Falling Apart: Britain Leaves India and Palestine 1947-48 (lecture)

Divide et Impera

Falling Apart: Britain Leaves India and Palestine

Dr. Paul Mulvey

Nehru vs. Jinnah

Britain:Holding the Ring

OrDividing and

Ruling?

Ben Gurion vs al-Husseini

By the end of 1945 the British Empire had survived the greatest test in its history, but it had done so at a terrible cost. Although the Empire suffered fewer casualties than in the First World War (712,000 deaths due to enemy action, as against 908,000; with 451,000 of those from the UK as compared to 735,000 the first time) the war had lasted nearly two years longer, large chunks of the empire had been directly attacked and even conquered by the enemy, and the war had ended with Britain very nearly bankrupt. Furthermore, there was no doubt even at the time that the UK was a far less prominent player on the world stage by 1945 than it had been in 1918, for while in 1918 Britain has ended the war as one of – perhaps the – main victor, in 1945 it was clearly a long way behind both the USA and the USSR both in terms of its contribution to the overall defeat of Germany and Japan and as regards its continuing military power.

The Empire was, however, still the largest the world had ever seen. And to many in Britain – not least to the wartime prime minister, Winston Churchill – the possession of it still seemed to guarantee Great Power status, whilst hopefully also offsetting at least some of the economic problems that had been caused by the costs of the war and the massive disruption to peacetime trade and industry.

There were trends that pre-dated 1939 that meant that the empire would not be the same as before. In the interwar years Ireland had gained effective independence, the Dominions had become legally sovereign and even India, as we shall see, had started on the road to home rule. The Empire, therefore, was going to become less imperial, more of a – in the word that became increasingly fashionable at the time – Commonwealth. Britain would thus become the head and inspiration of a group of like-minded democracies that via a community of strategic and economic interests would present an alternative to American economic hegemony and Soviet totalitarian militarism. The problem was though, that the war had fatally undermined some of the crucial assumptions upon which much of this neo-liberal imperialist ideal rested. It had, as the old cliché puts it, ‘changed the facts on the ground’. Did Britain’s interlocutors within the various parts of the empire have a ‘community of interest’ with Britain? Did they, indeed, even have a community of interest with each other – not only as between parts of the empire, but even more crucially within them? And when nationalists of whatever type fought against British dominion, did the British any longer have the resources or the political will-power to contain them? Did the Britain, in fact, have anything to offer the peoples of the empire that would give them a reason to maintain links with the ‘motherland’?

Today we are going to look at these questions via two case studies – India and Palestine. For while these countries had very different imperial pedigrees – India was by far the largest and one of the longest held parts of empire, while Palestine was tiny and had only been under British authority since 1918 – they were both to reveal how the war directly affected the empire and of how its consequences undermined Britain's ability to maintain control. They were also both clear demonstrations of what many British imperialists had known all along – that the British empire could only survive for as long as its constituent nations (the white dominions aside) were more divided amongst themselves than they were united against foreign rule. Dividing in order to

rule had long been a British policy, but one that brought with it the risk that the divisions so exacerbated would one day become so fierce that they were no longer containable.

India before 1939

‘A half naked fakhir’?

As we heard in an earlier lecture, India had contributed a considerable amount to the imperial war effort in World War One, not least in contributing most of the men who had conquered the Middle East for Britain. As a reward, and because he believed that the way to best develop India within the empire was to gradually move her towards Dominion status along the lines enjoyed by the likes of Canada and Australia, the Liberal Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montague, managed to persuade the Cabinet to grant India a degree of local autonomy on a provincial basis. Although it was not without considerable qualms from his more traditionally minded imperialist fellow ministers, such as the ex-viceroy of India Lord Curzon, that he managed to get this enacted as the Government of India Act of 1919. Unfortunately the reforms did not have the pacifying effect that Montague hoped for. It was too little too late for Indian nationalists, and – more damagingly for Britain’s long term prospects in India perhaps – the spirit in which it was granted was largely ignored by Britain’s agents on the ground. Most notably by the dyspeptic General Dyer when he ordered his troops to open fire on demonstrators, killing hundreds, in Amritsar in 1919. India erupted in demonstrations, which became so violent that the great moral authority figure of the nationalist movement – ‘The Mahatma’ Mohandas Gandhi – called them off and opted instead for acts of civil disobedience and non-cooperation which were intended to win the moral high ground and unite India (population 306 million by 1921) against the Raj. The pattern was set for the remaining years of British rule, where civil disobedience would prompt repressive measures from the authorities, which would prompt riots, which would lead to counter violence, more political bans and arrests (at one point, in 1930, 60,000 nationalists were in jail) until matters threatened to get out of control, when the nationalist leaders would calm things down until the whole cycle started again.

