On 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire reached what would prove to be its maximum territorial extent. It was now the largest empire in history, covering a quarter of the world’s land area and home to 460 million people. This was more than the populations of the French Empire, the United States, Russia and China combined.
Following the collapse of the rival empires of the Ottomans, Russia and Austro-Hungary, and the retreat into isolation of the United States, Britain now found itself the sole global superpower. There was even talk of it forming the basis of a benign world government. South African Prime Minister Jan Smuts called the British Empire ‘the widest system of organized human freedom which has ever existed in human history.’ A highly-distinguished Singaporean Chinese Lim Boon Keng wrote that, ‘Only sympathy and knowledge are needed to complete that stupendous edifice of Empire . . . whose noble example may well be the prelude to the Federation of the World.’
But at the moment of its territorial zenith, the factors were coalescing that would cause the empire’s rapid demise. As Churchill would write, the War had left ‘both sides, victors and vanquished, in ruins’. Britain had lent heavily to its European allies, as well as borrowing some £900m from the United States. The Americans were demanding repayment, but the Europeans could not repay Britain until reparations started flowing from Germany, which was on its knees. The international financial system, on which so much British prosperity had been built, was jammed. Furthermore, Britain’s European market had pretty much ceased to exist, thanks to deflated currencies and political turmoil. The hope was to make up the shortfall by increasing exports to the empire, but this was no real substitute. The result was two million British unemployed and severe constraints on public expenditure. The Versailles Treaty had seen the empire take on Axis territories totalling 1.8 million square miles and 13 million addition subjects. But with the defence budget stripped to the bone, senior officials were warning that the military were stretched far too thinly.
Furthermore, the new territories were ‘Mandates’, to be run under the manifesto of bringing them as rapidly as possible to self-government. This idea was contagious, and was soon seen to apply to the empire as a whole. So what was its point? people were asking. Was the primary purpose of the empire just to dismantle itself? The proceedings of the Imperial Conference at the end of September 1923 show a ‘top table’ of Dominion leaders divided and drifting.
Perhaps most importantly, there was underway a tectonic shift in the attitudes of the ‘colonised.’ Norman Manley, who had fought in the British army in the war and would later become Jamaica’s first Prime Minister, was fond of quoting a British official admitting that ‘The Empire and British rule rest on a carefully nurtured sense of inferiority in the governed.’ In his country, he saw this as creating ‘turgid lethargy’ and ‘a culture of dependence’. Indian nationalist Jawaharlal Nehru wrote how ‘surprisingly most of us accepted it as natural and inevitable’ that Indians were second rate. ‘Greater than any victory of arms or diplomacy,’ he said, ‘was this psychological triumph of the British in India.’
The empire was, of course, justified and maintained by the idea of white superiority. It was the duty, many thought, of the more advanced British to ‘lift up’ ‘backward’ people. It was also, as Manley explains, a method of control. Elspeth Huxley famously wrote in The Flame Trees of Thika: ‘Respect is the only protection available to Europeans who lived singly, or in scattered families, among thousands of Africans accustomed to constant warfare and armed with spears and poisoned arrows. This respect preserved them like an invisible coat of mail, or a form of magic, and seldom failed; but it had to be very carefully guarded. The least rent or puncture might, if not immediately checked and repaired, split the whole garment asunder and expose the wearer in all his human vulnerability.’
Such ‘rents’ or ‘punctures’ were now underway. The defeat of Italy in Africa and, more importantly, of Russia at the hands of the Japanese in 1905, had seen so-called ‘lesser races’ overcome white power. For African-American leader W.E.B. Dubois, the Japanese victory had ‘broken the magic word “white”,’ and caused a ‘worldwide eruption of colored pride’. Nehru noted that it diminished ‘the feeling of inferiority’ from which many Indians suffered. Tokyo became a mecca for anti-imperial nationalists from across Asia.
