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The phrasing of this question can lead to a number assumptions being brought into play, amongst which are the following four: firstly, that there was unanimity and consistency in post-war British policy; secondly, that there had been an established `role' for India in the imperial system, and that this role had changed; thirdly, that this `functional' role was both recognised and embedded in policy-making; fourthly, that both India and Africa can in some sense be seen as `instruments' of British policy rather than as discrete, autonomous entities. An awareness of these assumptions will inform the discussion that follows, and some critical analysis of them will be offered.
In discussing this question, I will focus firstly on India's pre-war role, before moving on to the post-war relationship between India and the metropolitan government. Next, this relationship will be placed in the broader post-war context of Britain's global economic, imperial and strategic positions. I will then discuss the measures which were adopted in developing the post-war imperial structures in Africa, before considering the level of success achieved in this programme of development. Finally, some general conclusions will be offered.
India before the second world war was still the most prominent jewel in the imperial crown: in the imperial economic system which provided Britain with a positive manufacturing trade balance of more than £156 million in 1937, India provided nearly £23 million. [1] This figure represents a decline from the mid-1920s peak [2], but still gives some indication of India's economic importance to Britain, an importance rooted both in direct trade between Britain and India, and in the access that control of India gave to the `local trade' eastward. The long-term value of India to Britain was also predicated on its populousness, which supplied Britain with a powerful and cheap Indian army - "the army of Empire" [3] - with which to police the imperial system. India was vital strategically too, serving both as the barrack-room and the `jumping-off' point for British imperial interests east of Africa. In 1939, as John Darwin has succinctly put it:
[India] was a valuable though declining market, an enormous bank of cheap manpower..., the provider of a regular army available in emergency for British use, and, in geopolitical terms, a great zone of stability from which British influence could be exerted in East Asia and the Middle East [4]
In the pre-war world, this vital imperial relationship was cemented by the fact that Britain was India's biggest creditor. [5]
In addition to these practical elements linking India and Britain there were crucial symbolic and prestige aspects to relationship. India had long been of symbolic significance to the identity of imperial rulers: witness Queen Victoria's glorification as the Empress of India, and Lord Curzon's view that "As long as we rule India we are the greatest power in the world. If we lose it we shall drop straightaway to a third-rate power." [6]
This perceived importance can be seen as having carried through until world war two and beyond. In 1942 Winston Churchill, despite the `independence-friendly' Cripps mission, revealed something of the symbolic value of India and the empire when he said "We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire". [7] However, this rhetorical truculence, and the turn of mind that it represented, masked the reality of long-term acceptance of political change in India [8]. This acceptance had manifested itself in the growth of representative bodies, the development of limited Indian self-administration, and the combination of Indian politicians and the growth of mass-support for them. Before the second world war, however, despite the acceptance of change, Britain still retained administrative control of the essential functions of defence, foreign policy, security, and of the forces that ultimately sanctioned British authority - the police and the army. In the British government view, India, even if it moved further towards independence, would remain tightly bound to Britain through the political and economic structures of the imperial system. The overwhelming retrospective impression gained is that, before world war two, the evolution of the British-Indian imperial relationship was viewed as controlled and somewhat leisurely, with India continuing to represent an important and malleable member of the imperial family. India's role can be seen as one of a valuable partner, a value measured in military, economic, geopolitical and prestige terms. Any `surrogate' would have to satisfy all or at least some of these criteria of value.
By 1945, this comfortable position was fundamentally transformed [9]: Britain's prestige was damaged in the subcontinent by defeats at the hands of the Japanese; India was now a creditor to Britain to the tune of more than £1000 million; and the political situation in India had changed, so that anti-British and confrontational sentiments were prevalent. Crucially, the instruments of British authority in India were undermined:
Coercion, as the ultimate weapon of British policy in India against recalcitrant nationalism, as the bedrock of British rule for 190 years, was defunct. [10]
Thus, the metropolitan government's capacity to hold Indian political development to the preferred pre-war path was fatally undercut, making the moves towards partition that subsequently emerged, if not inevitable, then at least much more feasible.
