The unwinding of the British empire can appear in the rearview mirror as almost quaint in comparison to what the US is going through today and what it is inflicting on the world.
While the eventual retreat of US military around the world as its military hardware is outclassed and its proxies suffer defeats is starting to rhyme with the case of the UK. Echoes of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus can be seen in US policy in Gaza—although on a much grander genocidal scale—and elsewhere.
The foreign policy Blob lurches from one confrontation to another—proxy wars, economic confrontations, small battles, destabilization campaigns—but unable to impose its will like it once did. It finds successes around the world but they are fleeting, almost exclusively due to chaos creation, appeal to corrupt elites, widespread repression, and destruction. It can offer nothing promising to the people living around its military outposts across the world. On the home front, the situation might be even worse. The population is bled dry by parasitic oligarchs, angry and confused but with no electoral outlet for their rage, with an economy running on the fumes of an AI bubble, and masked federal agents roaming the Hooverville streets as the tools of surveillance and population control increasingly find their way from combat zones abroad to the metropole.
Where do we go from here and can the end of the British empire offer any parallels?
That’s the question I was looking for clues to when I picked up Erik Linstrum’s Age of Emergency: Living with Violence at the End of the British Empire. Linstrum who is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia and is also author of Ruling Minds: Psychology in the British Empire, largely deals with the post-WWII twilight years and is particularly interested in the effect on UK society of the brutal colonial campaigns of the 1950s and how these boomeranged on the public at home.
The text is somewhat constrained by its area of focus. It is not a history book detailing key battles and moments British influence suffered irreversible setbacks.
Though (or perhaps because of the fact) I come from a line of what my Irish friends affectionately call “railroad paddies,” my knowledge of the British empire is largely confined to its effect on Ireland and elsewhere. Age of Emergency provides the flip side of that coin: the effect on British citizens.
Here I’ll try to compare what Americans are going through today to what Age of Emergency describes. If there are any shortcomings with regards to British history, I believe we are lucky enough to have some UK history buffs in the readership who can hopefully add more insight in comments.
As one could expect, there are many similarities between the US’ current decline and that of the empire it supplanted, yet there are also key differences, and in some cases it would appear that the US elite learned from the British and are copying or building off effective strategies employed by the British.
Similarities
It was striking how many passages from the book could apply directly to the US today if only a few dates and locations were changed. Take the following examples:
The US and its proxies use similar strategies to the British.
As in Malaya, Emergency Regulations in Kenya allowed for curfews, food restrictions, collective punishments, and detention without trial. A hastily constructed police state swept much of the Kikuyu population into a byzantine network of detention camps where physical abuse, forced labor, and disease were endemic…
That might sound a lot like the US in Iraq and Abu Ghraib or Israel in Palestine. One could argue it’s starting to sound a lot like home.
As we see the wars increasingly come home in the form of tools of oppression used abroad in the “colonies” turned on American immigrants and citizens. Drones used in Gaza by Israel now flying over the US are just the latest example. According to Linstrum, what came home in the UK was more psychological:
…the British state’s reliance on warfare legitimized aggression while individual Britons learned habits of dehumanization in battle with colonial forces.
In the metropole, authoritarian violence generated excitement in large part because its effects were felt elsewhere; it was a rhetorical ideal that could be expressed within the existing system rather than a form of action aimed at toppling it.
In the US—and not just under Trump— we are getting closer to the bone as authoritarian violence becomes increasingly commonplace. It’s not just masked agents on the streets and militarized police either, but the daily violence of neoliberalism, which sees the state encourage its takeover by oligarchal authoritarian entrepreneurs who openly embrace necropolitics.
The “F” word was also being thrown around a lot in the UK during the imperial collapse years as many saw obvious similarities between British actions and those of the Nazis. The same is happening nowadays in the US with some eager to label Trumpism as some sort of aberration, but what Linstrum describes for the UK would also seem to apply to the US today:
The danger of the fascist label is that it exoticizes and marginalizes the home-grown illiberalism of an empire long rooted in racial violence.
Yessir. Just as the horror-filled British campaigns in Africa, Asia, and Europe were a logical extension of capitalism and empire, so too is crude version of imperial America led by Trump. The violence might change locations, evolve, or see minor changes in tactics, but it is always there.
…not “total wars” that transformed civilian life but “small wars” of the kind that had long raged on the frontiers of empire…It was not the people living in Britain but colonial subjects overseas who bore the heaviest burdens in these conflicts.