Ironically, the growing influence of the nationalist movement – witnessed most strongly in the growing membership and influence of the Congress Party (4.5 million members by 1939) – was due in no small part to its often British educated leadership. Gandhi himself had been trained as a barrister at the Inner Temple (just across the road from the LSE), while the man who was to become the political leader of the movement, Jawaharlal Nehru, was an alumnus of Harrow (incidentally, the school Churchill went to) and Trinity College, Cambridge. It all seemed to confirm the worst fears of old school imperialists that far from reconciling Indians to British rule, giving them a decent education would only encourage them to escape from London’s grasp. It was all the more frustrating when, like Gandhi, men armed with the dialectical skills of the best western politicians were also able to appeal to the Indian masses by embracing the ascetic image of a traditional Hindu holy man – hence Churchill’s famous quip about the ‘half-naked fakhir’.

To calm matters down on a more permanent basis the British Government had another attempt at granting India more power in the Government of India Act of 1935. This proposed that India be split into eleven self-ruling provinces, with a total electorate of 36 million. At the centre would be two federal assemblies, with seats reserved for the Indian princes, Muslims, Sikhs, Untouchables and women. It would control all matters

except finance, defence and foreign policy. The plan failed – the princes weren’t happy with their share of power, while Congress thought that the reserved powers and the Viceroy’s right to suspend the constitution and rule by decree meant that the whole scheme was a fake. A view shared, ironically, by a small but vociferous band of opponents to the Act in the British Parliament, led by Winston Churchill, who described it as ‘a monstrous monument of sham built by pygmies’ and who feared that passing the Act might ‘mingle the death knell of the British Empire in the East’. But despite their qualms. Congress did take part in the consequent provincial elections, and in 1937 took control of six of the provinces, winning two more a couple of years later.

Ironically, the success of Congress somewhat helped the British, for it allowed them to play the old imperial game of divide and rule. Congress, although formally a secular party which claimed the allegiance of all Indians, was in fact dominated by a Hindu elite, and its sectarian nature was further reinforced by Gandhi’s very traditional Hindu style and appeal. This was worrying to the millions of Muslims who lived in north India (36 million in 1931, out of a total Indian population of 237 million). Their cause was taken up by Muhammad Ali Jinnah (another London-trained barrister, this time Lincoln’s Inn) who put aside his Saville Row suits and silk ties in favour of traditional black coat, baggy trousers and sheep-skin cap as he set about rallying India’s Muslims under the slogan ‘Islam in danger’. What motivated Jinnah and his followers was the fear of what might happen to them in an independent India which would be dominated by its large Hindu majority. Talk began of creating an independent Muslim state in India – perhaps to be called Pakistan, an acronym formed from the names of the Muslim majority areas of the Punjab, Afghanistan, Kashmir, Sind and Baluchistan. Jinnah’s Muslim League thus split the Indian nationalist movement on sectarian lines – with Jinnah fearing the Hindus even more than he disliked the British. As with Ireland and, as we shall see, Palestine, it seemed to British imperialists that they would have strong local allies who would allow them to fend off demands for greater local autonomy.

