Conclusion

Abstract

In the four years which immediately followed the end of the war in 1918, the directors of imperial policy grappled with a variety of problems which tested some of their most fundamental assumptions and expectations about Britain’s imperial power, and about the imperial system which they had inherited from the late Victorians. In Egypt, in India and in Ireland they faced challenges to British authority which were longer lasting and more widely supported than almost any previous expression of dissidence since the Indian Mutiny, even if they fell short of the intensity of the Transvaal’s great rebellion against British paramountcy. In all three places, the ability of British rule to maintain order and to obtain the collaboration or acquiescence of the local population in the continuation of British supremacy in some form was called into question by the success of local politicians in rallying mass support against cooperation with the agencies of British power. Civil disobedience in India, disorder and non-cooperation in Egypt, and open insurrection — apparently condoned by the majority of the population — in Ireland, all came as warnings that the permanence of British over-rule, and the capacity of the imperial system for meeting the aspirations (or quelling the indiscipline) of subject populations, could not be regarded as settled, certain or inevitable. Resistance to the exercise of British influence in Turkey, Persia and Iraq seemed to confirm the existence of a new fragility in the structure of British world power.