Abstract
At the end of the First World War Great Britain was the leader of the Allied nations in military terms. It was, however, a sign of both Britain’s weaknesses and the strength of the new challenges emerging from beyond Europe that hers was not to be the dominant voice at the peace conferences. The general sense of relief at the ending of the war served initially to disguise this fact. The subsequent unfolding of events was to reveal that three weighty considerations combined together to obscure the significance of this development in the ensuing post-war decade. First, the war had ended with the destruction of the four great empires of central and eastern Europe; in the resultant power vacuum in these areas (together with the temporary absence of Germany and Soviet Russia from international deliberations) lay the continuing guarantee of British global authority. Second, although the defeat of the revisionist Central Powers had resulted in the destruction of the old order within Europe no new global order had emerged by 1919–20 to challenge the still dominant western imperial system. Although non-European powers had been brought onto the centre of the world stage during the war, the 1920s were to see a voluntary American withdrawal from European and a partial withdrawal from Asian affairs, plus a continuing Japanese restraint in her dealings with China and South-East Asia.
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© 1986 Anthony Clayton
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Clayton, A. (1986). The Empire, its Nature and the Concept of Power. In: The British Empire as a Superpower, 1919–39. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08609-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-08609-2_1
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-08611-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-08609-2
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