Sounds familiar. More, including a Graham Greene quote that sums up post-9/11 America:
Tens of thousands of British soldiers, conscripts as well as career soldiers, were dispatched to one trouble spot after another. New wars began before their predecessors were finished. The same grim tactics were tried again and again with uncertain results. Lurking behind it all was the suspicion that the fighting dramatized Britain’s decline as a global power rather than reversing it…What Graham Greene wrote from Malaya in 1950 could stand as an epitaph for the age: “The war was like a mist; it pervaded everything; it sapped the spirits; it wouldn’t clear.”
I don’t believe I can remember the last clear day; perhaps I am not old enough.
Differences
For the US, since just September 11, 2001, there is nary a corner of the earth that hasn’t been affected by American violence, regime change operations, or economic warfare. Yet a key difference between the UK empire and America today is that the latter is also taking place during the heights of neoliberal globalization.
So when Linstrum writes that “The challenge for the British people was to find ways of living with the violence that they simply could not ignore,” it’s an altogether different one for Americans today. US citizens are practiced at ignoring the violence abroad—at least those who aren’t part of the armed forces. It’s not that there is support for endless wars for oligarch profit, but Americans are usually preoccupied with more pressing survivability concerns.
It’s harder to ignore the economic collapse for the majority of the population. There are Hoovervilles and dying towns, deaths of despair, and now masked federal agents roaming the streets as wealth inequality surges past Gilded Age levels. The US empire’s downfall comes at a time of late stage capitalism when more than 99 percent of the public are effectively disenfranchised while factions of reactionary billionaires vie for control. The public has largely become just another colonized people who are surveilled, arbitrarily imprisoned, and feasted on for profit.
In contrast, the UK at that time was arguably a much more cohesive society, which also had—and continues to have a degraded version—of national healthcare. The UK also became a much more equal economic society during the post-WWII years during the bloody end to its empire.
Here’s one last passage that stood out among the differences:
…violence against relatively defenseless enemies offended British pride.
No issue with that among the American hawks; indeed, those are the foes they prefer.
Lessons Learned?
Unlike the UK, the US no longer relies on conscription. Though that may be more a legacy of the Vietnam War, but it also helps avoid widespread opposition to the wars.
British opposition to war argued that there was a trade-off between warfare overseas and welfare at home (”the country cannot have schools, houses, and hospitals and also build huge bombing planes, warships, and A and H bombs”).
This argument feels few and far between in the US—and political rules designed to maintain a two-party system, elite control over the media, as well as a police state with more eavesdropping tools than ever can help make sure it doesn’t grow louder than a whisper.
This stuck out, considering today’s accelerationists in high places:
…A Second World War veteran…worried that military service in the colonies was breeding a hardened generation of white supremacists.
That’s what the new American elite like the Peter Thiels and Alex Karps want—that and a privatized state in which they rule. Here’s Unpopular Front on Karp’s book, The Technological Republic:
The book is extremely creepy: It becomes clear in the course of reading this “Technological Republic” the authors propose is essentially some kind of merger or acquisition of the United States government by Silicon Valley, a state run by an engineering elite that would be empowered to “ruthlessly” pursue “outcomes.” It’s a proposal for a kind of tech oligarchy: “no public “oversight for me, surveillance for thee.”
…To recap, Karp wrote his dissertation on a form of rhetoric that employs aggression to bind a community together and then he goes and writes a terrible, jargon-filled, cliché-riddled book about how the United States needs to rearm with the help of Silicon Valley. The shittiness, one might say, is the point: is Karp intentionally using jargon in this technical sense to create his own vision of Volksgemeinschaft? Maybe, but the rhetoric is not stirring! As for “aggression in the life-world,” Karp is saying “Yes, please!” In the book, Karp explicitly says how he wants to cultivate a more martial society to defend “the West.”
The same way the British used colonial war as a ‘source of order: “a citadel of strength and a guarantor of peace,” holding the line against a sea of “potential anarchy,”’ the Trump administration makes the same case—except in this case it is at home against enemies within. And as America’s power is increasingly threatened abroad, one can expect the home front to become more turbulent, and interested parties to try to steer more power to Silicon Valley surveillance and population control oligarchs in the name of battling the threat from within:
The demonization of anticolonial fighters throughout the 1950s furnished a script for fear-mongering about immigration…Boundaries between colonial battlefields and British streets likewise blurred in the fascist romanticization of racial violence….Rightists held the weak-kneed liberalism of both major parties responsible…
Again, this stands out with regards to relentless brutality we’re bombarded with on a daily basis today: exposing it doesn’t work:
The apathy of the masses was a perennial concern for the left. Activists’ hope in the 1950s, that exposing the brutality of the colonial war would inspire a collective repudiation of it, was not vindicated by events.
