The Edwardian Era and the World Wars
The brief Edwardian era (1901–1910) and the half-century that followed it saw the British Empire transformed beyond recognition. The two world wars of the twentieth century placed the empire under unprecedented strain, accelerated the political pressures that would lead to decolonization, and shifted the global balance of power away from Britain and toward the United States and the Soviet Union. By 1945, the British Empire was still nominally the largest in the world, but it was already in the early stages of dissolution.
This article examines the period from the accession of Edward VII in 1901 to the end of the Second World War in 1945, during which the British Empire was tested as never before. The articles linked throughout explore specific events, forces, and themes in greater depth.
The Edwardian Crisis
The death of Queen Victoria in January 1901 marked the end of an era. Her son, Edward VII, presided over a much-changed empire. The Boer War (1899–1902) had just ended in a British victory, but it had been a far closer-run thing than the British government was willing to admit. The use of concentration camps and scorched-earth policies had produced a wave of international criticism and a domestic debate about the future of empire. The Indian independence movement, led by figures such as Dadabhai Naoroji, Gopal Krishna Gokhale, and a young Mohandas Gandhi, was gathering force. The economic rise of the United States and Germany was beginning to challenge British industrial dominance.
The Edwardian era saw the British government undertake a series of reforms intended to strengthen the imperial system. The Committee of Imperial Defence was established in 1902 to coordinate imperial policy. The 1902 Colonial Conference and the 1907 Colonial Conference began the process that would eventually lead to the formation of the Commonwealth of Nations. The Anglo-Japanese Alliance of 1902 and the Entente Cordiale with France of 1904 gave Britain a more flexible diplomatic position. Yet the strategic and economic foundations of the empire were already eroding.
The First World War and the Imperial War Effort
The British Empire in the First World War (1914–1918) was the first major test of imperial unity since the Boer War. When Britain declared war on Germany in August 1914, it did so on behalf of the entire empire. India, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the various colonies and protectorates all joined the war effort.
The Indian Army provided the largest single contribution, with more than a million Indian soldiers serving in theaters as far apart as France, Mesopotamia, Gallipoli, Egypt, Palestine, and East Africa. The Indian Army in the world wars examines this contribution, including the specific formations that served in each theatre and the political implications of deploying so large an Indian force in a conflict framed, by the British, as a war for the freedom of small nations. Australian and New Zealand forces (the ANZACs) suffered catastrophic losses at Gallipoli in 1915, and the experience of the campaign became a foundational event in both nations’ national identities. Canadian forces distinguished themselves at Vimy Ridge (1917) and in the final Hundred Days Offensive. South African forces fought in East Africa and on the Western Front. African troops from the West African Frontier Force, the East African forces, and the South African Native Labour Corps served in a variety of capacities.
The war effort required the suspension of many of the political restrictions that had governed the empire in peacetime. Indians, Africans, and West Indians served in the military, worked in the factories, and produced the food and raw materials that sustained the British war effort. The political consequences of this mobilization were significant. Indian leaders such as Jawaharlal Nehru and Muhammad Ali Jinnah returned from the war with new political expectations that the 1919 Rowlatt Act and the Amritsar massacre — in which British Indian troops killed hundreds of unarmed civilians — would transform into nationalist fury.
The Post-War Settlement and the Mandates
The First World War ended with the defeat of Germany, Austria-Hungary, the Ottoman Empire, and Bulgaria. The 1919 Treaty of Versailles and the subsequent treaties with the other defeated powers redrew the map of the world. The League of Nations was established to maintain the new international order, and the former German and Ottoman colonies were distributed among the victorious powers as mandates.
Britain received mandates over Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, Tanganyika, parts of Cameroon and Togo, and Ruanda-Urundi (administered jointly with Belgium). These mandates were theoretically temporary, to be prepared for eventual independence, but in practice the British administered them as colonial territories for decades. The origins of the Commonwealth are intimately connected to this transition from empire to mandate to eventual independence.
The post-war settlement also recognized the new status of the dominions. The dominions — Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Newfoundland, and the Irish Free State — had fought as separate belligerents in the war, and they signed the Treaty of Versailles as separate parties. The Statute of Westminster in 1931 formally recognized the dominions as “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status.”
