Conclusion

Abstract

This study began by relating ideas of imperial development in the early 1900s to the chief preoccupations of Britain’s political leaders. Those preoccupations were the same as bedevilled the governing classes throughout Europe: the search for methods to make democratic systems compatible with state interests, for ways to sustain external trade when economic nationalism was beginning to reassert itself and for continued means of access to raw materials when industrial demand was straining supply. The construction of a world-wide British alliance appeared to many as an appropriate response to these issues because it would permit a gradual integration of the financial, military, manpower and trading needs of its constituent parts. World War I gave some credence to these aspirations, partly through the concrete economic cooperation between the UK and the Dominions which it entailed, but also through the propaganda machine which sought to project the image of the great British diaspora finally unified under the stress of conflict. The post-war years only served to intensify the pressures which had created this imperial ideology. Britain, like all the other industrial nations, found itself in a crisis of urban unemployment, under-utilised capacity and a level of production costs which outstripped profits. If the causes of this crisis were economic, the results were social and political decay.