While the British government—and the US today—often tried to suppress information, it also used another tactic: embracing it.
…violence proved more difficult to attack when it was already in the open. Colonial violence is usually thought to have left few traces in the language of British politics. A quiet tradition of “liberal militarism”—preferring high-tech weapons to mass mobilizations and full-scale occupations—may be the closest thing to an official ideology for the use of force, in the colonies and elsewhere. But the intricacies of liberalism…distract from what the wars of decolonization reveal most dramatically: the appeal of illiberal militarism in Britain. This was not an elite policy doctrine but a popular language of resentment. Its tenets were the rejection of legal and moral restraints on soldiers in the field, intolerance of debate and dissent at home, and the embrace of national greatness and racial prestige as paramount values. When officials shrugged off brutality against Britain’s enemies as unimportant or unavoidable, they created a space for more radical apologetics.
In this light, the Department of Homeland Security producing slick videos of ICE agents terrorizing immigrants and Pete Hegseth’s War Department turning war crimes into social media entertainment make more sense as an attempt by Trump and his backers clumsily trying to wed MAGA to illiberal militarism. Meanwhile the beloved Democrats favor liberal militarism.
For now, the US military-industrial complex wins either way, but due to all the overpriced hardware, corruption, deindustrialization, and more, a Suez always seems to be right around the corner (if we haven’t already witnessed it in Hormuz), which could curtail its prized weapons exports and dissuade future proxy countries from doing its fighting.
With the neoliberal peasant death spiral poses a unique threat for American workers, the increased imperial challenges are also a threat to the US elite.
Trump, even before the Epstein affair exploded again, was sinking fast due his acceleration of economic parasitism and inability to extricate the US from foreign wars. While MAGA largely opposes the forever wars and is more interested in reshoring American jobs, in the UK “the simmering resentments of frustrated nationalism drove popular support for colonial war.”
The American elite have been trying for years to drum up similar support. Biden’s “foreign policy for the middle class” was such an attempt, and many in Trump’s circle desire that MAGA quit the whining about child trafficking influence ops and the local shuttered factory, accept the assertion that this is the greatest economy evah, and start cheerleading Israel’s latest atrocities.
But when was the last time the American public displayed broad support for foreign intervention? The immediate post 9/11 wars?
In retrospect, 2001 will almost certainly mark the beginning of the end—on numerous fronts.
The year the “Global War on Terror” launched and the Project for the New American Century began. NATO, fresh off its official transformation from a defensive alliance to aggressor in the Balkans, had turned its sights on Russia and in a few short years would bring in Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, and Slovenia. And the US economic elite worked to admit China to the World Trade Organization greasing the wheels of America’s great deindustrialization and empowering the country that now has US capital over the barrel.
As the US collapse accelerates, the danger is that a cornered elite will look back fondly to those days of strong support for vengeance after 9/11 and try to recreate such an atmosphere in one final push to reclaim American dominance.
A Better Comparison?
Perhaps the biggest difference is that while the UK was forced to relinquish its empire, it was to a former colony “ally” with which it shared strong cultural ties and under which it could remain junior partner operating more from the financial spook shadows.
US acceptance of its reduced power, on other hand, would be an admission that the period of “Western”-centric world order is finished.
The economic situation on the American home front continues to track towards Russia’s “wild 1990s.” That “wild” label has always seemed a misnomer; the decade was an absolute catastrophe for the vast majority of its citizens, more akin to a brief Dark Ages.
And it’s not dissimilar to what many working class Americans have been living through for some time now and which looks set to only worsen on current trajectories as Trump 2.0 pursues “shock therapy on a civilizational scale.”
Stephen Bezruchka, the author of Inequality Kills Us All: Covid-19’s Health Lessons for the World, writes that the US is condemning its citizens to the same fate that Russians experienced in the 1990s and 2000s:
The latest United Nations Human Development Report, issued last September, shows that for 2021 American length of life was behind that of 43 countries. These included all the rich ones and some not, such as Chile, Slovenia and Thailand. If we eradicated our three leading killers: heart disease, cancer and COVID-19, we would still not be the healthiest nation. It may come as a surprise to some of us that the oldest person is never found in the U.S. We are also the only rich country to have seen continued drops in life expectancy from 2019 to 2021. What is going on?
We can find clues by looking to the former Soviet Union, where life expectancy fell after the 1991 breakup…The already soaring rates of American income and wealth inequality gained steam with the pandemic and our poor response to it, which encouraged profiteering over sound public health policy. Expected increases in length of life began faltering around 2015 and are now in free fall. Will the United States follow the Russian example of continued health declines?