This transformation of Britain's authority in India mirrors its wider ability to control or influence the destiny of the empire. After world war two, the British military, economic, and geopolitical forces operated in a fundamentally changed global environment. These changes helped to shape Britain's latitude for action in the imperial sphere, and it is to these conditioning factors that I will now turn.
The Labour government elected in July 1945, despite our retrospective knowledge of the forces that would militate against the retention of empire, and the huge indebtedness that the war created, saw opportunities as much as problems: Britain was the strongest, least-damaged manufacturing economy in Europe; it sat at the `high table' of world politics alongside the US and the USSR; its empire and global trading arrangements were largely intact; and it retained the `will to empire'. This latter point can be illustrated by one Colonial Office official's view that "The general assumption was that we were still a great power and were going to be one again". [11] Similarly,
To men such as Attlee and Bevin, the empire and Commonwealth seemed essential to the survival, let alone the prosperity, of Britain and to her position as a world power. [12]
This general mind-set was expressed in the immediate post-war world in conditions of fluidity: the bi-polar superpower world of the cold war had not yet emerged, and Britain's desired role as an independent `third-force' had not yet ossified into one of `hand-maiden to the US', meaning that it's opportunities for imperial action were not as constrained as they would become after 1950.
In this context, it is important to note that in the early years after 1945, Britain pursued parallel and complementary policies in India and Africa - they were not seen as mutually exclusive. I would suggest that as the political realities in India became more apparent and more unmanageable, and as the emergence of the cold war led to pressures to contain potential Soviet expansion, British aims to develop African possessions came to coincide more closely with US-driven strategic goals, as well as representing a more realistic chance of success than the retention of India as the prime imperial asset. It is to the African development policies that I will now turn.
The `Report of the Colonial Development Working Party' [13] in November 1948 outlined official recommendations on how Britain could best make use of its colonial possessions. It is worth quoting in detail:
(i) The broad objectives of economic policy in the Colonies should continue to be:-
(a) to restore and improve the capital equipment of the Colonial territories so as to provide a firm basis for future development;
(b) to promote those types of economic activity, whether primary or industrial production, in which the territories are bets fitted to engage, having regard to the balance of their economies and the advantages of external trade;
(c) to raise the living standards of the Colonial peoples as rapidly as the level of their productivity permits; and
(d) to secure the mutual advantage of the United Kingdom and the Colonial territories, having regard to the finance, equipment and skill which the former may be able to provide.
(ii) The pursuit of these objectives must, in the interests of the Colonies themselves as well as of the United Kingdom, be influenced by the necessity for the early attainment of a balance in the external payments of the sterling area. [14]
To anyone familiar with the principles of the `dual mandate' in Africa and the ideas of `trusteeship' associated with it, the parallels here are clear enough, despite the more `enlightened' interpretations that Fabian influences and progressive officials might seek to give. Indeed, the document itself goes on:
Despite these protestations, it is clear that for some influential figures in the Labour government - and for foreign secretary Ernest Bevin specifically - Africa assumed the role of an instrument of imperial development. All post-war policy-making in the imperial sphere - before 1950, at least - must be seen as serving the aim of maintaining Britain's "position as a first-class world power." [16] In Bevin's view,
if only we pushed on and developed Africa, we could have the United States dependent on us, and eating out of our hand in four or five years. [17]
However fanciful this vision may have been, and whatever the tensions and discontinuities between `progressive' and `traditional' imperialists, I would argue that the instrumental view of Africa that Bevin's idea embodied was a widespread influence on African development policies after world war two. I will turn now to the practical implementation of these development aims.
