Connected Empires, Connected Worlds

Essays in Honour of John Darwin

Robert S.G. Fletcher, Benjamin Mountford, Simon J. Potter, Robert S.G. Fletcher, Benjamin Mountford, Simon J. Potter

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781000596595
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

Connected Empires, Connected Worlds: Essays in Honour of John Darwin contains diverse essays on the expansion, experience, and decline of empires. The volume is offered in honour of John Darwin's contribution to the study of empire and its endings. Written by his former students and colleagues, the book's chapters discuss topics from the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries.

While each author has contributed according to their expertise, they also reflect on how John's ideas and approaches continue to stimulate new work in disparate fields. Touching on the experience of empire in Europe, Africa, Asia and Australasia, the authors have engaged with concepts from across Darwin's writings, including his earlier work on decolonisation, 'decline', and 'the dynamics of territorial expansion'. As such, the work in this volume operates across a number of different scales of analysis: from case studies of transnational communities, state formation and military intervention, to imperial politics, inter-imperial comparison, and global historical frameworks.

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

Unfinished Decolonisation and Globalisation

Karl Hack

Abstract

This article locates John Darwin’s work on decolonisation within an Oxbridge tradition which portrays a British world system, of which formal empire was but one part, emerging to increasing global dominance from the early nineteenth century. In this mental universe, decolonisation was the mirror image of that expanding global power. According to this point of view, it was not the sloughing off of individual territories, but rather the shrinking away of the system and of the international norms that supported it, until only its ghost remained by the end of the 1960s. The article then asks, echoing the title of Darwin’s Unfinished Empire, whether the decolonisation project is all but complete, or still ongoing. In addition, what is the responsibility of the imperial historian to engage with, inform, or indeed refrain from, contemporary debates that relate to some of these issues? The answer is twofold. On the one hand, the toolkit that the Oxbridge tradition and Darwin provide remains relevant, and also useful in thinking about contemporary issues such as China’s move towards being a global power, the United States’ declining hegemony, and some states and groups desires to rearticulate their relationship with the global. On the other hand, the decline of world systems of power needs to be recognised as just one of several types of, and approaches to, analysing ‘decolonisation’. One which cannot be allowed to ignore or marginalise the study of others, such as experience, first nations issues, the shaping of the postcolonial state, and empire legacies. The article concludes by placing the Oxbridge tradition into a broader typology of types and methodologies of decolonisation, and by asking what a new historiography of decolonisation might look like. It suggests that it would address the Oxbridge concern with the lifecycles of systems of power and their relationship to global changes, but also place them alongside, and in dialogue with, a much broader set of perspectives and analytical approaches.

The British empire, in its pan-Oceanic aspect, began as sixteenth-century piracy (or privateering), peaked as a full ‘system of world power’ between the 1830s and 1930s, and ended as late 1960s satire. John Darwin, as chronicler par excellence of this system’s life-story, has identified 1968 as the year of its near-death. As he puts it in his Empire Project, by the end of 1968 all that left was ‘the ghost of the British world system. It remained only to acknowledge its passing’.¹

Few would dispute this dating. The years 1967 and 1968 were anni horribiles for British prestige and world role. In November 1967 the Pound was devalued from $2.80 to $2.40, and British forces withdrew from the tiny colony of Aden and the surrounding Federation of South Arabia, leaving the area wracked by conflict. These territories eventually morphed into the Soviet and Chinese supported ‘People’s Democratic Republic of Yemen’: a Cold War defeat to cap off Britain’s Suez humiliation of 1956.² The cardinal aim of British decolonisation, to hand over to an elite in firm charge and willing to tolerate remaining British interests and act as part of the Commonwealth, had failed dismally. In January 1968, a white paper on defence policy further announced that British forces would withdraw from East of Suez by 1971.³ On 28 April 1968, Enoch Powell, Conservative MP for Wolverhampton South West, then delivered the Birmingham speech in which he invoked Virgil seeing the Tiber ‘foaming with much blood’, in order to dramatise fears about immigration. However controversial his voicing of prejudices was, it read the death rites over the spirit of the 1948 British Nationality Act (already watered down in 1962): an act that had given members of Commonwealth countries rights to citizenship after just a year’s residence in the UK.⁴