Americans report some of the world’s highest levels of stress. We consume about three-quarters of the world’s opioids to treat our stress-induced social pain. This leads to staggering overdose deaths in addition to the causes of death listed above.
Consider stress as the 21st-century tobacco. By creating awareness of the harms of second-hand cigarette smoke, most smokers were discouraged from their habit. Today only poorer people smoke, mostly to treat the social pain of poverty. Deaths of despair are clearly not limited to Russia and its former satellites. Can we expect to follow their pattern of continued decline? This seems likely unless we deploy the parachute of decreasing our record income and wealth gaps.
Hardly a country prepared for a fight to maintain global dominance, but perhaps one where its corrupt elite might take some well-placed bribes from, say, China in order to stand down.
Thanks for this, Conor. Very interesting comparison.
But this was a bit of a clanger to me:
I didn’t see a link to a study backing this contention that I would label a canard. One thing is definitely true: that tendency toward small wars that you talk about elsewhere is determined by the lack of a draft. The USA can only fight small wars, bombing campaigns, kidnapping operations, etc. That’s terrible, and we should do more to oppose this crap, but thanks to ending the draft, big wars are out of the question. The most recent example is how militarily knowledgeable people laugh at the idea of a U. S. ground invasion of Iran.
Thanks HMP. Fair point about draft and small wars, but I also think it’s pretty clear that to reinstitute draft would increase opposition as more people would be directly affected—or at least would make it easier to draw line between wars and how they’re being affected. Here’s a link to summary of one such study, which I’ll add in post:
https://warpreventioninitiative.org/peace-science-digest/military-draft-inequality-and-war-support/
I suspect that one of the legacies of the Iran war will be an attempt to reinstate a draft in the US.
I make no prediction as to how successful that will be (not very successful would be my guess, but I’m often wrong).
I think attempting to reinstate the draft right now would be difficult because the 18-22 age group is not supportive of Trump and his wars of Zionist aggression. But give it a little more than two years with a female CIA democrat in the White House telling us our national nightmare is over. Things might look very different to the Zoomers (even if the wars are the same).
Younger Zoomers are likely going to face a very tough job market. Soaking up a few million of them into a re-imagined homeland security corps might look like a very good idea.
Economic draft.
Do not underestimate the power of desperation.
Legacy of Vietnam?
I look at it long term. The alleged reason for the military involvement was because – big picture – the corporations thought it would be a country not friendly to corporations. “Commies” and such.
US and other multinational corporations are very comfortable there today.
Military action is only one part of rhe empirial playbook and the low intensity, but consistent military action is not the main play or the A game.
Great piece, Conor!
As one of the last cohort to sign up for the Vietnam Draft Lottery, I have been thinking about this since my younger comrades had a regular fit when registration for a potential Draft was reestablished and they had to sign up. But all they had to do was register. The “all-volunteer” armed services were and still are a thing. Of course, volunteer is a strained concept when so many of those who enlist do so because that is the only apparent choice they have if they want to move on. Recruiting sergeants and petty officers can be very persuasive under these circumstances.
A Draft that is inescapable for all men and women beginning on their 18th birthday, absolutely no exceptions with conscientious objector status a high but legitimate hurdle, would dampen American imperialism and the so-called small wars that accompany our malign adventures abroad. But it would have to be inescapable, meaning that the children of doctors, lawyers, local business owners, and local old money rentiers would have stood side-by-side with their working class brothers and sisters in Fallujah and Helmand and God knows where else among the 800 places the US has military installations. This sharing of the burden of imperialism will focus minds of those for whom combat deaths in futile wars are not even a distant concern.
I have been flamed for saying this by those who miss the “inescapable” part. That would be a difficult thing to do but not impossible.
One difficulty in instituting a Draft in the USA is the health, or lack of it, in the draft age population.
Partly due to a diet of food like substances and partly due to Covid the percentage of Americans with a disability continues to grow.
There have always been exemptions to the Draft in the USA, during our Civil War you could actually pay someone to take your place, and some made a business of it.
Some Pigs will always be more equal than others, even if they are drafted they will become the regimental liquor officer like Pat Robertson or find some other way to avoid danger while “Serving Honorably”.
I think people over egg the pudding when the imply that the elite are all Trumpian draft dodging cowards.
In the past the elite lead from the front because that was a nessecary component to maintaining their status. Just look at how many Kings and pretenders died in battle.
