The Climax of Commonwealth and a Time of Disenchantment

Abstract

The final stages in the transformation of the British Empire into a Commonwealth of Nations was the product partly of conviction, partly of experience and perhaps, most of all, of circumstances. Britain and the dominions stood side by side in both world wars from their outbreak to their victorious close. Their overall participation in them was longer than that of any other country on either side.1 The dominions had entered the second world war by their own free choice. For a year, in the (not quite exact) Churchillian phrase, they had ‘stood alone’ and they had made their contributions in every theatre of war from the Mediterranean and western Europe to south-east Asia and the Pacific. To the peoples of Britain and the dominions it seemed as if their experiment in free and equal association had been memorably vindicated. But it was far otherwise with the Colonial Empire. It emerged from the second world war, despite the evidence of a greater sense of social responsibility on the part of the metropolitan power, implicit in the Colonial Development and Welfare Acts (notably that imaginatively enacted in the summer of 1940), with its image tarnished and itself discredited.