Imperial Euthanasia?

Ronald Hyam (Cambridge University Press, 2006), 464 pages

Ronald Hyam did it again.  Hyam’s Britain’s Imperial Century, 1815-1914, first
published more than 30 years ago, remains the single-best historical synthesis
of the British Empire at its height.  With this new volume, Hyam has produced
an engaging and comprehensive study of British decolonization in the 20th
century that will provide one of the key starting points in any future discussion
of the subject.  

The central thesis in Britain’s Declining Empire contends that international
pressure, more than any other factor, forced Great Britain to retreat from its
formal empire in the middle decades of the twentieth century.  The Cold War
necessarily played a large role in this story.  The British, in Hyam’s view,
wished to control and direct colonial nationalism in the attempt to prevent the
spread of global communism.  The United States and especially the United
Nations, however, increasingly came to the conclusion that any continuation of
formal colonialism was incompatible with the struggle against communism.  In
order to retain its power and prestige, Great Britain acquiesced to this new
international situation in a series of stages, from Clement Attlee’s “proto-
decolonization” in the immediate post-war years to Harold Macmillan’s “wind of
change” speech in 1960.  The “avoidance of … international criticism …
became almost the primary reason for speeding up transfers of power” during
these years, Hyam writes (p. 181).

Hyam acknowledges the major competing explanations for decolonization—
financial crisis and colonial nationalism—and then dispatches them fairly
perfunctorily.  Financial weaknesses did prove fatal to Britain’s ability to
influence the global economy (and thus debilitating her “informal empire”) but
did not have as large a factor on ending formal colonial holdings, apart from
Cyprus, Malaysia, and a few others, Hyam writes.  The existence of successful
colonial nationalist movements, moreover, did not mean that nationalists
themselves held the balance of power: “The really significant historical
question to ask is how the imperial power had got psychologically to the point
where it was prepared to open the door to self rule when nationalist leaders
came and knocked” (p.403, italics added).  

This question is a good one, and it serves to sharpen Hyam’s narrative by
focusing on the imperial administration in London, specifically within the
Colonial and Foreign Offices.  In a series of lively pen portraits, Hyam provides
a sketch of some influential colonial officers in the decades after World War I.  
He does not posit an “official mind” per se, yet he does find a remarkable
degree of consistency in character and approach to imperial policy, marked by
gradualism and pragmatism.   Even Winston Churchill, somewhat surprisingly,
is portrayed within this open-mindedness; Hyam finds that Churchill’s decisions
on colonial policy were marked by “compromise, reconciliation, and even-
handed justice, however paternalistic the presentation might be” (p.172).

Hyam’s achievement in synthesizing 50 years of British colonial policy and
imperial withdrawal in Africa, Asia and the Middle East in fewer than 500 pages
prove remarkable, yet his narrative coherence, centered on political decision-
makers in London, admittedly restricts the view of the total decolonization
experience.  The words and actions of colonial nationalists themselves are dim
and fleeting; their impact is necessarily filtered through the eyes of imperial
administrators.  In a concluding metaphor, Hyam likens the end of British
imperialism as a kind of euthanasia, and emphasizes “the relative ease and
quiet of it all” (p. 404).  This conclusion rings true from a British perspective;
whether it holds throughout the former empire seems to be a matter for
another project.