Even more important was the catastrophe of the First World War, which made a mockery of the idea of a ‘white civilising mission’. As an American white supremacist warned in his 1920-published The Rising Tide of Color, ‘As colored men realised the significance of [the Great War], they looked into each other’s eyes and there saw a light of un-dreamed hopes. White solidarity was riven and shattered [and] fear of white power and respect for white civilisations dropped away like garments outworn.’ Soldiers returned home to India, the West Indies and elsewhere newly outward-looking and politicised.
Setbacks and defeats for the British – the siege of Kut, Gallipoli – had damaged prestige and prompted schadenfreude. Jawaharlal Nehru remembered that in India, despite loud professions of loyalty, ‘Moderate and Extremist alike learnt with satisfaction of German victories. There was no love for Germany, of course, only the desire to see our own rulers humbled. It was the weak and helpless man’s idea of vicarious revenge.’ Perhaps most damaging was the shambolic campaign in Tanganyika, where a canny German general fought a guerrilla campaign that tied up thousands of empire troops, and saw the death from disease and starvation of more than a hundred thousand local porters, far more, as a Kenyan would point out, than in generations of the ‘tribal warfare’ the British were so proud to have ended. These porters had seen white unity descend to bitter conflict and the Germans had staged organised humiliation for British prisoners by African guards – white men were harnessed like oxen to a cart and forced to drag it through a bazaar in front of jeering Africans.
In parallel to the collapse in white prestige was an ongoing process of the ‘colonised’ fighting to re-establish local pride in indigenous and non-white culture, art and political and social structures, to banish the ‘carefully nurtured sense of inferiority.’ This took the form of, for example, Africans discarding their European names and donning traditional dress. In India, Gandhi staged huge bonfires of western clothes. Pan-Africanist Marcus Garvey, through his hugely influential Negro World newspaper, urged his readers to shun the huge-selling skin-whitening and hair-straightening products and be proud to be black. Across the empire, literary and debating societies started gathering to celebrate indigenous art, history and culture. Locally-run newspapers and churches flourished.
Education was central to this battle. In Nigeria, a government official found local children being taught, ‘the height of the Chilterns, the Queens of England, and poems concerning primroses and Father Christmas’ reindeer’. On one tour of inspection she came across ‘the words “Eleanor of Aquitaine” written large on a blackboard in a primary school somewhere among the Yoruba . . . stared at by twenty or thirty small and puzzled children’. Trinidadian historian Eric Williams, writing about the West Indies, points out that education, as well as being done on the cheap (six times more was spent on a child in England) ‘ignored everything West Indian – West Indian history, geography, economics, community organisation and problems’. An Indian journalist, writing in early 1923, drew a picture of an Indian school leaver as ‘an emaciated being who could repeat like a machine the dates of births and deaths and of coronations of all the Kings and Queens of England’. The Indian schoolchild, the journalist complained, ‘is taught day after day to despise everything Indian and to admire everything British, with the result that he ends up being neither an Indian nor an Englishman, but a sorry ape’
In his auto-biographical novel, The Anglo-Fanti, Gold Coast nationalist Kobina Sekyi tells a similar story. Sekyi’s character by the age of twelve ‘knows at least as much of English history and geography as the average English boy, [but] knows nothing about the great Ahuba festival’. Instead, he is taught, the ‘greater sweetness of European confectionery, the greater attractiveness of European manufactures . . . the superiority, in every aspect, of everything European over everything African.’
Sekyi would be the first West African to wear traditional dress in court, and would campaign for the establishment of a university, where students would be taught to appreciate ‘Africa as the cradle of the world’s systems and philosophies, and the nursing mother of its religions . . . In short that Africa has nothing to be ashamed of [about] its place among the nations of the earth.’
On 29 September 1923, Adelaide Casely Hayford would be putting this into practice. On that day, thanks to money raised from the black community and their supporters in the US, she opened her Technical School for Girls in Freetown, Sierra Leone. Many of the heavily-Westernised black elite in the city didn’t like it, but here she resolved to teach the girls not only economic independence from their menfolk but also with the ambition to ‘hear the young mothers teaching their sons the glory of black citizenship, rather than encouraging them to bewail the fact that they were not white’. Education as it stood, she said, ‘either consciously or unconsciously, taught us to despise ourselves, and that our immediate need was an education which would instil into us a love of country, a pride of race, and enthusiasm for the black man’s capabilities and a genuine admiration for Africa’s wonderful art work.’
