Synopsis and chapter summary THE VANISHING EMPIRE by E T Webb Copyright 2015

Synopsis and Chapter Summary: ‘The Vanishing Empire’ by E T Webb, page 1

The Vanishing Empire - Synopsis

By going to war in 1939 to save its Empire, Britain destroyed it - this is the central paradox explored

in E T Webb’s 'The Vanishing Empire' in clear, accessible and thought-provoking prose. This failure

to achieve its imperial war aims was not well understood in the immediate aftermath of 1945’s victory

because, with Britain’s foes vanquished and its colonies back in its hands, many assumed British

power would soon be restored. It was not to be and, over the next two decades, Britain slowly learned

what the true cost of victory against fascism had been: giving up its global position to the USA and

discovering that there was no place in the new Cold War world for 1939’s Empire/Commonwealth.

In order to gloss over this reality, the loss of the colonies was instead presented as ‘decolonisation’,

the concept that the end of Empire was an orderly process directed from London rather than

something that happened in a slightly surprised rush. This interpretation persists today, taking

physical form as the Commonwealth, but it is not much more than a self-comforting myth.

Using the best of recent scholarship, E T Webb considers the state of the Empire in the 1930s,

emphasises WW2’s imperial nature, and analyses the response of successive postwar governments to

nationalism in the colonies. The central theme of the book is that British governments were powerless

to stop the Empire vanishing: WW2 had revealed foundations relying on bluff and the old methods for

restoring control were unacceptable to the new world order.

Despite this, violence and repression were ever present as the British sought if not to stop nationalism

then to ease the right nationalists into power after them. As the Kenya Emergency and the Suez Crisis

remind us, other European states did not have a monopoly on violent exits from empire. Both are

explored in depth to emphasise the sheer complexity of the imperial problems the British were

navigating in their formal and informal empires. The received orthodoxies are challenged: Mau Mau

in Kenya was in fact many things at once and not just a strange oath-inspired uprising against

European settlers; Suez was not the watershed from whence decolonisation was unleashed, but a

marker along the way of British power’s downward trajectory.

The book will engage and challenge general readers, as well as A level students and undergraduates.

Extensive notes provide plenty of ideas for further thinking (along with some of the more interesting

and amusing anecdotes left out of textbooks), with a good reading list to support independent

research. The author was the head of history at an English secondary school and uses his experience

of English curriculum matters (both as a teacher and as a pupil) to raise questions about how this

period is remembered and the consequences for how Britain perceives its place in the world today.


Chapter Summary

Chapter 1: ‘How’s the Empire?’ c.1900-1930s

In order to understand what was eventually lost it is useful to know what ‘the Empire’ was in the first

place, how it was run, and its condition; this chapter uses king George V’s dying question, ‘How’s the

empire?’ as its starting point. The British Empire was far from being a homogenous unit but a

‘hodgepodge’ of places with many differing degrees of control exercised over them by London,

depending only in part on whether they were in the formal or informal empire. Its growth had been

haphazard and this characteristic would later be matched by its unplanned disappearance.

As for its condition, the Empire of the 1930s was surviving, but only by storing up problems for itself

in the future. It had had to adapt to cope with the shocks of WW1 and the Depression by transforming

itself into a protectionist trading bloc and this ‘third empire’ allowed the imperial economy to emerge

comparatively strongly in the late 1930s, at the expense of future competiveness and cordial relations

with the Americans. Social development was stalled, with one critic referring to the ‘slummy empire’,

and political development is best described as ‘two-track’. Whilst the dominions became independent,

India’s route to similar freedom was uncertain, and progress in the African settler colonies was

hampered by their white minority governments intent only on entrenching power. Elsewhere, post-

WW1 had seen the British violently quelling revolt against their rule in a number of places. Come

1945 and the defeat of the fascist empires, many colonial subjects were to ask just what it was they

had been fighting for when they realised the British expected them to remain imperial subjects,

unchanged from 1939.

Chapter 2: The Imperial World War, 1930s-1945

Between 1939 and 1945 Britain was fighting a war to protect the British Empire. It was an imperial

war, not just a war to protect the Polish Corridor, and this can be seen both in its causes and where the

fighting took place.