Palestine before 1939

If the British had conquered an India that already consisted of many fissiparous communities – of which the Hindu-Muslim split was the most obvious one, in Palestine they actually went out of their way to create a bitterly divided country where one had not existed before. For centuries Palestine had slumbered as a largely insignificant province of the Ottoman Empire. By 1918 it had a population of only 750,000 of whom 90% were Arabs, most of whom were Muslims but with a small Christian minority. The rest were mainly Jews – some indigenous, but most of more recent settler origin. For with the spread of nationalist ideology throughout the late-nineteenth century world, some Jews too had decided that they should have a ‘nationalism’ – know as Zionism – and that they should have a state of their own: not necessarily, but preferably, in their ancestral homeland of Palestine. But for the First World War such Zionist ambitions would have got nowhere, but in 1917 – keen to win the support of American and Russian Jews, and to prevent the Germans from doing so, the British government in the guise of the Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, had declared that when Britain

captured Palestine from the Turks it would allow the creation there of a Jewish ‘national home’. After the war Britain was granted the League of Nations mandate to administer Palestine (the mandate also included the East Bank of the Jordan river which was later split away to form Jordan), so that effectively Palestine had become a part of the British Empire.

From the start the British were faced with an insoluble problem. Having promised the Zionists a homeland, they would have to allow Jews to migrate to Palestine – something which the British government was at least initially keen on, as it took the view that the Jews would be more loyal to Britain than the Arabs would be, and because it believed that the Jews were educationally and economically more advanced than the Arabs and would therefore make more productive use of the territory. The British hoped that the Jews and Arabs would agree on some sort of eventual power-sharing arrangement, but that proved impossible as the Zionists always aimed to become a majority in their new homeland, while the Arabs did not see why they should give up land and power to newly arrived and religiously and culturally foreign immigrants.

Population of Palestine 1914 to 1946

Various attempts were made in the 1920s to get the two sides to agree a way forward, and the British experimented with various ways to limit Jewish migration. But as the numbers involved were small, the lack of agreement did not register highly on Britain’s list of imperial problems. All that changed with the ascent to power in Germany of Adolf Hitler. Suddenly European Jews (and most Jews were European) had a rather urgent incentive to consider emigration from their current homelands. For some, Palestine was a first choice for a new home, but for many it was a least bad (or only) option, especially when other countries severely restricted the number of Jews that they would allow in.

The surge in Jewish immigration to Palestine proved too much for the Palestinians, who fearing that the British were in effect giving their country to the Jews, rose up in revolt in 1936. The British response (The 1937 Peel Commission) was to propose splitting the country into separate Jewish and Palestinian statelets, but this was rejected by both sides, as the Jews wanted more land than they were offered, while the Palestinians did not see why they should surrender any territory at all. In the meantime, and with covert help from the British authorities, the Jews armed themselves and set up an underground army – the Haganah – not only for self-defence but also to help the British fight the rebellious Arabs.

The fighting was brutal and nasty, with attacks on civilians and atrocities committed by all (three) sides. By 1939 more than 3,000 lives had been lost. But by then, with war in Europe looming, and despite the fact that the Arabs on the ground were losing the struggle, the British switched strategy by issuing a White Paper (i.e. a proposal of Government policy) which proposed to scrap the partition plans, severely limit further Jewish immigration and promised the Arabs that they would have majority rule in Palestine within ten years. Even in the annals of British imperial duplicity, this was a stunning volte face. It was driven by fear – not of the Arabs but of Germany and, to some extent, Italy. The Second World War was imminent. The British Army could not

afford to be tied down trying to keep the peace in Palestine and, perhaps more importantly, Britain needed to keep the goodwill (and oil supplies) of her Arab friends in the region, the most important of whom were the Saudis. Given the urgency of the matter, Zionist friendship had become a commodity Britain could no longer afford. Or so she thought, for Zionists now turned against the British, launching terrorist attacks on government courts and offices, and increasing the rate of illegal immigration. But though Zionist militancy was to have a profound effect on the future of Palestine in the long term, as 1939 progressed it sank very much into the background as Hitler launched his effort to conquer the world, and gave Britain rather more to worry about than how to manage Palestine.

