The Concept of Empire from Attlee to Churchill, 1945–55

Abstract

The post-war decade was an anxious one for those whose task it was to maintain Britain’s pre-eminent position in the world. But this was not new; at the turn of the century British statesmen pondered on what it was that could keep Britain ahead of her competitors. In 1906 L. S. Amery warned Lord Milner that Britain must direct her energies ‘into national and imperial channels’.¹ Lord Selborne in October 1901, had expressed concern about the fact that the United States of America, if she wished, could build a navy far superior to that of the United Kingdom.² The years after the Great War were also a period of ‘unusual self-consciousness’ when statesmen, both British and Imperial, ‘looked at their Empire with a fresh awareness and wonder’, referring to the creation of what Jan Smuts described as ‘the only successful experiment in international government that has ever been made’.³ But in 1931 the Irish Free State Minister for External Affairs announced what he called ‘the final demolition of the system which it took centuries to build’.⁴ The loss of India might be expected to provoke further gloomy predictions about this work of ‘demolition’, but the British faced this post-Indian Empire phase of their imperial history with a reasonable degree of confidence.