Canard.
https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/research-briefings/cbp-10226/
Musa Al-Gharbi also asserts that anti-war activism died out once Nixon and Congress ended the draft, but I think that’s not fully justified. Nixon going to China was what really took the wind out of sails of the leftist movement, including the anti-war movement, in the 1970s. All those earnest radicals clutching their copies of Mao’s Little Red Book! Plus the government showing its willingness to shoot down anti-war protesters in cold blood had an effect. A number of factors went into it, of which the end of the draft was only one. And I think there were still healthy demonstrations against the Christmas bombing that preceded the final US ceasefire.
What avoids widespread overt opposition to wars now is that it doesn’t matter what the population opposes or supports, the government pays no attention to the public now, whereas it still used to up until the mid-1980s at least. Now the government obeys the donor class (including foreign bribers of Congress) and uses the “news” and “entertainment” media to confuse, divide and distract the population as much as possible. No one “serious” cares if you and your friends stand out on a street corner with a sign, chanting anti-war slogans. No one has cared for a while, as demonstrated during the run-up to the Iraq invasion. And we know it.
quoting the late great Frank Zappa
Didn’t the US technically replace conscription by making several services like education expensive, so working class people have to serve tours just to afford essentials?
Also, just like the British, the USA relies pretty hard on foreign auxiliaries and cannon fodder.
History punishes stupidity, and the U.S. will be punished in a manner similar to Great Britain. Our unsustainable finances will gradually curtail military adventurism, but the main damage will come in the form of faltering economic development as nations with better leadership outperform our industries. In the long run, a global society will emerge, and nationalities will be as meaningful as Zodiac signs. All this assumes no catastrophic nuclear war, an uncertain probability.
The wars aren’t being fought for “nationalities”. That’s the fake out. It’s people that want stable communities who are most against war.
They wars fought for globalist, multi-national corporations’ spoils.
The biggest fight people are going to have is their right to settle in place….and not be moved around like cattle. Not everyone wants to be a migrant worker.
The biggest U.S. corporations depend on global supply chains. They are not in favor of the destruction of global trade. If the defense sector and militarist politicians threaten the welfare of the rest of the U.S. economy, they will be restrained.
There won’t be s some one size fits all, standardized belief system – like a computer operating system.
I’ll take the other side of that bet.
Indeed, the abundance pipedream, enabled and encoded by the same people who can never have enough power or lucre. I think the mainers say “ya can’t get there from heah”
A global society would be a disaster in this age with economic policies enhancing the economic leader’s (China’s) economy, while devastating the rest of the globe – see Mississippi versus New York – the former is below most third world countries in every metric.
Instability from the economic disparity leads to separatist revolts, and the global empire will fail. This is a story that has been repeated again and again over recent millenia (See Fall of Civilizations Podcast for detailed depressing narrative on, now, I think 20 different empires. The Trek future requires free unlimited energy to make it work.
in-universe, what enabled that Trek Future was 1: globally shared trauma of humanity almost offing itself…and 2: the invention of the Replicator,ending scarcity.
free energy and warp tech were secondary effects.
True, but the replicator requires free unlimited energy…
One of the under-examined legacies of Russiagate is how it helped enlist #McResistance liberals into proxy war against Russia and support for a completely fictitious portrait of a Ukraine where Bandera-ite/Nazi factions provide the muscle undergirding the State.
Liberals, initially supportive of the war in Vietnam, eventually became part of the coalition opposing it. Now, they’ll support anything against Russia they’re told (far more credulously than even during the Cold War) and will be happy to continue aggression against Iran, as long as it’s not administered by Trump. It’s as if they mis-intuit the threats to their standing as the PMC – which stem far more from the Silicon Valley oligarch wing than Putin or the “Mullahs” in Iran. A hopeless, politically useless bunch, happy to collude in their own repression…
> While the eventual retreat of US military around the world as its military hardware is outclassed and its proxies suffer defeats is starting to rhyme with the case of the UK. Echoes of Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus can be seen in US policy in Gaza—although on a much grander genocidal scale—and elsewhere.
Not so sure about this. Britain did a very good job of covering up what they did in their post WWII colonial wars (going so far as to pay people to burn records/archives), but recent historians like Caroline Elkins have done a very good job of uncovering what the UK actually did in places like Kenya, Oman, Malaysia, etc.
Britain was a far more brutal colonial power than it seems to get ‘credit’ for.
You can say that again. The Nazis were pikers when it came to the Brits. They were dumb enough to keep excellent records, and sure they did a lot of damage over the decade plus they ran amok, but Great Britain had a much, much, longer run including the absolute evil of the slave colonies in the so-called “West Indies” (gross, right?)
