h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

On the British Empire, that it.

I saw a quote from the historian Richard Gott:

'It took Britain three hundred years to build an empire in India but we got out in seventy days.'

What is our understanding of why the empire fell apart so quickly?

Because we decided we were more interested in 'Free asprin and false teeth' than empire.

Shame we're throwing away the NHS, we could have just kept the empire...

Well I guess that's getting at it. We couldn't afford both - what with the uppity natives getting harder and harder to suppress.

But...isn't the whole point of empires supposed to be that they're nice little earners?

The principle of exploiting the ignorant savages went out of fashion.

Hmm. Call me cynical - but I find it hard to believe that we stopped out of principle. Especially when we applied somewhat extreme measures to hold on to certain parts.

I think the ignorant savages copped on and started refusing to cooperate. And once one did it, they all did, the blighers!

So when did the Empire end?

In NZ there are some who consider we ended up with a relatively useful treaty between the Crown and Tangata Whenua because the Brits wanted an easier path rather than a long drawn out struggle with the natives. But they were still very intent on colonisation. That was 1840. Not sure when we stopped being a colony though (we became self governing in the early 1900s, but colonial attitudes lasted well past then).

1921 in the Republic of Ireland.

Wasn't it more to do with economics than fashion or morality?

The British royal family seem to have stopped using the title "Emperor" in 1948, so that's when the sun set.

I think that it just stopped being profitable, as well as being unfashionable.. the UK was bankrupted by the First and Second World Wars.

That will have been because from Victoria onwards they were Emperors and Empresses of India. specifically.

I'm thinking mostly of the precipitous post-war collapse - although other departures are also relevant. As with Mountbatten's seventy days, the express instructions to most governors was 'Get out quick - and don't worry too much about tidying up after you.'

The unprofitability is certainly the main thing, Z - although the whole point of empires is to generate profit, surely?

What was it that made the empire turn from profit to loss?

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.

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?

The US, perhaps? They were still doing a smash and grab raid on a whole continent full of oil, steel, timber, and coal that they'd only begun to scratch the surface of.

Well, indeed. They had become the dominant industrial power - so much so that it was to them that we owed all the money.

The wars had also trashed our markets, presumably.

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.

Another thing, Ed, is to ask where we'd sell the affordable goods this cheap labour was producing.

An entire continent was living off American hand-outs, and the USA could and was manufacturing things at home that proved cheaper than imported goods.

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.)