The Interwar Period
The interwar years (1918–1939) were a period of imperial strain. The British economy struggled to recover from the costs of the war, the Great Depression of the 1930s produced widespread unemployment and political unrest, and the rise of Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and militarist Japan created new strategic challenges. The 1932 Ottawa Conference established the imperial preference trade system, in which Commonwealth countries agreed to lower tariffs on each other’s goods while maintaining higher tariffs on imports from outside the empire. The system reflected an older vision of empire as a self-contained economic unit, but it was already being overtaken by the rise of American economic power.
The interwar period also saw the continuation of the Indian independence movement. The 1919 Rowlatt Act, the Jallianwala Bagh massacre of 1919, and the non-cooperation movement of 1920–1922 marked a significant radicalization of Indian politics. The Round Table Conferences of 1930–1932 attempted to negotiate a new constitutional arrangement for India, but they failed to satisfy Indian nationalist demands. The Government of India Act of 1935, the last major constitutional measure of British India, established provincial autonomy and a federal structure that brought Indians into the political process at the provincial level while reserving key powers for the governor-general.
The Second World War and Imperial Crisis
The Second World War (1939–1945) placed the British Empire under greater strain than ever before. The colonies’ contribution to the war effort was enormous. Indian, African, Caribbean, and Pacific soldiers fought from the deserts of North Africa to the jungles of Burma. The colonies in the Second World War examines these contributions in detail, including the West African divisions in the Burma campaign, the Caribbean pilots in the Battle of Britain, and the economic mobilization of India and the African colonies that kept the British war machine running.
The war’s most spectacular disasters were the fall of Singapore in February 1942 and the loss of Burma in the same campaign. The fall of Singapore, in which some 80,000 British and imperial troops surrendered to a smaller Japanese force, was the largest surrender of British-led forces in history. The loss shattered the myth of European military invincibility in Asia and accelerated the Japanese advance through South East Asia, which would eventually be reversed only with substantial American assistance.
The Battle of Britain in 1940, fought largely by the Royal Air Force with crucial assistance from pilots drawn from across the empire, became a powerful symbol of defiance against Nazi Germany. Yet the war also exposed the limits of British power. The Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by Churchill and Roosevelt, affirmed the right of peoples to choose their own form of government, raising hopes and tensions in colonial territories. The path to decolonization traces how these political expectations became independence movements.
The Wartime Imperial Conferences
The Second World War produced a series of imperial conferences that shaped the post-war world. The 1941 Atlantic Conference between Churchill and Roosevelt produced the Atlantic Charter, which included statements on national self-determination that were widely read in colonial territories. The 1943 and 1944 conferences in Cairo, Tehran, and Yalta brought together the leaders of Britain, the United States, the Soviet Union, and other allies. The 1944 Imperial Conference in London, attended by the prime ministers of the dominions, began to plan for the post-war world.
The most important wartime development was the decision, made by the Churchill government in 1940 and 1942, that India would be granted dominion status after the war in exchange for its full support for the war effort. The Cripps Mission of 1942 attempted to negotiate an agreement with Indian leaders, but the negotiations failed. The resignation of the Indian Congress provincial governments in 1942, the Quit India Movement, and the imprisonment of Congress leaders hardened the political situation. The end of the war in 1945 led directly to the post-war negotiations that produced the independence of India and Pakistan in 1947.
The Post-War Empire and the End of the Beginning
The end of the Second World War in August 1945 marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The Labour government of Clement Attlee, elected in July 1945, presided over the largest transfer of imperial territory in history. India and Pakistan became independent in 1947. Burma and Ceylon became independent in 1948. The mandate of Palestine was relinquished in 1948. The Gold Coast became independent as Ghana in 1957. The Suez Crisis of 1956 was the decisive moment at which the post-imperial world was publicly acknowledged.
The story of how the empire was dismantled, and the institutions and ideas that survived its end, are the subjects of the article on the decline and legacy of the British Empire. The articles linked throughout this section explore the wars, conferences, and political movements that shaped this transformation.