The Bengal Famine, 1943

India during the War

The Second World War was the event, more than any other, which sealed the fate of British rule in India. Things went badly from the start. The Viceroy, Lord Linlithgow, announced on 3 September 1939 that India was at war with Germany. He had not bothered to consult Indian party leaders or the provincial governments. Although affronted by Linlithgow’s high-handed arrogance, some at least of the nationalists were sympathetic to Britain’s cause – Gandhi being chief amongst them. Nehru, however, took a harder line, arguing that India should do a deal with Britain – support for the war in exchange for independence after it. A more extreme faction, under Subhas Chandra Bose, saw in the war a chance to rise up and expel the British. Bose got little support and fled to Germany before the British could arrest him.

Meanwhile Linlithgow refused to make any concrete concessions to Nehru, prompting Congress to resign from the provincial governments, ironically making it easier for the British to manage the country for the moment. Jinnah soon helped as well by announcing on 22 March 1940 that India’s Muslims were a separate nation and thus would take no part in a deal to hand the country over to Nehru and the Congress party. As Congress pursued it traditional policies of non-cooperation the British clamped down and by 1941 Nehru and 26,000 of his followers had been jailed.

Then things got a lot worse. On 7 December 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and within a few months they had swept away the European colonies of South East Asia, easily capturing the ‘impregnable’ fortress of Singapore and sinking the British battleships sent to relieve it in the process. Burma, which until 1937 had administratively been a part of British India, fell in the Spring of 1942. The Japanese were now on the very borders of India proper. It was an imperial defeat without precedence. British forces had been understandingly inadequate, but also – and not so forgivably – incompetent. The myth of British imperial might had been well and truly shattered.

As to the immediate crisis, Britain’s allies against the Japanese – the USA and China, as well as the Labour Party leader and deputy-prime minister at home, Clement Attlee – now urged Churchill to motivate India by making this a war for democracy by offering an early opportunity for freedom. Reluctantly Churchill announced that after the war India could decide on a new constitution, albeit that individual provinces would

have the right to opt out of it if they chose. A Labour politician, Sir Stafford Cripps, went to Delhi in March 1942 to persuade the nationalists to agree to a deal. He failed, as he was not authorised to offer the Indians complete control of their own future, not least because Congress demanded a free and united India, whereas Britain would not force the Muslim majority areas into a Hindu dominated India. It was the problem that had bedevilled the negotiations over Irish Home Rule some quarter of a century or so earlier but now on a much larger and potentially far deadlier scale. Churchill was delighted that he had managed to pacify the Americans by being seen to make the effort, while the nationalist refusal to deal meant that in fact Britain had offered nothing. Gandhi, on the other side, took a more realistic view of British imperial prospects in a post-war world, asking why should Congress take a ‘post-dated cheque’ on a failing bank.

Congress launched another protest campaign, under the slogan ‘Quit India’. The British responded by again arresting Nehru (this time he was kept in jail until April 1945), along with up to 60,000 other campaigners. 2,500 Indians were shot and killed in the disturbances.

But worse, far worse, was to follow. The Japanese army had brutally exposed the inadequacy of British military might in Asia, now nature revealed the hopelessness of British administrative power in India itself. During 1943 failed monsoons led to a poor harvest in Bengal – India’s most densely populated province (half of which makes up modern Bangladesh). Traditionally, local food shortages could be covered by imports from Burma – but that was now impossible. The British authorities did nothing to provide emergency food supplies, except to advise people to stock up themselves – poor advice both because it did nothing to alleviate the overall shortage, but also because it prompted hoarding which made matters worse. They also destroyed 50,000 boats which traded food (amongst other things) in the Ganges delta lest they fall into the hands of the Japanese and their new ally, Subhas Chandra Bose, who along with 25,000 of his followers was now fighting alongside them as the Indian National Army. By the autumn of 1943 malnutrition and disease had killed some 3 million people – or more than six times as many Brits as died in the whole war.

Eventually some aid was provided, the rains returned and the harvest recovered. Meanwhile a British and Indian Army kept the Japanese out of India and by the end of the war had reconquered Burma, but it was small compensation for the disasters that the war had brought to the British Raj.