The peace treaties of 1919-21 spent considerable time dividing up all the Triple Alliances’ colonial

territories, property and agreements, leading to resentment at the victors’ appropriation of imperial

spoils that would fuel war later. As for appeasement, it was supposed to be the opposite of a cause of

war. Imperial defence policy had long made use of it, dating back to way before Chamberlain’s time,


and in the 1930s it was the only option for an over-stretched empire facing the triple threat of

Germany, Italy and Japan. Much of its substance was imperial: the Anglo-German Naval Agreement

sought to maintain the Royal Navy’s supremacy, so vital to imperial security; the offer to rescramble

Africa (reallocating British, Portuguese and Belgian colonial territories to Germany) was supposed to

correct Versailles’ stripping Germany of its colonies; and the toleration of Mussolini’s imperialism

was intended to prevent his allying with Hitler.

Once fighting commenced, approximately half of British troop deployments were to the imperial

theatre. In North Africa the army had to defend the Suez Canal and the approaches to Iraq’s oilfields

and in Burma it had to defend India; no troops were deployed to Poland. All the great disasters of the

war after Dunkirk were in the imperial theatre and shattered the bluff on which British imperial power

had relied on for so long. At the same time as they attacked Pearl Harbor, the Japanese attacked

Malaya and Hong Kong, later overwhelming them. In 1942 the army holding Singapore surrendered

to much smaller Japanese forces. Australia in particular, already dubious about Britain’s military

capabilities and priorities, turned to the Americans for protection. They too were extremely suspicious

of British war aims, fearing their focus was on safeguarding the British Empire postwar rather than

defeating the enemy now – Americans had no intention of fighting to save an Empire against which

they had fought a revolutionary war less than 200 years before.

Chapter 3: The Cost of Victory, 1945-47

In the immediate aftermath of the war Britain faced what economist John Maynard Keynes called a

‘financial Dunkirk’. It lacked enough dollars to buy essential imports, pay for its troops overseas,

support sterling and pay the huge bill for all the war supplies used under the US Lend-Lease Act of

1941. (Lend-Lease was the most significant event in the entire war for Britain because it enabled it to

continue fighting.) Bankruptcy was only averted by Keynes’ postwar negotiations with the Americans

in Washington, where they wrote off almost the entire cost of Lend-Lease and made Britain a loan to

save sterling from collapse (it was not paid off until 2006).

But the Americans were not entirely selfless. They took advantage of Britain’s weak negotiating

position to force it to break up the third empire, open the door to US goods and services, and make the

dollar the world’s premier reserve currency, as already agreed at Bretton Woods. This left the British

with a nagging sense of injustice at their treatment by an ally, but Keynes was one of the few people

who understood the extent to which Britain’s power had been permanently downgraded. He knew


Britain could no longer afford to multi-task as an imperial power, a world policeman, and an occupier

whilst rebuilding its shattered domestic economy and infrastructure – something had to give.

Chapter 4: The Imperial Socialists, 1945-51

Clement Attlee’s two Labour governments are sometimes assumed to have been in favour of ending

the British Empire. It was certainly the case that in Burma, India, Ceylon, Ireland and Palestine, the

policy was to make way to nationalists (or the UN in Palestine), but this was a policy of expediency to

halt the spread of independence. When Attlee and foreign secretary Bevin could they slowed down

Britain’s colonial exit and concentrated on rebuilding the African colonies to replace the Raj under the

auspices of ‘imperial socialism’. This ‘fourth empire’ never really got established: nationalism,

technical failings, and the gap between economic development and political advancement meant it

was fading fast even before the Conservatives won the 1951 general election.

In its informal empire Britain committed itself to staying put. Despite Attlee arguing for withdrawal

from the Middle East (the passage to India no longer had to be defended) , he backed down in the face

of fierce opposition from Bevin and the chiefs of staff who argued its oil supplies were essential to

Britain’s defence.

Attlee’s great imperial achievement was to plant the idea that Britain was engaged in ‘decolonisation’,

transferring power peacefully and according to plan in one colony after another. Of course, his real

plan had been to write off lost causes in the hope that nationalism did not spread, but his government

and subsequent ones found that nationalism was too contagious once the genie was out of the bottle.

