The Vanishing Empire: British Government and the Disappearance of the Empire of Rule, 1936-1971

By going to war in 1939 to save its Empire, Britain destroyed it - this is the paradox explored in Edward Webb’s 'The Vanishing Empire'. In the immediate aftermath of 1945’s victory many assumed British power would soon be restored but, despite vanquishing its foes and getting its colonies back, Britain had failed to achieve its imperial war aims. Over the next few decades it learned that the true cost of victory against fascism was a new US-USSR dominated world order in which there was no place for the old British Empire/Commonwealth of 1939. In order to gloss over this reality, the loss of the colonies was instead presented as ‘decolonisation’ - an orderly process directed by London – rather than something made up as events rapidly unfolded. This interpretation persists today, taking physical form as the Commonwealth, but it is not much more than a self-comforting myth.

The myth was needed because postwar British governments were powerless to halt the resurgent wave of nationalism unleashed by WW2. The war had revealed that the Empire’s foundations relied on bluff, and the new world order no longer accepted imperialists hanging on through violence and repression. This did not mean, though, that the British avoided violence. As the Kenya and Malaya emergencies and the Suez Crisis remind us, violent exits from empire were by no means the sole preserve of France, Holland and Portugal. Violence, it appeared, could be tolerated if it was used not to stop nationalism but to mould it to ensure that it was the moderate variety which flourished. In this the British were aided by the fear of Soviet expansion, which excused interventions not least in Malaya.

The exit from Empire was so complicated, with causes and conditions varying so greatly between colonies, that it is almost impossible to draw sweeping conclusions about why it vanished so quickly except to say that it was an idea whose time had come.