cool-headed

restraint. As an index of attitudes the British newspaper market offered

a very approximate guide. Of the daily papers, those leaning to the