And meanwhile the Brits were expert at destroying any evidence of their brutal crimes from India to Barbados. Great Britain always gets my vote for worst country of all time, but there are lots of contenders. The US is moving up the list fast.
But-but-but according to my Western schooling and media mythology, the British Empire was held together solely by literature, tea drinking, and cricket! Violence had nothing to do with it. /s
Differences that I can see.
1) The colonial wars were largely a distraction from the post war reconstruction, and the strong pressure to repay the social debt incurred by WWII. Britain before the war was a highly unequal place, and the average person was very poor (housing was bad, almost no access to healthcare, food insecurity was uncommon, education was not universal, etc). During this period Britain was getting better for the average person (unlike the period from the early C20th to 1939 – when things were getting worse). For the average person, if they had to pick between India and the NHS – they were going to pick the NHS.
2) Britain couldn’t really afford these wars. The war had bankrupted it, they’d had to give a lot of imperial stuff to the US to pay for weapons and the UK is a small place. Even with conscription – it was difficult.
3) People didn’t really know what was going on. A lot of the news was straight out propaganda (many people got their news from cinema newsreels – which if you watch them now…). So the kind of strong resistance that you find later to Vietnam, or now Iran, wasn’t really possible in the same way.
4) The UK elites were way way weaker than US elites today. Two world wars had exhausted them, and heavy taxation destroyed much of their power (while rapid social improvements for the masses increased their power). So the concerns of elites were less politically imortant than they are in the US today. For the working classes in the UK this period was a golden age, despite the fact that the UK was rapidly declining on the global stage.
5) The UK in many ways was successful. They were able to prevent hostile governments from forming (governments that would have been better for the ex-colonies), and shape the types of countries that they would become. Even today in Malaysia, and much of the Middle East, those governments and political structures are a legacy of British post-imperialism and the wars they fought. Britain was also able to hang onto many of the resources owned by British companies that otherwise would have been nationalised.
6) There was a large contingent of British ‘ex-pats’ who administed the empire, who were in British terms middle class (maybe even lower middle class), but in the colonies were able to live the lifestyles of the upper classes. They had servants, large houses and a fairly luxurious lifestyle. They returned to a country that was far shabbier than anything they remembered, where they could not afford servants and there was no real economic place for them.
I’m sure there’s more, but this is all I could think of off the top of my head with no coffee.
“For the average person, if they had to pick between India and the NHS – they were going to pick the NHS.”
This is an interesting example, as post-WWII, British soldiers stationed in India were getting restless and wanted to return home instead of being kept to suppress local rebellions. As for the native regiments, some of them had become so unreliable that the British authorities had to carefully choose which one they sent to put down demonstrations and riots. All in all, British imperial forces in the Raj were getting outright mutinous.
“Britain couldn’t really afford these wars.”
You could say the same for every colonial power post-WWII — it never mattered.
The Netherlands were undergoing a dramatic situation (with near famine conditions) post WWII — it did not prevent the Dutch to immediately embark in 4 years of colonial war in Indonesia.
France had been economically bled dry by the Germans during WWII — it went big time into colonial wars in Indochina, Madagascar, Algeria, Cameroon, with some additional side-shows in Egypt (Suez), Tunisia, Morocco. Remarkably, by the end, the French military became uncontrollable and made attempts at overthrowing the government (deemed not supportive enough).
And what about Portugal, not exactly a prosperous, developed country — 13 years of war in Africa (with some very brief skirmishes in India where it was hopelessly outmatched). In the end, the Portuguese military overthrew the government to put an end to the nonsensical colonial war.
“This is an interesting example, as post-WWII, British soldiers stationed in India were getting restless and wanted to return home instead of being kept to suppress local rebellions.”
Sure, but that was a post WWII thing and as much to do with the slow pace of demobilization. Most of the British colonial wars took place in the 50s, and the last was in the 60s. But if you read accounts from that period, most British people didn’t really care too much about the empire – and these wars were in many ways shadow wars, that weren’t much discussed (with heavy censorship on what was reported).
” As for the native regiments, some of them had become so unreliable that the British authorities had to carefully choose which one they sent to put down demonstrations and riots. All in all, British imperial forces in the Raj were getting outright mutinous.”
Sure, but similar things happened in the C19th as well. The Indian mutiny dwarfed anything that happened after WWII. The empire was always sustained by ultraviolence – it was just in the post war period this, for whatever reason, became far harder to do.
“You could say the same for every colonial power post-WWII — it never mattered.”
