![\"Delegates](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-3396431-6d2e220.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Delegates")
\n<\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/source><\/picture>\n<\/div>Twenty-five years earlier, the Victorians had produced a stamp with a map of the world and the legend, \u201cWe hold a vaster empire than has ever been\u201d. But under the terms of the post-First World War treaties, Britain had now absorbed from the German and Ottoman empires a further 1.8 million square miles and an additional 13 million subjects. So the British empire now covered 14 million square miles, a quarter of the world\u2019s land area \u2013 making it the largest empire in history.<\/p>\n
In keeping with the vision of former colonial secretary Winston Churchill<\/a>, Palestine was now the keystone of a geopolitical and strategic arch that stretched the length of Africa, across the Middle East and down to India, Burma and all the way via Malaya to Australia and New Zealand. With a puppet ruler and British garrison installed in Persia, and Egypt under a bogus \u2018flag of independence\u2019, you could now walk from Cape Town in South Africa to Rangoon in Burma without ever leaving the British empire or territory it controlled.<\/p>\n London, the world\u2019s most populous city, was the centre of global business, a shipping and cable hub communicating news, opinion, values and ideas across the world.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In France, Sorbonne professor Albert Demangeon wrote in his just-published L\u2019Empire Britannique<\/em>: \u201cWithout its overseas possessions the United Kingdom is merely a small group of islands off the coast of Europe; with them, it has become one of the poles of the human race.\u201d For him, it was trade that had established British global supremacy: \u201cthe gold and diamonds of South Africa; the wool, wheat, butter and meat of Australia; the wheat, fish and timber of Canada; the sugar of the West Indies; the rubber and tin of Malaya; the wheat, cotton, jute, rice and tea of India.\u201d A quarter of the world\u2019s wheat, around half its rice, wool, chrome and tin, 60 per cent of its rubber and 70 per cent of its gold were all produced within the empire.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For Demangeon, though, the \u201cmost original type of British settlement\u201d were the cosmopolitan entrep\u00f4ts such as Aden, Singapore and Hong Kong: \u201csuction pumps, gathering to themselves the commerce of vast regions\u201d. In fact, four of the world\u2019s five busiest ports were in the British empire, with Hong Kong, clearing nearly 40 million tons a year, at the top of the list above London, New York, Liverpool and Singapore.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n What\u2019s more, nearly half of the vessels using Hong Kong harbour were under the British flag, part of an unmatched merchant fleet of more than 2,000 ships over 3,000 tons. It was this \u201ccommercial genius\u201d, Demangeon concluded, that had made the British empire \u201cthe largest, richest and most populous colonial empire that the world has ever seen\u201d.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This immense wealth, all within the borders of the empire, was to be showcased at the vast Empire Exhibition, scheduled to open in six months\u2019 time. Recent troubles and unrest in India, Iraq, Egypt, Ireland and elsewhere had abated or been crushed. At the end of the previous month, the victory in Ireland of William Cosgrave\u2019s pro-Treaty party over Eamon de Valera\u2019s republicans had confirmed the Irish Free State as a Dominion of the empire, an arrangement believed to be a permanent solution to an age-old problem.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The new \u2018trustee\u2019 relationship between coloniser and colonised, which included a widely-professed concern for the well-being of \u2018native\u2019 people, together with new ideas about racial equality, promised a glorious and more humane future in a consensual empire, which was now increasingly being referred to as the British Commonwealth. This, it was hoped, could even become a \u2018federation of mankind\u2019, a structure for benign world government.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Arriving in London on 29 September, New Zealand prime minister William Massey told the press that: \u201cThe British empire is today more necessary than ever to the welfare and peace of the world,\u201d while Australian PM Stanley Bruce said his desire was \u201cto ensure a strong and virile British empire which should be the precursor of a world-alliance\u201d. But the First World War, while dramatically expanding the size of the empire, had changed everything.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This period became known to contemporaries as \u2018The Aftermath\u2019, and the shadow of the war fell over every part and aspect of the empire: military, political, financial, racial, psychological. The war had seen the empire at its most useful ever for the mother country \u2013 the huge contribution of money and nearly 2.5 million men from the Dominions, India and the African colonies had arguably made the difference between victory and defeat for Britain. But then, during the Chanak Crisis of 1922, prime minister David Lloyd George had, without consulting them, pledged the Dominions to fight against Turkey if war broke out again.<\/p>\n The Dominions were outraged, and determined that only their own parliaments could decide on war. Now the idea of a common foreign policy and unquestioned military alliance was under threat.<\/p>\n The war had also wrecked the international trading and financial system on which Britain\u2019s prosperity had been built. In September 1923, Rudyard Kipling \u2013 who had famously urged the United States to take up the \u2018White Man\u2019s Burden\u2019 and assume control of the Filipino people \u2013 gave a bad-tempered interview to the New York World<\/em>. America, he said, \u201ccame in the war two years, four months and seven days too late, botched the Versailles Treaty for us, and withdrew without assisting any further. She has our gold, but we have our souls.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Britain, for its part, was saddled with industry which had failed to modernise and largely missed out on the \u2018Second Industrial Revolution\u2019 based on chemicals, oil, electrical goods, and, above all, cars. It also had a vast war debt, including \u00a3900m owed to the US. New York was in the process of replacing London as the world\u2019s leading capital market.<\/p>\n Mainland Europe was the best market for British exports, and had almost always been more important than the empire. But this market had pretty much ceased to exist: postwar Europe was in ruins, with devalued currencies, hyperinflation and political chaos. Rival militias, including Hitler\u2019s Nazis, were fighting in the streets.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n There was hope that the empire could fill the gap, but this was ridiculed by the Daily Herald<\/em>: \u201cIt is futile to suppose that fewer than 20 million people [in the Dominions], with growing manufactures of their own, could, even if they dealt with none of our competitors, take the place of the 100 million in central Europe with whom we did such valuable trade before the war.\u201d<\/p>\n In the meantime, Britain was suffering high taxation and unemployment and ever harsher cuts to government expenditure, including on defence. Among British political and military leaders there was concern that, particularly in these severely straitened postwar financial circumstances, the empire was now just far too big \u2013 \u201ca huge bladder waiting to be pricked\u201d, as German wartime propaganda had alleged.<\/p>\n To make matters worse, in order to avoid antagonising the Americans \u2013 in the forlorn hope of debt reduction and with an irrational belief in the \u2018special relationship\u2019 \u2013 Britain had just ended its treaty with Japan. It had also agreed to limits on its key strategic asset, the Royal Navy. The empire had never made much strategic sense, with its closest allies on the other side of the world, but this now left the far eastern possessions, including Malaya, Burma and even Australia, intensely vulnerable to an expansionist and insulted Japan.<\/p>\nThe business of empire<\/h3>\n
![\"Indian](\"https:\/\/images.immediate.co.uk\/production\/volatile\/sites\/7\/2023\/09\/GettyImages-55758496-c2a5148.jpg?quality=90&resize=620%2C413\" "\\"Indian")
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The US rises<\/h3>\n