Palestine during the WarIn the shadow of the Camps

When war broke out in Europe Palestine, unlike India, became a rather irrelevant side show. Most Palestinian Arabs as well as almost all Jews supported the fight against Hitler, though the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem (pictured on the first slide) sided with the Nazis. More oddly, and presumably on the basis that my enemy’s enemy is my friend, so did the violent Zionist extremists of the Stern Gang, whose leader Abraham Stern, as well as attacking British forces, wanted Jews to shout ‘Heil Hitler’ in Jerusalem. But while mainstream Zionists were overwhelmingly on Britain’s side as to their desired outcome for the war, they did not see eye to eye with the British about Jewish immigration to Palestine. This, as we heard earlier, had always been an issue, but with the terror and eventual genocide that the Nazis launched against the Jews of Europe this issue gradually came to dominate all others in deciding the future fate of Palestine.

In the early years of the war the British authorities tried to keep to the spirit of the 1939 White Paper by severely limiting Jewish immigration, and this led to a number of very unpleasant incidents that seriously damaged Britain’s image as a civilised power. Before inaugurating the death camps of the Final Solution in 1943, the Nazis had been happy to allow some Jews to flee from areas that they controlled. Indeed Adolf Eichmann, the SS officer in charge of Jewish matters, sometimes ‘sold’ the right for Jewish emigration to the Zionists. As a result a number of ships crammed with Jewish refugees tried to land in Palestine, where the British authorities turned them away. In two notorious cases this ended in disaster. One ship, The Patria, was blown up by the Haganah in Haifa harbour, apparently with the intention of disabling it and so preventing the British sending it to Mauritius. Unfortunately, the sabotage was rather overdone and the ship sank, with the loss of 260 Jewish and 12 British lives. In another case, that of The Struma in February 1942, a ship containing 769 Romanian Jews was sent hither and thither between Romania, Palestine and Turkey as no one would let it land, until it was torpedoed in the Black Sea with the loss of all but two of the people on board.

All of this, however, fell into insignificance as the full extent of Nazi barbarity against the Jews became apparent. Sir Harold MacMichael, the British High Commissioner in Palestine who had survived assassination attempts by the Haganah after turning away The Struma and other refugee ships, now decided that a Jewish state in Palestine was desirable after all. More importantly, President Roosevelt, in May 1942 endorsed the Zionist leader David Ben-Gurion’s call that ‘Palestine be established as a Jewish Commonwealth’. With allies like these, the Zionists could be confident that their prospects were going to be much improved in a post-war world, although that was small compensation for the horror which had been unleashed on their fellow Jews throughout Nazi controlled Europe.

India after the War

As the war in Europe ended Churchill authorised Lord Wavell, now Viceroy, to convene a conference of political leaders in India ‘to advance India towards her goal of self-government’, but he did so confidently expecting that Jinnah’s refusal to countenance a unified democratic India would prevent any agreement – which it did. But within weeks Churchill was out of power, as Labour won the July 1945 UK general election by a landslide. While Labour was not without its own imperialists – foreign secretary Ernest Bevin for one – the party did not have the ‘last ditch’ imperialist attitudes that Churchill did. It’s leader, and the new PM, Clement Attlee had long been a proponent of Indian home rule within the British Commonwealth; and in any case, Labour had been elected to create a better life for the people at home – not least by introducing a National Health Service – and not to spend what little money the country could scrape together after fighting the most expensive war in history on defending an empire whose members no longer wanted to be in it.

While the new government decided what to do next, things got worse again in India. Wavell’s attempt to prosecute a selection of the men who had supported Bose prompted widespread disorder, leading to dozens of deaths, while the provincial elections of 1945-6 exacerbated the communal divide as Jinnah’s Muslim League won over 80 per cent of the seats allocated to Muslims, while Congress gained 90 per cent of the non-

Muslim ones. Disruption also spread to the Indian armed forces – always the backbone to the British Raj – as several mutinies broke out, the most serious of which occurred in Bombay (Mumbai) in February 1946 when sailors started a riot. Enough was enough for Attlee, who sent Cripps and two other ministers to India to offer independence. Three months of tortuous negotiations, however, failed to get Jinnah and Nehru to agree on how India could be united, democratic and yet safe for its Muslims. While the talks went on communal violence got worse, particularly in the Punjab, where three religious groups – Hindus, Muslims and Sikhs competed for dominance. Arson, rape and murder became commonplace as ethnic cleansing and reprisal attacks spread. Gruesome atrocities became everyday events, and often thousands died in a single incident. His Majesty’s Government decided it was time to go, and in February 1947 appointed Admiral Lord Louis Mountbatten (incidentally, Prince Philip’s uncle) as the last Viceroy, tasked with getting Britain out of India by June 1948.