Britain could afford the wars it fought, but it didn’t have the manpower to fight in every one of its colonies – let alone the material to support them. It also couldn’t afford the colonies it had (which were a net drain on their coffers even prior to World War 2). So what they did instead was shape the newly ‘independent’ countries, and tried to make sure that forces that were hostile to them were destroyed. France did similar things in Africa (and arguably was more successful at it).
“The Netherlands were undergoing a dramatic situation (with near famine conditions) post WWII — it did not prevent the Dutch to immediately embark in 4 years of colonial war in Indonesia.”
Britain fought colonial wars in SE Asia (Malaysia), Africa (in particular Kenya) and the Middle East (e.g. Oman). But they could not have fought wars in every colony, and I seriously doubt the UK could have fought a sustained conflict in India.
“Remarkably, by the end, the French military became uncontrollable and made attempts at overthrowing the government (deemed not supportive enough).”
Sure, but that was largely due to Algeria which was perceived by the right as part of France. And the right wing (with the support of factions of the army and intelligence services) were trying to assassinate de Gaulle even as far back as the late 1940s. The post war period was kind of a wild time, even if that’s largely forgotten today.
Cian: For the average person, if they had to pick between India and the NHS – they were going to pick the NHS.
The Attlee government’s original plan in 1945-46 was to have India and the NHS both, the profits from the empire underwriting socialism and nationalization of multiple industries at home in Britain. What scuppered that was primarily the RAF mutinies of 1946 —
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_Air_Force_strikes_of_1946
‘… these incidents involved refusals to obey orders …technically… a form of mutiny. The protests arose in response to slow demobilization and return of British troops to Britain, and use of British shipping facilities for transporting G.I.s. The “mutiny” began at either Maripur or nearby Karachi (RAF Drigh Road) and later spread to involve nearly 50,000 men over 60 RAF stations in India, Ceylon, Burma and as far away as Singapore, Egypt, North Africa, and Gibraltar.
‘… later declassified reports have shown that British troops were deliberately retained in India to control possible unrest from the independence movement, and the grievances of the RAF men may have also included significant political opinions and sympathy with the communist Party of India.‘
I bring that up because the first of two things the US now doesn’t really have that the UK did in 1945 was a tradition, going back to things like the English Revolution, and the Levelers and hundreds of other communalist and socialist subcultures through the centuries, and running through the Chartists and so forth, of large parts of the population having some generational commitment to ideas of socialism and communism, alongside the capitalism of the City and the Industrial Revolution.
The second thing the US doesn’t have now that the British in 1945 had is the sense of having come through WW2 together and won, albeit at enormous cost and poverty that Americans would struggle to credit. One of the best known histories of the time is called Austerity Britain: 1945-1951, Tales of A New Jerusalem
https://rcwlitagency.com/books/austerity-britain-1945-1951
Why a new Jerusalem? The British came back from WW2 determined that they weren’t going back to the old days. There’s a story, perhaps apocryphal, of Attlee, who’d been in Churchill’s coalition WW2 government, coming to Churchill to tell him that the Labour party had been elected as the new government and Churchill protesting, ‘But I won the war.’ To which Attlee responded, ‘Yes, you did, sir. But we’ll take it from here.’
The U.S., by contrast, is as Wang Huning, the Chinese political thinker and member of Xi’s governing cabinet, described it in his book, America Against America .
The Attlee government’s original plan in 1945-46 was to have India and the NHS both, the profits from the empire underwriting socialism and nationalization of multiple industries at home in Britain. What scuppered that was primarily the RAF mutinies of 1946
Well a lot of things scuppered it. But India was a drain on the UKs resources at a time when they didn’t have many resources, they were facing pressure from their main creditor to step back from colonialism and they didn’t have the manpower to suppress all of India. And the Attlee government was not elected to save the empire, but to improve the lot of the average working man – and faced enormous pressure to do so.
‘… later declassified reports have shown that British troops were deliberately retained in India to control possible unrest from the independence movement, and the grievances of the RAF men may have also included significant political opinions and sympathy with the communist Party of India.‘
This may have been true of a minority, but the main grievance was that they hadn’t been demobilized the previous year. And the colonial wars continued into the mid 60s (by which time they looked a lot like the recent US colonial wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). You can’t really explain that with the 1946 mutinies.
I bring that up because the first of two things the US now doesn’t really have that the UK did in 1945 was a tradition, going back to things like the English Revolution, and the Levelers and hundreds of other communalist and socialist subcultures through the centuries, and running through the Chartists and so forth, of large parts of the population having some generational commitment to ideas of socialism and communism, alongside the capitalism of the City and the Industrial Revolution.
