Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation

H. Kumarasingham, H. Kumarasingham

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781000094824
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: History

Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation explores the subject of liberalism and its uses and contradictions across the late British Empire, especially in the context of imperial dissolution and subsequent state- building.

The book covers multiple regions and issues concerning the British Empire and the Commonwealth, in particular the period ranging from the late-nineteenth century to the late- twentieth century. Original intellectual contributions are offered along with new arguments on critical issues in imperial history that will appeal to a wide range of scholars, including those outside of history. Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation exposes commonalities, contradictions and contexts of different types of liberalism that animated the late British Empire and its rulers, radicals, subjects and citizens as they attempted to forge new states from its shadow and understand the impact of imperialism.

This book examines the complexities of the idea and quest for self-government in the last stages of the British Empire. It also argues the importance of the political, intellectual and empirical aspects of liberalism to understand the process of decolonisation.

The chapters in this book were originally published in a special issue of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History.

The Plural Society: Labour and the Commonwealth Idea 1900–1964

Pippa Catterall

ABSTRACT

The Labour Party founded in 1900 necessarily confronted the imperial nature of the British state, the empire as an economic and military entity, and the inequalities it contained. Yet Labour initially thought on the subject primarily in terms of the liberal objective of the advancement of self-government. It was only in the 1930s, in the writings of Lansbury and Attlee, that more systematic thinking about the empire in terms of global divisions of labour of which the British working class were among the beneficiaries, began to emerge. Tensions between the perceived interests of these beneficiaries and of the working classes of the empire as a whole remained in Attlee’s postwar government. It did, however, begin to develop a reconceptionalisation of the empire as a multi-racial Commonwealth. This facilitated a Labour patriotism around the Commonwealth that reached its apogee in Gaitskell’s weaponising of it as a means of resisting European entry in 1962. Yet the economic and military relations he evoked were already out of date, leaving his successor, Harold Wilson, to adjust to a multi-racial partnership.

When the British Labour Party was founded in February 1900, it emerged in the metropole of an imperial state and in the midst of the first imperial war to be fought as an empire. Imperialism was thus one of the central political realities confronting the new party, whether in the form of the projection of power at the imperial frontier, the role of the empire in providing the raw materials for Britain’s industries and foodstuffs, or in the politics of oppression across its vast extent. The latter – in the form of Chinese indentured labour in South Africa – was indeed a major issue in the 1906 election which saw Labour’s breakthrough to 30 seats in parliament. The empire thus raised, in more extreme and racially varied forms, similar issues about exploitation, oppression and inequality to those the party had been created to confront in Britain. To this can be added the duty these newly elected Labour politicians had to hold to account those British ministers who were responsible for administering the empire, a responsibility that Labour ministers were themselves to exercise in 1924, 1929–1931 and 1945–1951.

The party thus emerged at a point when thinking about empire more generally within British society was arguably in transition. A year before Kipling had, in the context of American imperialism, identified and popularised the “White Man’s Burden’; the Mission Civilisatrise of imperial development. The contemporary Boer War was, however, also to raise in the mind of J. A. Hobson the idea of empire as economic exploitation and, in that of Joseph Chamberlain – faced with intimations of British imperial decline – the need for closer military and economic co-operation across the empire.¹ As C. Delisle Burns observed in an official Labour publication in 1925, without quite capturing these complex nuances, modern empires were thus economic rather than military: ‘Imperialism was the faith of those who believed that this expansion of their nation was for the good of the peoples governed as well as for the development of the whole world’. It was thus also an idea, as Burns noted, actively promoted throughout the empire through the innovation of Empire Day from 1902, through school textbooks and indeed through the spread of tropes of Britishness and of British forms of Christianity across its length.

Empire, as Burns acknowledged, thus posed a number of challenges to the new party. There was the electoral problem of the conflation of imperialism with patriotism given that ‘Imperialism is necessarily opposed to Socialism, not only because Socialism looks towards international peace, but also because Socialism is opposed to private advantages gained at the expense of the common good’. Empire at the same time raised the policy issue of responding to the needs of the ‘common men of other lands’.²