The British discovered they had only limited influence over the circumstances surrounding their exit;

they therefore focused on creating sufficient goodwill with their preferred successors so that

negotiations on Commonwealth membership and military bases would have more chance of success.

It was an approach summarised as better to give away too much too soon, than too little too late.

Chapter 5: Did Churchill Try to Hang on to Empire? 1951-55

There was considerable continuity between Labour and Conservative governments’ imperial policies.

This is interesting when confronted by a character as large as life as Winston Churchill who was, for

many, the very embodiment of Britain and its Empire and could reasonably have been counted on to

halt the scuttle. Nevertheless, under his government, the Empire’s direction of travel continued


towards the exit - even Churchill had to acknowledge that Britain found itself in somewhat changed

circumstances. Whilst he harrumphed and sulked he made no real attempt to hang on to empire in the

way that France did in Indochina or Holland did in the East Indies. He hardly features in the big

imperial crises like the Kenya Emergency, leaving policy to the colonial and foreign secretaries. It is

worth remembering too the physical decrepitude he was in by then. No longer the towering figure of

yore, Churchill’s powers aged 77 on election were fading fast; he retired in 1955, handing over with

great misgivings to the foreign secretary, Anthony Eden.

Chapter 6: The Kenya Emergency, 1952-60

In Kenya the British government was forced to respond to what the white minority regime said was a

murderous anti-European movement steeped in black magic (the Mau Mau) by declaring a state of

emergency designed to pre-empt a full-blown uprising. However, this, and the rigged trial of those the

authorities said were the Mau Mau’s leaders, actually had the opposite effect and precipitated the

worst phase of fighting in the colony, as the Mau Mau fought all-out for ‘land and freedom’. The

British responded by committing huge levels of manpower and resources to support the Kenyan

government, but the conflict turned out to be much more complicated than was first thought: not only

did the Mau Mau mostly attack those Kikuyu that refused to join their movement (rather than settlers),

it also appeared that the Kenyan government was using the situation to entrench its hold over the

colony.

The lengths that the (British and Kenyan) authorities went to to defeat the uprising were extraordinary

in their scale and brutality. Aside from the military and aerial bombing campaigns against guerrilla

groups in the forests around Nairobi, a system of screening was designed to interrogate the entire

Kikuyu population in order to root out those who had taken the Mau Mau vow. This required their

reorganisation into fortified villages and the establishment of concentration camps in which the

authorities had approved the use of violence and hard labour to somehow cleanse the oath-takers of

their allegiance. (This would later erupt in the Hola Massacre scandal, which continues to have

repercussions for Britain today.) Knowing the details of what happened in this ‘pipeline’ makes it

hard to provide a qualified defence of Britain’s exit from empire along the lines of, ‘well, at least it

wasn’t as bad as the French and Portuguese empires’.

In the end this level of repression was too much for the British government. It drastically changed its

policy towards the unsympathetic Kenyan regime once the Mau Mau threat was neutralised and this

had profound consequences for the settlers. Britain set about making political reforms to enable


majority rule, having decided there was no future in rule by a white minority so opposed to political

development. Crucially they made considerable land reforms that went some way to addressing the

Mau Mau’s (and non-Mau Mau’s) grievances. After the Emergency was finally over, the very man the

authorities had imprisoned for being Mau Mau evil personified, Jomo Kenyatta, became president.

Chapter 7: Eden and Suez: Why? 1956

At the heart of what the British called the 1956 Suez Crisis was PM Anthony Eden, who drove his

government forward in its hardline stance towards Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdul Nasser. In trying to

apply the lessons of Munich to the Middle East he had many supporters, including future PM Harold

Macmillan - from the imperial point of view, the argument was sound that, without a show of force to

remove Nasser, his pan-Arabism would destroy Britain’s informal empire in the region. However,

Eden’s rush to violence over the wrong issue at the wrong time (the nationalisation of the Suez Canal

Company) made it appear as if he was having his own Nasser Crisis, so personally fixated did he

become on removing the man he called colonel.

