Abstract
When in 1953 Winston Churchill, ruminating on his government’s decision to withdraw British troops from the Suez Canal Zone, told his Cabinet that ‘we are not animated by fear or weakness, but by the need of making a better deployment of our forces, and … in my case we are not going to be in any hurry’,1 he expressed what might be regarded as the aspirations of British colonial policy in the post-war era. He also articulated a more general assumption of British policy-makers, that the management of change was well within their capability. Thus the precipitate withdrawal from India in 1947 could be set in the balance by the notion that India had been led, slowly and gradually, towards self-government, though privately the Labour Cabinet on 10 December 1946 admitted that to make a precipitate withdrawal and ‘leave India in chaos’ might be regarded as ‘an inglorious end to our long association with India’: ‘world opinion would regard it as a policy of “scuttle” unworthy of a great power’.2
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Notes
D. Goldsworthy, ‘Keeping Change within Bounds: Aspects of Colonial Policy during the Churchill and Eden Governments, 1951–1957’, JICH, 18: 1 (1996), p. 102.
Ronald Hyam (ed.), BDEE, series A, vol. 2: Labour Government and the End of Empire, 1945–1951, part I: Higher Policy and Administration (London: HMSO, 1992), p. 32.
Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom: Africa in the Struggle Against World Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1962), p. 39.
Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa (London: Muller, 1956), p. 179.
Ali A. Mazrui, Africa’s International Relations: The Diplomacy of Dependency and Change (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1984), p. 28.
For which see the two articles by T. O. Ranger, ‘Connexions between “Primary Resistance” Movements and Modern Mass Nationalism in East and Central Africa’,part 1,Journal of African History, IX: 3 (1968), pp. 437–53; part II, op. cit., IX: 4 (1968), pp. 631–41.
G. E. Metcalfe, Great Britain and Ghana: Documents of Ghanaian History, 1809–1957 (London, 1964), pp. 688–9.
John Iliffe, A Modern History of Tanganyika (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), pp. 263–5.
Thomas Hodgkin, Nationalism in Colonial Africa, pp. 131, 140–2; Robert I. Rotberg, ‘The Rise of African Nationalism’, World Politics, XV (October 1962 July 1963), pp. 75–90, at pp. 79–82;
A. J. Hughes, East Africa: Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda (London: Penguin, 1969 edn), pp. 100–1.
John Lonsdale, ‘The Emergence of African Nations: A Historiographical Analysis’, African Affairs, 67 (1968), pp. 11–28, at pp. 16–17.
John D. Hargreaves, ‘Towards the Transfer of Power in British West Africa’, in Prosser Gifford and W. R. Louis (eds), The Transfer of Power in Africa: Decolonisation, 1940–1960 (London, 1982), p. 138.
Muriel Chamberlain, Decolonisation: The Fall of the European Empires (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985), p. 36.
W. P. Kirkham, Unscrambling an Empire (London: Chatto & Windus, 1960), pp. 32–3.
D. Birmingham, The Decolonisation of Africa (London: University College of London Press, 1995), pp. 46–7.
D. George Boyce (ed.), The Crisis of British Power; The Imperial and Naval Papers of the Second Earl of Selborne, 1895–1910 (London: The Historians’ Press, 1990), p. 222.
For an admirably clear discussion of this phenomenon see Donal Lowry, ‘Shame upon “Little England” while “Greater England” stands! Southern Rhodesia and the Imperial Idea’, in Alex C. May (ed.), The Round Table and British Foreign Policy (London, 1998), pp. 305–41.
Alan Megahey, Humphrey Gibbs Beleaguered Governor: Southern Rhodesia, 1929–1969 (London: Macmillan, 1998), pp. 21–2.
J. D. Fage, A History of Africa (London: Hutchinson, 1978), pp. 450–1.
W. K. Hancock, Survey of British Commonwealth Affairs, vol. 1: Problems of Nationality (London: Oxford University Press, 1937), p. 214.
Zoe Marsh and G. W. Kingsnorth, An Introduction to the History of East Africa (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1963), pp. 182–3.
Frank Furedi, Colonial Wars and the Politics of Third World Nationalism (London: I. B. Taurus, 1994), p. 163.
D. Goldsworthy, ‘Keeping Change within Bounds’, JICH, 18: 1 (1996), p. 84.
George Bennet and Alison Smith, ‘Kenya: from White Man’s Country to Kenyatta’s State, 1945–1963’, in D. A. Low and Alison Smith (eds), History of East Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 136.
A. N. Porter and A. J. Stockwell (eds), British Imperial Policy and Decolonisation 1938–1964, vol. II: 1951–1964 (London, 1987), p. 61.
Porter and Stockwell (eds), British Imperial Policy, pp. 234–7; R. Ovendale, ‘Macmillan and the Wind of Change Speech in Africa, 1957–1960’, Historical Journal, 38: 2 (1995), pp.455–77; Cab. 21/3156, 3157.
John Turner, Harold Macmillan (London: Longman, 1994), p. 200.
Peter B. Harris, The Commonwealth (London, 1957), p. 107.
Austin Morgan, Harold Wilson (London: Pluto Press, 1992), p. 274.
D. Boucher and A. Vincent, A Radical Hegelian: The Political and Social Philosophy of Henry Jones (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1993), p. 151.
Christopher Hill and Christopher Lord, ‘The Foreign Policy of the Heath Government, 1970–74’, in Stuart Ball and Anthony Seldon (eds), The Heath Government, 1970–1974 (London: Longman, 1996), pp. 285–314, at p. 295.
R. Lewis, ‘From Zimbabwe-Rhodesia to Zimbabwe’, Round Table, 70 (1980), pp. 6–9.
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation, pp.319–23; Sir Anthony Parsons, ‘Britain and the World’, in Dennis Kavanagh and Anthony Seldon (eds), The Thatcher Effect: A Decade of Change (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 154–65, at pp. 156–7
John W. Harbeson and Donald Rothschild (eds), Africa in World Politics: Post Cold War Challenges (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1995), p. 30.
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© 1999 D. George Boyce
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Boyce, D.G. (1999). Pillars of Empire: Africa. In: Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775–1997. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-27755-1_10
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