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 | | | Subject: Why did the sun set?
Posted Apr 23, 2012 by Mr603
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  | | The fact that our economy was crippled by two global wars? Hard to move goods from India when your whole merchant navy's been torpedoed by U-Boats and you're dependent on US Navy cast-offs...
Besides, Britain didn't choose to abandon Empire. The rise of nationalist groups meant that it was prudent. It's not the 1800s and a case of machine guns against spears. We'd trained up generations of Indians and Africans to provide manpower for our wars with The Hun. And much like the working class soldier getting back to Blighty and voting in a socialist government, the colonial soldier got home and wanted self determination.
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| | | Subject: Why did the sun set?
Posted Apr 23, 2012 by Edward the Bonobo - Gone.
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| | The thing I'm trying to bottom out is why, post war, the imperial possessions didn't just become cash cows again. Was it a simple matter of operating costs? (i.e. the constant need for armed suppression) That's quite possible - CLR James pointed out in one of his books that this is the main reason why Britain abandoned a slave-based economy.
All the same it must be quite hard not to turn a profit with access to a huge reservoir of cheap labour, surely? Who was outcompeting Britain and how?
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| | | Subject: Why did the sun set?
Posted Apr 23, 2012 by  Just Bob aka Robert Thompson, plugging my film blog cinemainferno-blog.blogspot.co.uk
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| | I have a pet theory that it was partly because the criteria by which a nation was judged changed. In WWI we managed to beat Germany, yes, but it was a close-run thing, and they had practically no colonial holdings. From then until now, industrial and economic prowess have determined who sits at the 'top table' in world affairs, not square-mileage of territory.
I think the British spotted this, and got ahead of the game. We managed to divest ourselves of a lot of the colonies while keeping their good will as allies and trading partners - with some notable exceptions. By contrast, I gather France tried to hold onto its colonies more tenaciously, with detrimental results.
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| | | Subject: Why did the sun set?
Posted Apr 23, 2012 by Edward the Bonobo - Gone.
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| | nnn...I hear what you're saying, but I'm not convinced that this was anything new. Primacy has always been decided by economics - and it's economics that buys soldiers.
It raises the issue of whether Britain got rid of its colonies in order to get ahead...or because we had to. Incidentally...France *did* also give up its colonies, over precisely the same timeframe as we did. Perhaps the only reason we think that the French anticolonial wars were less detrimental than our own because the Foreign Office dumped most of our records at sea and lost the rest.
So it seems to me that there must have been global economic forces afoot which simply made the colonial model unviable. *However* I'm not convinced it was just the operating costs (ie militarised policing). As Richard Gott has pointed out, imperialists have had to be brutal from the get go. Things like suppressing the Indian Mutiny and Opium Wars were huge, huge overheads. Nevertheless, for about 300 years we were able to take the hit.
One thought I have is that you can run a basic, commodities economy like that but not an industrialised one. For that you need a proper proletariat and bourgeoisie. Post Civil War America had those so cleaned up. Relative to American efficiency the empire became a drain.
(And it also gives a lie to the idea that we left our possessions in good shape when we scuttled off.)
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