The extent to which Eden’s health played a role in this is fascinating. Some historians are uneasy

about delving into the realms of physiology and psychology but it is impossible to ignore the weight

of evidence from those who observed Eden up close and noticed the change in his temperament from

early 1956. There is a reluctance too to acknowledge that the British constitution collapsed when

confronted by a mentally imbalanced PM. Eden was able to conduct his Nasser policy in great secrecy

and, whilst publically pursuing a diplomatic solution, favoured a military one all along despite it being

wholly disproportionate to the threat posed.

It was US opposition more than anything else that brought Eden to heel. Eisenhower ordered the US

6th Fleet to harass the British task force as it sailed across the Mediterranean, refused to sell Britain oil

once its middle eastern markets were inaccessible, and actively schemed to weaken sterling. Only

when confronted by the imminent collapse of the pound did Eden back down, incredibly just hours

from achieving the military objective of seizing the Suez Canal. To be fair to Eisenhower, the Soviets

had threatened to defend Nasser with nuclear weapons: the president would not be drawn into

defending a NATO ally over what he considered largely an imperial matter. (Those, like Churchill,

who believed Eden should have seen the mission through once it had started, ignored the fact that the

real objective of toppling Nasser could have taken months or even years of guerrilla fighting.)

Even if Eden was not ‘mad’ he was an imperialist when it was mad to be one. He had learnt the wrong

lessons from Hitler and Mussolini’s appeasement and was stuck in a 1930s imperial great power


mindset. Unlike Macmillan he did not adapt quickly to the harsh new postwar realities,

acknowledging too late Britain’s reduced circumstances. But Suez was not a turning point in Britain’s

exit from empire. Its strategic aim was to maintain Britain’s informal presence in the Middle East and

this it continues to do today, albeit having moved over and made more space for the Americans. What

Suez did do was make very public Britain’s postwar weakness, most notably its financial fragility and

inability to conduct foreign policy independent of the USA.

Chapter 8: The End of the Empire of Rule, 1957-71

When Macmillan took over as PM in January 1957 he was seemingly happy to write off Suez as all

Eden’s fault and set about quickly restoring Anglo-American relations. Once this was done he came

to accept that the British had to concede control of the independence timetable to the nationalists. This

was not so much a change of policy but an injection of leadership to make Britain face up to events.

The scandals of 1959 (murder in Kenya and the police state in the Central African Federation (CAF)),

Belgium’s problems in the Congo, and France’s war in Algeria all helped focus minds on what the

alternative realities might be for Britain if it did not act decisively. Macmillan’s motto was, ‘no more

Nyasalands’ and he appointed Iain Macleod as colonial secretary to get on with giving form to the

‘wind of change’ that he had publically acknowledged in Africa in 1960. Macleod set about doing this

vigorously in Kenya and the CAF, facing down the settlers’ leaders and their supporters in the UK

Parliament. 1959-60 then, not Suez, was the real tipping point when nationalists found the last

obstacles (which only really amounted to institutional foot-dragging) swept away.

With Britain’s exit from Africa almost complete by the mid 1960s, its weak economy became the

principle driving force behind imperial policy. The devaluation of the pound in 1967 saw the

beginning of the end of the Overseas Sterling Area and spending cuts meant withdrawing the military

from ‘east of Suez’ by 1971. The empire of rule had vanished leaving behind just rocks and islands

(and the rebel state of Rhodesia); but, in the nuclear age, their usefulness was not to be underestimated

given their suitability as military bases.

Conclusion

In English schools and popular histories the imperial aspects of WW2 are downplayed, and the Battle

of Britain, the Blitz, the Home Front and so on are emphasised, leading to a misremembering of what

the war had originally been about. In the summer of 1940 it was of course about defending Great


Britain from invasion, but a year before it had been about defending the British Empire from fascist

regimes intent on upsetting the global balance of power. In a delayed defeat Britain lost this original

imperial war and it is this which contributes to the way WW2 as whole has been incompletely

remembered. By the 1960s, given that colonialism was accepted as being a ‘bad thing’ and with the

Empire gone, Britain did not want to draw too much attention to its original imperial war aims and we

have been stuck with this interpretation of WW2 ever since.

Synopsis and chapter summary THE VANISHING EMPIRE by E T Webb Copyright 2015

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