In November 1946 a Colonial Office staff member wrote:
Africa is now the core of our colonial position; the only continental space from which we can still hope to draw reserves of economic and military strength. Our position there depends fundamentally on our standing with Africans in the mass. And this depend[s] on whether we make a success of African local government. [18]
In these three sentences are to be found, for this writer, both the key to Britain's attempts to develop Africa in the post-war world, as well as the source of substantial reasons why those attempts would ultimately founder. The principles of "political, social and economic advancement" [19] adumbrated in the passage above were taken up by Arthur Creech Jones as Colonial Secretary and further refined by 1948:
The fundamental objectives in Africa are to foster the emergence of large-scale societies, integrated for self-improvement by effective democratic political and economic institutions both national and local, inspired by a common faith in progress and Western values and equipped with efficient techniques of production and betterment. [20]
Here we can see the essentially exploitative aims of politicians dressed in the rather more `high-minded' terms of Colonial Office officials. The implementation of these principles was to be achieved by encouraging the participation of Africans in the mass in the administration and government of their countries. Here, in the way that government and administrators sought to propitiate colonial subjects by offering them essentially limited and guided self-government, we might find parallels with pre-war policy aims in India. Like Indians, Africans were perceived as proceeding towards self-government in a series of stages, with these developments being channelled and controlled by the wise representatives of the paternalistic metropole. The echoes of trusteeship are strong here.
Economically, the focus was on developing the export economies of the African colonies, the intention being both to develop their economic infrastructures and to help service the `dollar deficit' that Britain and the sterling area languished under. [21] This was to be achieved through a set of centrally-planned mechanisms, in order to create an integrated system that would serve the needs of the imperial system as a whole. [22] To a limited extent, these efforts met with some success: by 1948 colonial material accounted for 10.2% of UK imports compared to 5.4% in 1938, and the volume of colonial exports rose by 48% between 1946 and 1948. [23] However, the limits of development were also apparent: shortages of labour, materials, and investment, and the extensive structural defects of many colonial territories - poor soil, water, and transport, as well as pervasive monoculture - were all barriers to the effective development of the colonial economies. [24] The money provided by successive Colonial Development and Welfare Acts (1945 and 1950) was not sufficient to overcome these difficulties on anything like a universal scale, especially given the number, variety and disparity of colonies involved in the drive for improved productivity. [25]
The sphere of political development was seen partly as a way of bolstering these economic development drives: by involving Africans in participative democracy and administration, their `hearts and minds' could be won over for the empire. Later, the pressing need to undermine the attractions of Communism added a further motivation to these efforts. Additionally, the
local government strategy was designed to bring in the masses to redress the balance of the professional politicians, who were reckoned to be bent only on removing the colonial power for their own benefit. [26]
This required the creation or adaptation of root and branch structures for local representation, government, and administration, which in turn meant infrastructure development and modernisation. All of these developments were to be carried out in parallel with the attempted expansion and rationalisation of production for export. In retrospect, the tensions and conflicts that developed seem inevitable, especially where developments driven from the metropole or by the colonial government, and abetted by African elites, cut across more traditional methods of cultivation and land-ownership.
From this brief survey of some of the economic and political development programmes slated for Africa in the post-war period, it can be suggested that what the British were attempting was highly complex, fundamentally challenging to traditional social and economic norms in Africa, and represented perhaps the last chance for Britain to autonomously exploit extensive territories before the emergence of a US-USSR bi-polarity.
In assessing the extent to which, and how successfully, Britain utilised Africa as a surrogate for India, I will offer a few observations. At the more concrete level, that is, in military and economic terms, there is evidence to suggest that Britain was indeed seeking to relocate the Imperial centre of gravity in Africa. However, Africa could not offer an army comparable in quantity and quality to the Indian army in a short time scale, [27] neither could Africa's economic infrastructure provide the sustained and rapid economic development that Britain required. Similarly, Britain attempted to stabilise and develop the African political sphere, with a view to maintaining control and entrenching the British strategic position. This was of a piece with Britain's strategic interests in the Middle East and the Mediterranean. The parallels with pre-war India are strong here, in the sense that Britain's involvement in both Africa and India embodied important economic, military, political and strategic considerations.