During the war, and in the immediate years after, driven in part by severe economic difficulties, the literary and debating societies – the Caribbean League in Jamaica, the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Burma, the Kuam Muda in Malaya and many others – became far more actively focussed on nationalist politics. West Africa saw the formation of the National Congress of British West Africa, led by Kobina Sekyi and Adelaide’s estranged husband Joseph Casely Hayford. In Kenya, Asians suffering political and commercial oppression from the minority white settler population, formed the East African Indian National Congress. Kenyan Africans organised into the East African Association to protest against forced labour. Brutally suppressed in 1922, it quickly re-emerged as the Kikuyu Central Association in which Jomo Kenyatta would cut his teeth.
All were inspired, of course, by the Indian National Congress. However doubtful the vast region’s economic value to Britain, it was still the keystone of the empire. In 1917, warned by the Governor-General that the lack of British troops was a danger, the Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montagu, laid out a sweeping program of political reforms that would give Indians a far greater share in the running of their country. But when these came accompanied by a continuation of oppressive wartime security measures, and the massacre at Amritsar, Congress mobilised and united the vast array of the country’s conflicting religious, commercial and class interests into a spectacular campaign of non-co-operation. For Jawaharlal Nehru, it was a moment when a ‘demoralized, backward, and broken-up people suddenly straightened their backs and lifted their heads’. By September 1923 it had been called off, and both Gandhi and Nehru were in prison. But the message had been received loud and clear.
The Prince of Wales, dubbed ‘the Prince of Hearts’ and the ‘Pivot of Empire’, had toured India in 1921 and had been met by boycotts and riots. He left with a deep feeling of foreboding. He reported that having talked to British soldiers, civil service and police, he had encountered everywhere a feeling of general demoralisation. ‘They one and all say the same thing,’ he wrote, ‘they won’t let their sons come out here to earn their living in the Indian Army, Indian Civil Service . . . The reason for this is that India is no longer a place for a white man to live in.’
George Orwell, who in September 1923 was serving as a policeman in India’s Burma province, wrote that even the thickest-skinned Anglo-Indian, was aware of what Orwell called the ‘unjustifiable tyranny’ of imperial rule. The majority were ‘not nearly so complacent about their position as people in England believe. From the most unexpected people, from gin-pickled old scoundrels high up in Government service, I have heard some such remark as: “Of course we’ve no right to be in this blasted country at all” . . . The truth is that no modern man, in his heart of hearts, believes that it is right to invade a foreign country and hold the population down by force.’
In September 1923, E.M. Forster was writing his masterpiece, A Passage to India, and had become an expert on India for the British press.
He reported of the British officials in India: ‘‘’It’s all up with us” is their attitude.’
Even after Amritsar and the brutal martial law crackdown that followed, Gandhi still did not want India to leave the empire. The British connection should be kept up, he said, ‘but only if the British should give up behaving as our superiors.’ And here was the rub.
Distinguished India moderatet politician V. S.S. Sastri has secured from an earlier Imperial Conference in 1921, a pledge that, Dominion immigration policies aside, the empire would operate on a policy of racial equality. But the ‘racist mental furniture’ of white supremacy proved too engrained to shake off.
A few years later, Sastri wrote about a meeting he had had with a senior civil servant in the Colonial Office. ‘He depicted the struggle going on at present between two rival ideals of the British Empire,’ Sastri wrote. ‘The one tending towards the equalities of races and communities, the other insisting on the maintenance of white supremacy. The latter idea, till recently undisputed, even now is in practice dominant, and prevails in most matters of importance.’ So the ‘sympathy and understanding’ pleaded for by Singaporean Chinese Lim Boon Keng, and his dreams of forming a ‘Federation of Mankind’ proved, in the end, out of reach.
Matthew Parker is a historian, writer and the author of One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink. You can listen to a conversation with Matthew on the Aspects of History Podcast.
