Empire Lost - Andrew Stewart [0]
Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War
Andrew Stewart
Continuum UK, The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX Continuum US, 80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com Copyright © Andrew Stewart 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission from the publishers.
First published 2008
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 84725 244 9
Typeset by Pindar NZ, Auckland, New Zealand Printed and bound by MPG Books Ltd, Cornwall, Great Britain
Contents
Introduction: A Special Relationship
1 The Great Experiment
2 War Again
3 Controlling the Alliance
4 Standing Alone
5 Coalition United
6 Pacific Test
7 The 'First' Dominion
8 Rupture?
9 Holding the Imperial Line
10 The Private Anzac Club
11 A Family Council
12 Losing an Empire
Conclusion: Brave New World
Notes
Bibliography
For my parents
Introduction: A Special Relationship
'Walk about Sion, and go round about her: and tell the towers thereof—mark well her bulwarks, consider her houses; that ye may tell them that come after'1
In 1958 Nicholas Mansergh finally finished a project that he had started 11 years before, a monumental survey of the British Commonwealth of Nations. He had been elected by the Royal Institute of International Affairs to the newly established chair of British Commonwealth relations, and one of the duties he assumed was the continuation of the Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs. From 1953 onwards, Mansergh would split his time labouring to finish his research and writing at the renowned think-tank based at Chatham House in the heart of London while also serving as Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth at Cambridge University. The result was two volumes of the Survey with three supporting volumes of Documents and Speeches. His initial volume, Problems of External Policy, 1931-39, offered an exhaustive study of the circumstances that had led, what at this point was still then generally termed as 'the British Empire', into its final titanic military struggle. The publication of the accompanying documents followed before Mansergh's second volume, Problems of Wartime Cooperation and Post-War Change, 1939-1952, was released to considerable acclaim. One reviewer described it as 'an extraordinary arrangement', a book of 'scholarship and insight, illuminated with flashes of wit'. Another, himself a great historian of the Empire and Australian by birth, viewed it as 'the most valuable contribution to the understanding of the Commonwealth of yesterday, today and tomorrow'. This noted scholar Professor Keith Hancock who pre-war had begun the task of recording the Survey's assessment of the British Empire's progress, believed it to be an 'immense addition to organized knowledge' which explained fully the British Commonwealth's evolution. The story told was on a colossal scale drawn from Mansergh's wide pre-war academic studies, supplemented by his own wartime experiences. From 1941 onwards he was first the Irish expert, and then later the Director of the Empire Division within the Ministry of Information. At the war's end he moved to the Dominions Office (DO) as an assistant secretary for a short period before returning to academia. From his wartime offices in Malet Street—in peacetime the heart of the University of London—he watched the progress of the global conflict and its effect on an alliance that in 1939 had re-forged an historic bond to defeat a common foe. Now he would tell the tale of how in the process of its greatest victory, Britain had lost its Empire. In between there would be further volumes, largely on his other great passion India, and in 1969 The Commonwealth Experience was published, 'the centrepiece of his oeuvre' and still rightly acknowledged