World War I and the End of British Hegemony - Essay Example

The Weight of Empire: World War I and the End of British Hegemony Location The Weight of Empire: World War I and the End of British Hegemony When Adolf Hitler wrote in 1924 that the British Empire was “the greatest world power on earth,” it was in praise of a superpower that still held dominion over colonies in every corner of the globe (James, 1994). Great Britain had emerged six years earlier the strongest of the great powers after the death struggle that played out in France, the Low Countries, the Balkans, the Middle East and on the high seas. But Britain had been bled white by the Great War in which the mother country, its colonies and dominions sustained a combined 1.2 million deaths. The British Empire had committed its full weight to the defeat of Germany and the other Central Powers – the cost was its physical and moral supremacy as an imperial power and its practical control over an enormously over-extended collection of overseas possessions. Absolute naval supremacy and a willingness to wage countless “little wars” around the world enabled Great Britain to build and maintain the largest empire the world has ever known. So long as the British were able to follow this “blueprint of empire,” it was possible for them to continue doing business as usual. All-out war in 1914 proved to be a fatal scenario for imperial aspirations. It is worthwhile to note that the British Empire reached its zenith only 21 years before the end of World War I. At that time, Queen Victoria ruled over approximately 372 million human beings occupying 11 million square miles (“Imperialism to Post-Colonialism,” 2010). The Royal Navy was the envy of the world, able to respond to flash points in any part of this vast area in a matter of weeks. The Boer War had shaken the notion of British invincibility but, comparatively speaking, did little material damage on a worldwide scale. It is one of the Name 2 most breathtaking facts of modern world history that World War I did so much to hasten the end of a world empire that just two decades before had appeared unassailable. Aftermath and empire Achieving victory over Imperial Germany forced Great Britain into the modern technological age. The British Army had pioneered the tank and a number of other technical innovations in what Niall Ferguson termed “a huge feat of military modernization” (2002). As has often been the case in British history, need drove advancement but failed to have a lasting impact on the security of the empire. “The stark reality was that, despite the victory and the territory it had brought, the First World War had left the Empire more vulnerable than ever before” (Ibid). The British failed abjectly to apply the lessons learned during the Great War to the need for more efficient management of its colonies. This tendency to fall back on traditional, even outmoded tactics would cost the British much in the years after the war. “Time and again, in the inter-war period, this was a pattern that would repeat itself…a sharp military response, followed by a collapse of British self-confidence, hand-wringing, second thoughts, a messy concession, another concession” (Ferguson, 2002). Ferguson uses Ireland as a prime example. The British had suffered some 1,400 casualties in Ireland by 1921, a toll that the British government and people were no longer willing to tolerate in the interest of empire. British forces in Ireland found themselves overwhelmed because Lloyd George’s government had failed to adopt the advice of Winston Churchill, who called for the utilization of tanks and armoured cars (Ibid). Put simply, the British were content Name 3 to manage circumstances “on the cheap,” a convenience that cost them dearly in Ireland and would do so repeatedly in subsequent years. Perhaps the most telling sign that Great Britain’s imperial façade was cracking was the loss of its historic edge in naval power. Weapons technology had taken a turn against the Royal Navy during the war. U-boat warfare did much to level the balance of sea power, giving the German Kriegsmarine an advantage it lacked in surface vessels and overall firepower. Nevertheless, the Royal Navy’s glorious history still bestowed on the King’s ships a prestige capable of causing the commanders of Germany’s Grand Fleet to lose their nerve. Admiral Reinhardt Scheer made no apologies for exercising caution at the Battle of Jutland, despite having sunk several British warships. “The English fleet had the advantage of looking back on a hundred years of proud tradition which must have given every man a sense of superiority based on the great deeds of the past” (Herman, 2004). This is all the more remarkable given the startlingly backward condition the Royal Navy found itself in during the war. The navy had switched from coal to oil power before the war, but lagged behind the Germans in several crucial areas. The British still used tactics that dated to Nelson’s time (Ferguson, 2002). Technology was, by then, available that could ensure greater firing accuracy by compensating for a ship’s heave and roll, yet the British had not outfitted their ships with this advancement. Semaphore was still the means by which British warships communicated, whereas by 1914 the Germans were using wireless communications (Ibid). Ultimately, the British managed to hold off the German naval juggernaut, principally by force of numbers, but the Royal Navy had proven notoriously dilatory in the development of Name 4 modern technologies, a situation which was not materially improved until the onset of the Second World War. Great Britain emerged from the war the world’s preeminent naval force, but only just so. The Royal Navy, the very symbol of British imperial power, held the upper hand but found itself unable to go it alone. In To Rule the Waves, Arthur Herman points out that “the British Navy would have lost the war without the Americans – or indeed the Japanese – who dispatched their own destroyers to escort British merchantmen and even helped in the anti-submarine campaign in the Mediterranean” (2004). It was an unsettling yet unavoidable precursor of a new world order. British seaborne might would rapidly dissolve in the decades after the war, removing forever Great Britain’s primacy among the world’s navies and its long status as the only nation capable of exerting its influence anywhere in the world. Administering the millions The British Foreign Service had for generations been the career of choice for countless adventurers, restless fortune seekers, impoverished nobility and disenfranchised younger sons. The colonial network of governors and bureaucrats that connected the empire to the mother country had, by the early 20th century, become terribly inefficient in terms of generating and managing revenue for the empire. Governing the far-flung colonies was, at best, a patchwork effort and often found the British in the position of oppressor. Colonial governors, the representatives of Britain’s liberal traditions of government, increasingly found themselves in the incongruous position of autocrat. “When we say that Great Britain has given to many of her colonies liberal constitutions, so liberal that they as nearly as possible approach to her own Name 5 