The sense in which Africa represents a surrogate for India is more problematic. If surrogacy suggests a direct substitution, then I feel that this is a misleading use of the term, since British policy was pursued in parallel in Africa and India - they were not mutually exclusive. Rather, Africa emerged in the post-war period as Britain's `best remaining bet' in economic and strategic development terms. A further complication is that during the time that India was `phased out' and Africa `phased in' as the key colonial area, the conditions and constraints external to the British imperial system had altered profoundly. Britain was now a diminished force in the world, given the emergence of the two superpowers. As such, Britain was not in the same position to exploit Africa as it had been in the pre-war years. Further, British authority had been eroded. It could be argued that it was this loss of authority that determined Britain's demotion to a Curzon's `third-rate power status' and allowed the secession of India, rather than the loss of India which determined that status. This interaction between authority, legitimacy and perceived status also highlights another sense in which Africa can be seen as a surrogate for India: the sense in which the control and exploitation of Africa represented, for politicians and administrators, the continued `glory and grandeur' of the British imperial tradition. It is in this sense - as a symbol and instrument of the imperial idea - that Africa can perhaps best be seen as a surrogate for India.
Finally, I would observe that British attempts to modernise and develop Africa brought with them uncontrollable developments and reactions within African societies. These responses, coupled with the growth of nationalism and the loss of British authority and coercive power, perhaps go a long way to explaining why the attempted development of Africa as a practical and symbolic surrogate for India ultimately failed. The `rules of the game' had changed fundamentally: Britain could no more create a substitute for India on the same terms than it could turn back time and recreate the India that existed before 1939.
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Cain, P. J.
and
Hopkins, A. G. - British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914 - 1990; Longman, 1993
Darwin, John - Britain and Decolonisation Macmillan, 1988
Fieldhouse, D. K. - The Labour Governments and the Empire-Commonwealth, 1945 - 51
in Ritchie Ovendale (ed.),
The, Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945 - 1951; Leicester U.P., 1984
Hennessy, Peter - Never Again; Vintage, 1993
Hyam, Ronald - The Labour Government and the End of Empire Part I; HMSO, 1992
and
The Labour Government and the End of Empire Part II; HMSO, 1992
[1] P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism: Crisis and Deconstruction 1914 - 1990 (Longman, 1993), p. 38
[2] ibid.
[3] Peter Hennessy, Never Again (Vintage, 1993), p. 220
[4] John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation (Macmillan, 1988), p. 28
[5] ibid., p. 85
[6] cited in Hennessy, p. 216
[7] cited in Hennessy, p. 221
[8] for the following, see Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation, pp. 80 - 86
[9] for the following, see Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation, pp. 89 - 97
[10] ibid., p. 92
[11] cited in Hennessy, p. 224
[12] D. K. Fieldhouse, The Labour Governments and the Empire-Commonwealth, 1945 - 51
in Ritchie Ovendale (ed.), The Foreign Policy of the British Labour Governments 1945 - 1951 (Leicester University Press), 1984
[13] see CAB 134/219, EPC(48)92 in Ronald Hyam, The Labour Government and the End of Empire Part II (HMSO, 1992), pp. 106 - 110
[14] Hyam, Part II, pp. 106 - 107
[15] ibid., p. 109
[16] Fieldhouse, p. 88
[17] cited in Hennessy, p. 221
[18] CO 847/35/6 in Ronald Hyam, The Labour Government and the End of Empire Part I (HMSO, 1992), pp. 117 - 8
[19] CO 847/35/6, nos 15 - 24 in Hyam, Part I, p. 120
[20] CO 852/1053/1, Cambridge Summer School Paper CSC(48)4 cited in Hyam, Part I, pp. xxix - xxx
[21] see Hyam, idem, pp. xliv - v
[22] ibid., p. xlii
[23] ibid., xlv
[24] ibid., p. xlvii
[25] ibid., xlv - lii
[26] ibid., p. xxxi
[27] see Hennessy, p. 217