This posed the challenge of thinking of the empire as an interconnected system in which the British working classes were among the beneficiaries. In the process it therefore raises the question of whether, when Labour writers waxed lyrical – as they were wont to do until the 1940s – on the Socialist Commonwealth that was to come, did they also include in that the Commonwealth that already existed as an appellation for those parts of empire which had been given some form of self-governing autonomy, let alone the imperial whole? Often the answer appears to be no. Consider G. D. H. Cole, one of the leading left-wing thinkers and popularisers of the inter-war years. His 1918 tome, Labour in the Commonwealth, attempted to think through how Labour could achieve its place in a state – specifically the British one – rather than the wider issue of the place of labour across the vaster realms of the empire.³ It has also been suggested that at the official level the new party’s references to Commonwealth similarly tended to be concerned with the Socialist, rather than the imperial, variety.⁴ Take, for instance, the statement of The Aims of Labour, published the year before Cole’s work by Arthur Henderson, the Labour Party’s general secretary, as part of the re-launch of the party he and Sidney Webb masterminded to prepare it for the world emerging after the Great War.⁵ The empire may have been heavily involved in supporting Britain’s war efforts militarily, commercially and financially (for instance, George Lansbury claimed in 1935 that India contributed £100m to the British war effort, spent £207.5m on its own military campaigns and contributed greatly to saving the Channel ports in 1914–1915),⁶ and it was to reach its greatest extent in its immediate aftermath. It was, however, passed over in silence by Henderson.

The limited attention Labour paid to imperial matters before 1914 was understandable given that it remained a small party which could influence the governing Liberals but not yet aspire to replace them. For instance, in 1906 it joined the Liberals in condemning ‘Chinese Slavery’. In general, however, the essence of Labour’s thinking about the empire in the Edwardian era was expressed in the aspiration contained in party’s first election manifesto in 1900 for ‘Legislative Independence for all parts of the Empire’.⁷ This would thus extend throughout the dependent empire the legislative autonomy already achieved by then in the ‘White’ Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and Newfoundland, to be shortly joined by the Union of South Africa in 1910.

The problems with such an approach became apparent to the party when, in April 1914, the Labour MP Frank Goldstone initiated a debate in the Commons on the applicability of Magna Carta, Habeas Corpus and the Petition of Right across the empire, calling for their inviolability to be assured in every self-governing Dominion.⁸ This is an early example of thinking about the empire systematically, rather than imperial wrongs in particular territories, notably India, Ireland, and South Africa. In calling this debate in light of the alarming handling and aftermath of the mines dispute in South Africa in 1913, Labour clearly were expressing a sense of responsibility for the empire as a whole. This was even more apparent when Henderson (notwithstanding his silence on such issues three years later) in seconding the motion noted:

It seems to me that if we were indifferent to this situation, especially we on the Labour benches, we would be false to the trust that has been reposed in us, not only by our constituents, but by crowds of organised workers, whom, to some extent, we represent in this House.⁹

South Africa’s legislative independence, however, meant that Labour’s attempt to invoke a standard of liberty across the empire proved to be a dispiriting experience. Disconsolately, the Labour MP Stephen Walsh observed:

I have been under the impression that there were certain fundamental principles of British law upon which all these self-governing institutions were to be based…. In the ignorance under which we labour upon these benches we really thought that that fundamental condition would exist just as much in the South African Dominions as in our own country, that there should be no person outlawed or exiled, that justice should not be sold and should not be deferred, that no man should be deprived of his fundamental liberties, except through trial by his peers.¹⁰

Such difficulties seem to have been largely overlooked when Labour for the first time included a substantial passage (albeit only two pages long) on empire and Commonwealth policy in an official party publication. This was Labour and the New Social Order, a statement of post-war aims largely drafted by Henderson and Webb and revised at the party conference in June 1918. The aspirations of Joseph Chamberlain and his later acolytes such as Lionel Curtis for some kind of imperial federation were roundly condemned as implying a dangerous subjection to a common imperial legislature coercing tax and military services, invading the autonomy of the Dominions and – by the imposition of imperial duties – undermining the democratic freedom of choice in the United Kingdom itself. Labour, the publication proclaimed, d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Liberal Ideals and the Politics of Decolonisation
• 1 The Plural Society: Labour and the Commonwealth Idea 1900–1964
• 2 Imperial Citizenship or Else: Liberal Ideals and the Indian Unmaking of Empire, 1890–1919
• 3 Written Differently: A Survey of Commonwealth Constitutional History in the Age of Decolonisation
• 4 An Acutely Embarrassing Affair: Whitehall and the Indian-South African Dispute at the United Nations (1946)
• 5 A Liberal Ghost? The Left, Liberal Democracy and the Legacy of Harold Laski’s Teaching
• 6 The Post-Colonial Constitutional Order of the Commonwealth Caribbean: The Endurance of the Crown and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council
• 7 Primitive Liberals and Pirate Tribes: Black-Flag Radicalism and the Kibbo Kift
• 8 Imperial Liberalism and Institution Building at the End of Empire in Africa
• Index