constitution, few people take any other view of the subject than to congratulate themselves on the generosity of their country… feeling (they) will be governed with greater ease and with more harmony to the home government than formerly. But this is all delusion” (Bell, 1859). In other words, liberal government may have been the ideal at home, but governing the natives required a firmer hand. The time-honored tradition of cowing native populations with the presumption of moral superiority, backed by firepower, had worked well enough. But after colonial subjects from India, Africa and the Far East had done their bit for King and Country in the trenches and other theatres, there was no question of them docilely resuming the role of faithful and supportive minions. In Africa, blacks were used cynically and indiscriminately during the war. In East Africa, 3,516 whites died in the service of the empire. When blacks are added as troops and carriers, the number of casualties soars to more than 100,000; in all, approximately 2 million Africans served the interests of the British Empire during World War I (Ferguson, 2002). The Sikhs went to war firm in the belief that British sahibs were utterly incapable of cowardice. But war on the Western Front disabused them of that notion. The idea that the British were a superior race deserving of undying loyalty was a blow to the empire’s prestige. In this sense, the First World War indoctrinated ruler and subject alike in the credo that empires were becoming a thing of the past. Decay from within There is a persistent school of thought that says the decline of any empire is inevitably Name 6 preceded by the decline of its internal foundational social and economic support systems. Winston Churchill gave a speech at Leicester in 1909 that warned of the degradation of many important aspects of the British way of life. Churchill lamented that the condition of British society was a cause of great worry and that it boded ill for the future of the empire, which relied heavily upon the moral integrity of the mother country. He pointed to the growing gulf between rich and poor, an erosion of personal responsibility and civic duty. More specifically, he made mention of a visit by newspaper editors from the colonies, who found conditions in England and Scotland in a deplorable state, infrastructures allowed to crumble and decay “here in our midst…in the vast growing cities of England and Scotland, and in the dwindling and cramped villages of our denuded countryside. It is there you will find the seeds of Imperial ruin and national decay – the unnatural gap between rich and poor, the divorce of the people from the land…the absence of any established minimum standard of life and comfort among the workers, and, at the other end the swift increase of vulgar, joyless luxury…” (Churchill, 1909). Churchill ended with a warning that these “enemies of Britain” would eventually do more than any external foe to tear down the great imperial civilization the British had established over hundreds of years. The onset of war in 1914 superseded a number of pressing social and political crises threatening British society. Most of the nation’s major trade unions had gone on strike in the years immediately preceding the war. Labor unrest had opened the way for the growing women’s suffrage movement, which became increasingly vocal and insistent in the first two Name 7 decades of the 20th century. Ireland, perhaps sensing an internal weakening of British resolve, increased political pressure for home rule and terror campaigns weakened Britain’s hold on its oldest colonial possession. The “intervention” of war postponed these problems, which themselves were symptoms of deeper economic problems. The manifestations of these greater ills returned after the war, weakening the British commitment to maintaining its empire and limiting its ability to do so. Wages and working conditions continued to be problematic issues for workers in key national industries after the war. The mining and railroad concerns were a source of particularly severe protests. The resulting fall from power of Lloyd George’s liberal coalition government gave way to the ascendancy of the conservatives in the mid-1920s. Political developments at home had deeper repercussions for the empire. After World War I, Britain found itself no better off than other European nations, rivals it had long surpassed in economic and military terms. It is during this period, which was so profoundly impacted by the material costs of the war, that the fabric which bound Britain to its colonies and dominions the world over began to tear apart. Rumblings of separation increased in severity in Ireland, where several Home Rule bills had failed to clear Parliament, and in India, where the 1919 Government of India Act was unsuccessful at accommodating demands for lasting independence on the sub-continent. Conclusion In 1922, Britain signed the Washington Naval Treaty, an official recognition that the United States now held naval parity with Britain and would maintain a fleet equally as powerful. Name 8 This expected outcome of the war was a temporary situation. Britain’s inability to maintain economic parity with the U.S. meant, among other things, that its naval power would be surpassed by that of the Americans. The consequent contraction of Britain’s high seas fleet, as much as anything, signaled the beginning of the end of its imperial existence: if the British could no longer patrol (and control) its colonies, it was only a matter of time before its possessions would begin to fall away. The empire not only required vast resources to maintain – resources that the First World War exhausted – but also the will to maintain it. The “splendid isolation” amid which Disraeli, Salisbury and others aggrandized British world power in the 19th century was shattered by World War I. The insularity and naval power that had frustrated the ambitions of Napoleon was a thing of the past – Britain was now inextricably tied to the fortunes of the other European nations. The freedom that had allowed it to “cherry pick” colonies the world over was at an end. Those who had considered such isolation perilous were proven right. When the need arose for British intervention on the Continent, it required the commitment of its full resources and those of other members of what would become the British Commonwealth. A new world order was unfolding, and it would no longer bear the weight of empire. Name 9 Bibliography Bell, Sydney S. 1859. Colonial Administration of Great Britain. Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, London. 378. Churchill, Winston 2007. Liberalism and the Social Problem. Arc Manor, Rockville, Md. Ferguson, Niall 2002. Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. Penguin Books, London. 253, 274-75. Herman, Arthur 2004. To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World. Harper Collins, New York. 508, 515. “Imperialism to Postcolonialism – Perspectives on the British Empire.” The Norton Anthology of English Literature. 2010 – 2011. Web. http://www.wwnorton.com/college/english/nael/20century/topic_1/welcome.htm. James, Lawrence 1994. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. St. Martin’s Press, New York. 451. Read More