Meh, this is a bit of a stretch. There was a socialist tradition, but compared to what you saw in other countries (e.g. France, Italy, Greece, Germany) it wasn’t that radical or strong. Yes it was stronger than what you see in the US today, but for the period Britain was surprisingly moderate (particularly given the immiseration that had occurred during the previous 40 years). And people, by and large, took pride in the empire. What was different was that a socialist movement, backed by a pretty strong trade union movement, which had been building since the late C19th had been swept into power after WW2 with a huge mandate (and expectation) for widespread social change. And which had the memory of their last (very brief) stint in power ending quickly because they were not radical enough.
The transformation of Britain between 1945 and 1960 was enormous – and took most of the focus of the governments of those periods. And also Britain faced a fair bit of pressure from its main creditor (who already wasn’t happy about their loans being used for ‘socialism’) to dispose of its empire.
The second thing the US doesn’t have now that the British in 1945 had is the sense of having come through WW2 together and won, albeit at enormous cost and poverty that Americans would struggle to credit.
Sure, but I don’t see much sign that that resulted in any great sympathy for the colonial subjects of her majesty’s great empire. Even when I was a kid in the 1980s, most British people thought that the empire was a good thing, and that those countries had done worse since the stopped being Britain’s subjects.
I think the main difference between the US now and the UK then – is that Britain was forced by circumstances, and its recent weakness, into doing the sensible thing. But the elites of Britain still fought that.
I expect a downside difference with the Soviet experience (note life in the US becomes more kayka-esque every day – try getting insurance approval for a medical procedure) as the US has largely eviscerated its safety net, and people cannot keep working (rent/mortgage) when paid, they must find a job that pays or homeless and keeping a job is very hard when living in a car (increasingly illegal) or under a bridge.
Bus drivers kept driving their routes even though they were unpaid, thanks to free housing / other services courtesy of the state, based on the hope of getting paid in the future. In the US, the bus wouldn’t be driven; preventing people whose job still pays from getting to work, etc., and the same applies to everything in the US. Even doctors already ignore their Hippocratic oath to maximize profits for health care corporations.
So I expect the fall to be much harder, and the fragmentation (independence for kleptocratic former states) to be much worse, likely followed by internal wars for a people who have been at war for almost every year of 250 years.
In many former Soviet republics during the 1990s, everything was for sale– and I do mean everything.
And that’s the part Americans will have to get used to.
Yeah, the ex-Soviets had it easier than what’s in the pipeline for US/us.
You have to give Britain credit for winding down their empire after WW2, even if it was not by choice. There were one or two countries where they had to shoot their way out of but it was mostly ceremonial handovers. The American empire is a different animal altogether and survives on over a thousand bases scattered around the world and the financial power emanating out of Wall Street. The name of the game has been the military and finance. But both now are being degraded and ironically it is the later that is degrading the former. The American elites will fight to keep their empire but I do not believe that they will have buy in from the American people simply because they are being degraded by finance as well and only care about internal matters. You can see this at work with how recruitment for the military is getting more and more difficult as nobody believes anymore. Empires don’t usually die from external threats. They usually die from the hollowing out of that empire and the people no longer buy into it. And then it collapses under the first serious external threat.
“even if it was not by choice.” Some was by choice, above all India. The Government of India Acts had stated that the ambition was that India become a Dominion i.e. independent like Australia or Canada.
The problem with stating that intention is that you then face a contest among Indian politicians to see who will rule India after independence. That ended up with the slaughters of Partition.
Does that mean that the intention of Dominion status should not have been announced? God knows.
An English colleague once put it this way: ” we let them go”.
“Empires don’t usually die from external threats. They usually die from the hollowing out of that empire and the people no longer buy into it. And then it collapses under the first serious external threat.”
And this hollowing out is related to internal inequalities. Britain used to send away its poors to the colonies to get rid of them. (Dickens’ novels are full of atrocities related to the British aristocracy’s refusal to share its wealth.) The Roman aristocracy, unlike Greek Athens, would not hear about any accomodation with land-hungry plebeians. Both Britain and Rome crumbled because inequalities were such that the “masses” did not care about their survival. Any serious U.S. citizen has good cause to be deeply worried for the same reason.
May I also recommend Caroline Elkins’ 2022 *Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire*
and Yves’s fav, Polanyi’s 1944 *The Great Transformation*
for the British/US imperial decline comparison. They both get in the muck and the mire with imperial victims, and amass and organize a tremendous amount of data.
Curious that Conor does not mention the Troubles in Northern Ireland, where the colonial playbook was applied to nominally British citizens.
For their arrogance and insularity, not to mention their callous disregard for their foreign dominions, US elites remind me at least as much of the Spanish Imperium as the British …