The World Wars and Imperial Decline

The two world wars of the twentieth century are the indispensable background to the decline of the British Empire. They did not begin the process; the long pre-1914 crisis of Edwardian Britain was already evident to careful observers. But the wars accelerated every contradiction — financial, military, ideological, racial — and they left an imperial power too exhausted to do anything other than manage its own retreat. John Darwin, in The End of the British Empire (1991), argues that the wars converted the empire from a “going concern” into “a winding-up operation,” and the metaphor captures the cumulative effect better than any single causal account.

The First World War and the Imperial War Effort

The British Empire in the First World War was the largest war machine ever put in the field. More than 2.5 million men from the Indian subcontinent served in the British armed forces, alongside substantial contingents from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and the West Indies. The contribution of the Indian Army was decisive on battlefields from France to Mesopotamia and East Africa. The Gallipoli campaign of 1915 produced the Anzac legend that would later feed Australian and New Zealand national identity. The war effort exhausted the Dominions as well: Canada, Australia, and New Zealand emerged with their own diplomatic voice and their own claim to have earned a place at the peace table.

British war debts rose from £650 million in 1914 to £7.4 billion in 1919, a transformation funded by American credit. The post-war settlement included the League of Nations mandates, which placed former German and Ottoman territories under British and French administration, and a wave of political agitation in the colonies. The Statute of Westminster of 1931 was the constitutional recognition that imperial subjecthood was no longer the same thing as imperial citizenship. The Dominions had earned their autonomy by their war service, and the Statute codified what the 1926 Balfour Declaration had already conceded: “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another.”

The Second World War: Decisive Defeat

The Second World War made the empire’s decline unmistakable. More than 2.5 million Indians served in the Allied forces, alongside large contingents from Africa, the Caribbean, and the Pacific. The fall of Singapore in February 1942 destroyed the myth of British military invincibility in the Far East, and the Bengal famine of 1943, in which some three million Indians died, did immense political damage to imperial prestige. The defence of Britain itself, celebrated in the Battle of Britain, drew on pilots and aircrew from across the empire, including several hundred Caribbean and West African volunteers. The point, for colonial subjects who had fought for a freedom they were themselves denied, was hard to miss.

The wars raised expectations that the post-war settlement could not satisfy. The Atlantic Charter of 14 August 1941 committed the Allies to “the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live.” Churchill, anticipating trouble, insisted in Cabinet that “we had no thought of consulting the peoples of the British Empire, and still less of consulting their representatives, about the application of this principle.” The contradiction was preserved; the colonial subjects could read.

The Post-War Settlement: Bankruptcy and Dependence

The British economy emerged from 1945 exhausted. The country had liquidated its overseas investments, run up debts of more than £3 billion, and depended on American credit. The 1945 Anglo-American loan of $3.75 billion imposed the conditions of an insolvent: convertibility of sterling, the dismantling of imperial preference, and the abandonment of preferential trade with the colonies. Marshall Aid from 1948, worth around $2.7 billion in total, was the second American lifeline. The United States emerged from 1945 as the dominant economic power in the world, with the dollar replacing sterling as the international reserve currency. As Darwin has argued, decolonisation was not a defeat for Britain; it was the necessary condition of British participation in the Western alliance.

The Path to 1960

The two wars set the stage for the rapid decolonisation of the late 1940s and 1950s. The independence of India and Pakistan in 1947 was the symbolic end of the British Empire as a world system, and the Suez Crisis of 1956 was the most dramatic demonstration of British decline. By the 1960s, two-thirds of the empire had become independent, and by 1980 the formal British Empire, apart from a scatter of overseas territories, was gone. The world wars had destroyed the financial, military, and ideological conditions in which empire had been possible. The question was no longer whether the empire would end, but on what terms.

Historiographical Note

The role of the two world wars in imperial decline has been argued over for half a century. The “decline” school — represented by Correlli Barnett, Paul Kennedy, and Bernard Porter — treats the wars as a decisive accelerant of a long-run British relative decline that was already visible in the Edwardian period. The “imperialism of free trade” school of Robinson and Gallagher, and the “World System” school of Immanuel Wallerstein, are more sceptical: they emphasise the structural advantages of empire to metropolitan capital, and treat decolonisation as a political accommodation rather than an economic necessity. The most useful recent work, in the tradition of John Darwin and Wm. Roger Louis, has stressed the contingency of the process: the wars did not foreclose alternatives, but they narrowed the choices facing successive British governments until, by 1957, no plausible policy other than managed retreat remained.

In this Section

Other Sections