‘The wind of change is blowing through this continent and, whether we like it or not, this growth of [African] consciousness is a political fact’.
‘Great Britain has lost an Empire and has not yet found a role’.
‘This is Imre Nagy, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Hungarian People’s Republic, speaking. In the early hours of this morning, the Soviet troops launched an attack against our capital city with the obvious intention of overthrowing the lawful, democratic, Hungarian Government. Our troops are fighting. The Government is in its place. I inform the people of the country and world public opinion of this’.
‘It is a grave error to call upon foreign troops to teach one’s people a lesson’.
At the close of the Second World War, the peoples of Western Europe—who were hard put to govern or even feed themselves—continued to rule much of the non-European world. This unseemly paradox, whose implications were not lost on indigenous elites in the European colonies, had perverse consequences. To many in Britain, France or the Netherlands, their countries’ colonies and imperial holdings in Africa, Asia, the Middle East and the Americas were balm for the suffering and humiliations of the war in Europe; they had demonstrated their material value in that war as vital national resources. Without access to the far-flung territory, supplies and men that came with colonies, the British and French especially would have been at an even greater disadvantage in their struggle with Germany and Japan than they already were.
This appeared particularly obvious to the British. To anyone raised (like the present author) in post-war Britain, ‘England’, ‘Britain’ and ‘British Empire’ were near-synonymous terms. Elementary school maps showed a world heavily daubed in imperial red; history textbooks paid close attention to the history of British conquests in India and Africa especially; cinema newsreels, radio news bulletins, newspapers, illustrated magazines, children’s stories, comics, sporting contests, biscuit tins, canned fruit labels, butcher shop windows: everything was a reminder of England’s pivotal presence at the historical and geographical heart of an international sea-borne empire. The names of colonial and dominion cities, rivers and political figures were as familiar as those of Great Britain itself.
The British had lost their ‘first’ empire in North America; its successor, if not exactly acquired in ‘a fit of absent-mindedness’, was anything but the product of design. It cost a lot to police, service and administer; and— like the French imperium in North Africa—it was most fervently appreciated and defended by a small settler class of farmers and ranchers, in places like Kenya or Rhodesia. The ‘white’ dominions—Canada, Australia, New Zealand—and South Africa were independent; but their formal allegiance to the Crown, their affective ties to Britain, the food and raw materials they could supply and their armed forces were regarded as national assets in all but name. The material value of the rest of Britain’s Empire was less immediately obvious than its strategic uses: British holdings in East Africa—like the various British-controlled territories and ports in the Middle East and around the Arabian peninsula and the Indian Ocean—were esteemed above all as adjuncts to Britain’s main imperial asset: India, which at the time included what would later become Pakistan and Bangladesh, as well as Sri Lanka and Burma.
All the European empires had been acquired sporadically, episodically and (with the exception of the land and sea routes servicing British India) with little sustained attention to logistic consistency or economic gain. The Spanish had already lost most of their empire, first to the British, later to demands for independence from their own settlers, most recently to the rising power of the United States—a source of lingering anti-American sentiment in Spain, then and now. What remained were mere enclaves in Morocco and Equatorial Guinea, to be abandoned by Franco (ever the realist) between 1956 and 1968.
But much of Africa and Asia was still in European hands: governed either directly from the imperial capitals, through a locally recruited governing caste of European-educated intellectuals, or else via indigenous rulers in subservient alliance with European masters. Politicians in post-war Europe who knew only such people were thus largely unaware of the rapid growth of nationalist sentiment among a coming generation of activists throughout the empires (except perhaps in India, but even there they long underestimated its scale and determination).
Thus neither the British, nor any of the other remaining European colonial powers, anticipated the imminent collapse of their holdings or influence overseas. As the British historian Eric Hobsbawm has attested, the end of the European colonial empires seemed very far off in 1939 even to students at a seminar for young Communists from Britain and her colonies. Six years later, the world was still divided between rulers and ruled, powerful and powerless, wealthy and poor, to an extent that seemed unlikely to be bridged in the near future. Even in 1960, well after the worldwide movement towards independence had gathered steam, 70 percent of the world’s gross output and 80 percent of the economic value added in manufacturing industry came from Western Europe and North America.
Tiny Portugal—smallest and poorest of the European colonial powers—extracted raw materials at highly favorable prices from its colonies in Angola and Mozambique; these also offered a captive market for Portuguese exports, otherwise internationally uncompetitive. Thus Mozambique grew cotton for the Portuguese commodity market rather than food for its people, a distortion that issued in sizeable profits and regular local famines. In these circumstances and despite unsuccessful revolts in the colonies and military coups at home, Portugese decolonization was postponed as long as possible.[101]
Even if the European states could manage without their empires, few at the time could conceive of the colonies themselves surviving alone, unsupported by foreign rule. Even liberals and socialists who favored autonomy and eventual independence for Europe’s overseas subjects expected it to be many years before such goals would be realized. It is salutary to be reminded that as recently as 1951 the British foreign secretary, Labour’s Herbert Morrison, regarded independence for African colonies as comparable to ‘giving a child of ten a latch-key, a bank account and a shotgun.’
The world war, however, had wrought greater changes in the colonies than most Europeans yet understood. Britain had lost its East Asian territories to Japanese occupation during the war, and although these territories were recovered after the defeat of Japan the standing of the old colonial power had been radically undermined. The British surrender in Singapore in February 1942 was a humiliation from which the British Empire in Asia never recovered. Even though British forces were able to prevent Burma and thence India falling to the Japanese, the myth of European invincibility was shattered for good. After 1945 the colonial powers in Asia would face growing pressure to relinquish their traditional claims.
For the Netherlands, the oldest colonial power in the region, the consequences were particularly traumatic. The Dutch East Indies, and the trading company that had developed them, were part of the national myth, a direct link to the Golden Age and a symbol of Dutch commercial and seafaring glory. It was also widely assumed, especially in the gloomy, impoverished post-war years, that the raw materialsof the Indies—rubber especially— would be the Netherlands’ economic salvation. Yet within two years of the Japanese defeat, the Dutch were once again at war: the Dutch-held territories of South-East Asia (today’s Indonesia) were tying down 140,000 Dutch soldiers (professionals, conscripts and volunteers) and the revolution for Indonesian independence was generating admiration and imitation throughout the remaining Dutch imperium in the Pacific, the Caribbean and South America.
The ensuing guerilla war lasted for four years and cost the Netherlands more than 3,000 military and civilian casualties. Indonesian independence, unilaterally asserted by the nationalist leader Sukarno on November 17th 1945, was finally conceded by the Dutch authorities (and a tearful Queen Juliana) at a conference in The Hague, in December 1949. A steady stream of Europeans (actually many of them were born in the Indies and had never seen the Netherlands) made their way ‘home.’ By the end of 1957, when President Sukarno closed Indonesia to Dutch businessmen, Dutch ‘repatriates’ numbered many tens of thousands.