The hardware of empire was in retreat, the heartware of the replacement Commonwealth was being undermined by immigration issues at home; by South Africa’s withdrawal (1960) and Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence (November 1965) abroad; by technological failure (the collapse of the Blue Streak missile and TSR-2 aircraft projects in 1960 and 1965 being examples); and by the greater resources the Americans and Soviets had available for courting newly independent countries.⁵ Britain’s high postwar hopes that its economic and technological leadership would glue together ex-colonies under informal British leadership – so supporting British world power from beyond the grave of formal empire – soon looked fanciful, if not delusional.

Then, to hardware and heartware problems were added failure of imperial confidence and cockiness. George MacDonald Fraser finally got a publisher to accept his first Flashman novel (Flashman, 1969). The bully of Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays was reimagined as a coward and cad who nevertheless blundered his way to being a General and Knight, via campaigns across the nineteenth-century British empire. Flashman was based on a literary conceit (that the author had discovered Flashman’s memoirs wrapped in an oilskin in a Midlands auction room), by someone who had served in the 14th Army in Burma, as a subaltern in the Middle East, and who thought empire generally a good if messy affair.⁶ It captured the sense of ridiculousness at the end of empire. Almost simultaneously, the ‘Carry on’ team lampooned empire with affection and ridicule in Carry on … Up the Khyber, which reached British cinema screens in November 1968.

Darwin focusses on high politics, but low culture makes the point just as well, that for Britain all that remained was in Darwin’s phrase ‘the exorcism of the ghost’.⁷ At root, Carry on Up the Khyber’s toilet humour and Darwin’s grand systems analysis say the same thing. Once the conditions for high Victorian dominance – an uncharacteristic low point in the strength of Eurasian empires, and a large economic lead from early industrialisation – were gone, empire increasingly became a pretence, a bluff, an absurdity. Hence Private Widdle of the 3rd Foot and Mouth (Devils in Skirts) being found to wear underwear – as opposed to going without even in harsh hills – exposes the British bluff and things all but fall apart in Carry on, just as in real life they had in Aden. It was a far cry from the heroic images offered to audiences in Zulu (1964) and Khartoum (1966). The age of empire had ceded to the age of parody, epitomised by the start in 1969 of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, whose ‘Colonel’ makes repeated, ultimately doomed, calls to dial back the silliness.

This article nevertheless suggests that such a picture of decolonisation is but one possible framing of many. It traces the origins of that framing in an Oxbridge tradition of imperial history, and in Darwin’s development of that, before arguing that alternative constructions give the term, and the wider Oxbridge tradition of imperial analysis, broader value. After all, though in one reading Darwin and Carry On were right – the British empire as part of a global power system was all but dead by 1968 – in other readings decolonisation remained unfinished, abroad and at home. In other words, decolonisation as an umbrella term does encompass the weakening of Britain’s world system of power, but as one of many different aspects and processes.

Even in terms of British world power, some elements still awaited decolonisation long after Britain’s global power status had vanished. Britain, for instance, had retained part of the Indian Army after 1947 (a share of the Gurkhas) and attempted to reconstitute them as part of a Far Eastern strategic reserve based in Malaya.⁸ The Defence White papers of 1967 and 1968 did not end the desire to use this Indian Army rump worldwide. Gurkha headquarters moved to Hong Kong in 1971. As late as the 1980s the Gurkhas had four battalions in Hong Kong, one in Brunei (whose protectorate status ended only in 1984, and where the army continues to maintain an outpost), and one in Britain, with a role in the Falklands War in between.⁹ Close defence relationships with the Gulf States continued despite Britain ending its protectorates in the latter in 1971, as did a modicum of capacity to project troops and aircraft worldwide by shipborne forces, including naval servicing facilities in Singapore. As late as 2008, the daughter of an ex-officer of the 6th Gurkha Rifles, Joanna Lumley, could pull public heartstrings to secure rights to settle in Britain for any Gurkha who had served at least four years in the British Army, whether or not that had been before or after their 1997 move to a UK base.¹⁰

More fundamentally, the notion of decolonisation as specifically about the dismantling of a system of world power (and beyond that, as a particular ‘era’ when western tutelage of others was an accepted norm) needs to be recognised for what it is: one of a series of processes that huddle under the umbrella term decolonisation; one particular heuristic and framing device, albeit a rather brilliant and useful one.

