Thanks to its own resources and those of the empire, Britain avoided defeat in 1940. There is no doubt that this was a moment of global significance. Had Britain surrendered, like France, or been knocked out the war, Hitler would have been free to devote all Germany’s manpower and resources on his war against the Soviet Union, while the United States would probably have pulled in its horns and concentrated on defending the Western Hemisphere. Instead, British defiance encouraged Roosevelt to extend material support and then enter the war. Britain became the essential base from which the Western Allies could eventually mount a cross-Channel assault to help liberate Europe.
So Britain’s 1940 really mattered. But whatever Churchill declaimed then about ‘victory at all costs’, overcoming Hitler’s Reich was beyond its own capabilities once there was no French army or Western Front in Europe, and when the Royal Navy faced challenges in the Mediterranean and the Pacific as well as in home waters. Britain therefore had no choice but to rely on new allies to win the victory – above all the USA and the USSR. By May 1945, after five years of total war, Hitler was dead and his Thousand-Year Reich lay in ruins, but he had brought down the old Europe with him. Such was the extent of Germany’s early success in 1940 that the Führer had, in effect, called the superpowers into existence to redress the balance of the Old World. After the D-Day landings in Normandy in June 1944, the United States dominated the campaign in Western Europe, while the Red Army’s long and bloody fightback from Stalingrad to Berlin left it in control of most of Eastern Europe. By the time the Germans surrendered, the armed forces of the USA and USSR each numbered between 11 and 12 million men, more than double the British figure.
Had the world reverted to the pattern of the previous post-war era after 1918, with American and Russian withdrawal from Europe, the power shift would not have been so pronounced. But out of this war there developed a bitter Soviet–American rivalry, which not only divided Germany and Europe into two military blocs but also became truly global and fiercely ideological. Although Britain was still a major power in the immediate post-war period – third in military and industrial terms around 1950, thanks in part to the total defeat of Germany and Japan – it could not match the two superpowers, despite maintaining until 1960 the policy of peacetime conscription. In 1953, Britain’s peak post-war year, its armed forces totalled 900,000 compared with 3.5 million for the USA and 4.75 million in the case of the USSR.[54] Nor, in the age of nuclear weapons and inter-continental missiles, could it hope to keep up in the Cold War arms race with the Big Two. Since the 1960s, Britain’s continued existence as a nuclear power has depended on its ‘special relationship’ with the United States.
This does not mean that Britain is no longer of any military consequence. It remains the only European member of the Western Alliance, apart from France, to maintain a capacity for power-projection outside the NATO area. But its days as a major global presence are over. As with the economic story, others have surpassed its precocious early lead – reducing Britain to the position that one might expect for a state of its size, population and resources. In power, as in wealth, what is historically striking was ‘rise’, not ‘fall’.
Empire, power and greatness
Britain would never have risen so high but for the ‘multiplier’ effect of empire. It was the empire which made Britain great. At the start of the twentieth century Britain and Ireland had only 42 million people, whereas the population of the USA was 76 million and of Tsarist Russia 133 million. When the inhabitants of Britain’s overseas territories were included, however, the arithmetic looked different. At its peak after the Great War, the British Empire covered nearly a quarter of the earth’s land surface and encompassed a similar proportion of its population, over 500 million in all. France accounted for only 9 per cent of the earth’s land surface and 108 million of its people.[55] At times of crisis the empire could serve as a vast resource of material and manpower. During the Great War the British government mobilised 6.7 million men from Britain and Ireland, but 3 million more came from the empire – nearly half of these from India.[56] In 1939–45 the imperial contribution was yet more pronounced: while the UK mobilised 5.9 million, the so-called ‘white dominions’ – Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa – raised nearly 2.5 million and India over 2 million.[57]
Mindful of such statistics, some historians have castigated British leaders for ‘losing’ the empire, because that diminished the country’s ability to compete with the continent-sized superpowers. Correlli Barnett, for instance, argued that if the British had not lost their nerve, they could have held on to India by ‘resolute autocracy’.[58] Yet it was not willpower but hard power that mattered. And, to quote again the German commentator Constantin Frantz in 1882, Britain was really ‘an artificial worldpower’ (eine künstliche Weltmacht) because ‘the territorial base of this power was just a European country’ and its resources came from colonies spread out across the oceans which were tied to Britain only ‘through the threads of the fleet’ and ‘these threads could all be broken or cut’.[59] This was not a vast continental empire commanding adjacent terrain, unlike the United States and the Soviet Union after each had surmounted its crisis of civil war – in 1861–5 and 1917–22 respectively.
This lack of a contiguous continental empire was Britain’s basic weakness as a world power. But almost as significant was the diversity of its colonial territories. The empire emerged haphazardly, with little coordination from London. There were leftovers in Canada and the Caribbean from the pre-1776 American colonies; spoils from the wars against France, of which India was the most important; the fruits of creeping imperialism in West Africa as weak tribal governments caved in before the advance of European commerce, conquest and culture; pre-emptive strikes in South and East Africa in the late nineteenth century to block European rivals; and the carve-up of the decaying Ottoman Empire before and after the Great War, including territories such as Egypt astride the Suez Canal, oil-rich Iraq and the poisoned chalice of Palestine.
Nor did Britain truly ‘own’ these diverse ‘possessions’. British control was usually superficial. In colonies settled by white emigrants from the UK, who dominated the indigenous population, successive London governments gradually followed the path of increasing devolution. This pattern began in Canada in the 1840s and was extended to the other white-settler colonies in Australasia and southern Africa during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. By 1931, when the London Parliament’s residual authority was abrogated, the Dominions – as the white-settler colonies were known – were effectively independent in all domestic affairs. Although still dependent on Britain for defence, the main bond linking them with Britain was that of loyalty to the country from which many of them, or their parents, had only recently emigrated in the early decades of the twentieth century. This ‘Britannic nationalism’ was a potent force in mobilising support for the ‘mother country’ in the two world wars. In the 1930s, for instance, over 95 per cent of Australians and nearly 50 per cent of Canadians were of British stock.[60]
This policy of measured devolution was adopted in colonies where there was a large British settler community and also the capacity for fiscal independence. ‘Non-white’ colonies were treated differently because, until well after 1945, they were generally thought incapable of self-government. In these cases the British employed more autocratic and paternalistic methods, with an unelected government headed by a British Governor exercising certain devolved powers under supervision from London. Much of the dependent empire was run in this way as Crown Colonies. Even where there seemed little benefit to Britain – as in West Africa, the West Indies or the Falklands – London clung on for fear that a rival power might acquire the territories or because these lacked a natural ethnic or political viability. At the same time the British tried to minimise the costs of continued