The rest of this article will first construct, and offer reflections on, the Oxbridge and Darwinesque framings of decolonisation. Section One sketches an Oxbridge tradition of empire analysis, and explores how a particular conception of decolonisation emerged from that. Section Two looks at how John Darwin’s works added to that tradition, and broadened it into global history, and begins to ask questions about alternative framings of decolonisation.¹¹ Section Three concludes by experimenting with a clearer typology of forms of decolonisation, as a way of clarifying some of the debates, and of allowing better dialogue between different approaches, with a view to allowing a more comprehensive and balanced historiography. In addition, the latter sections ask whether, and if so in what ways, the Oxbridge concepts and approaches (and empire history more generally) remain relevant in the twenty-first century. Can they, for instance, shed light on China’s world role and aspirations, the United States’ declining hegemony, or on the attempts by states to re-articulate their relationship with supranational bodies and frameworks?

Oxbridge and the British Empire

How did the notion that decolonisation (or at least British decolonisation) was about the adjustment of a system of world power in order to protect core interests arise? How did it establish its claim to be the main unifying field for the study of British decolonisation?

The answer begins with two historians who taught at both Oxford and Cambridge, namely: Jack Gallagher (among whose DPhil students was John Darwin) and Ronald Robinson.¹² Respectively starting their academic careers at Trinity and St John’s in Cambridge, they lectured on Cambridge’s new postwar ‘Expansion of Europe’ paper.¹³ John (‘Jack’) Gallagher (1919–1980), Birkenhead-born son of an Irish railwayman, rose to be Beit Professor of Imperial History at Oxford (1963–1970), and Vere Harmsworth Professor of Naval and Imperial History at Cambridge (1971–1980). Ronald Robinson (1920–1999) flew bombers in the Second World War as an officer, and was Smuts Reader in the History of the British Commonwealth at Cambridge (1966–1971), then Beit Professor at Oxford (1971–1987).

Both had undergraduate studies postponed by the war, and both had first-hand experience of empire during the conflict and on postwar travels; Gallagher as a sergeant tank driver in North Africa, Robinson as trainee pilot in Southern Rhodesia and research officer for the Colonial Office from 1947 to 49. They collaborated on two works which had a profound legacy for how the history of the British empire was thought about, and which left a toolkit of key assumptions and concepts for others. In reshaping how people thought about British Imperialism, ‘Robinson and Gallagher’ – directly and as supervisors of a generation of imperial historians – did much to frame the later study of decolonisation.¹⁴

Their first collaboration was on their 1953 article on ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’.¹⁵ This asked why Britain seemed to shift from mid-nineteenth-century ‘anti-imperialism’ (in an era when free trade was apparently preferred to territorial control) to rapid expansion later. Its answer was that at the official level there was a continuity of motives. Britain aimed throughout the century at ‘integrating new areas into the world economy’ (my emphasis), and where this required control, ‘British policy followed th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction – Making Connections: John Darwin and his Histories of Empire
• Bibliography
• 1 Unfinished Decolonisation and Globalisation
• 2 The China of Tomorrow: Japan and the Limits of Victorian Expansion
• 3 Liberia an(d) Empire?: Sovereignty, ‘Civilisation’ and Commerce in Nineteenth-Century West Africa
• 4 Colonial Australia, the 1887 Colonial Conference, and the Struggle for Imperial Unity
• 5 Colonial Emulation, Competition and Opportunism: A Twentieth-Century Spanish Perspective on the British and French ‘Empire Projects’
• 6 Democratisation and the British Empire
• 7 Complicating Decolonisation: Mozambican Indian Experiences in the Twentieth Century
• 8 Britishness Reconsidered: Interplay Between Immigration and Nationality Legislation and Policymaking in Twenty-first Century Britain
• 9 Imperial Projections & Crisis: The Liberal International Order as a ‘Pseudo-Empire’
• Index