With the violence getting ever worse, and despite the adamant objections of Congress, Mountbatten soon decided that partition was the only way to prevent an all-out civil war. And the sooner the better, as he advanced the date for the handover to 15 August 1947. Thus the British Raj would be dismantled in just 73 days. Unfortunately, rather than pacifying matters, this precipitate timetable both undermined the confidence of the scant forces of law and order and incensed the partisans on all sides to grab what they could while the going was still good. So as the politicians quickly planned for and then celebrated their new found independence as the two states of India and Pakistan (Pakistan consisted of two separate parts, of which the eastern one broke away in 1971 to form Bangladesh) the northern parts of British India collapsed into a fury of savage communal violence, during which more than a million people died, while eleven million were driven from their homes. Even Gandhi became a victim – shot by a Hindu fanatic in January 1948 for his supposed partiality to Muslims. But by then Britain had escaped the quagmire, and with the added bonus that both of the new states had at least theoretically remained within the imperial orbit by becoming members of the British Commonwealth.

Palestine after the War

Unlike with India, British politicians had no emotional attachment to Palestine, but they did have strategic interests in the Middle East as a whole, not only because it was a major source of oil but also because Britain had long been the most influential of the Great Powers in the region – a position which, superficially at least, her victories there in the Second World War seemed to confirm. Palestine, therefore, presented an irresolvable problem: how to show compassion to the Jews (more important than ever in light of the Holocaust) while being fair to the native Palestinians, and in the process maintaining good relations with Arab states, who did not see why Arabs should suffer in order to assuage the conscience of the West, made guilty by its failure to prevent the Holocaust. The new Labour Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin, tried a compromise, setting up a joint committee of enquiry with the Americans which in April 1946 recommended the immediate admission of 100,000 Jews to Palestine, which the Jews and Arabs would share power. Significantly, President

Truman did not support the latter suggestion. Neither did the Zionists or Palestinians. And the more extreme Zionists turned their weapons against the British, most spectacularly when they blew up the British Military Head Quarters at the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 41 Arabs, 28 Brits and 17 Jews in the process.

Without American support, and in a financially parlous state, the British had no stomach to mount the sort of anti-terrorist campaign against the Jews that they had used against the Arab revolt in the years before the war. By February 1947 Bevin had had enough and referred the future of Palestine to the United Nations where the General Assembly, urged on by the United States, voted for partition. Britain accepted this, but was not prepared to enforce it, so in May 1948 she relinquished the Mandate. The Zionists immediately declared the birth of the State of Israel and a war broke out between the Jews on one side and the Palestinians, helped by several of the Arab states, on the other. The Israelis won, and in the process half of Palestine’s Arab population of 1.5 million were displaced or forced into exile – creating a refugee problem which festers to this day.

Palestine: a divided land

So Britain had ‘scuttled’ twice in less than a year, leaving violent chaos in her wake. Her power and prestige was much diminished and the greater part of her empire was gone. We have seen how events in India and Palestine led to this, but we also need to consider some of the wider issues that meant that Britain was by the post-war years both unwilling and unable to enforce her imperial dominion over societies that were no longer prepared to tolerate her rule.

The wider picture: only a bit player now?

Attlee, Truman and Stalin

There were indeed a number of factors which meant that by 1947-48 Britain was more prepared to let India and Palestine go than she had been before the war. Some of these factors also made it easier for the British to abandon these countries than would be the case with some of their other colonies. Unlike Ireland, Kenya or Rhodesia, for example, there was no British settler community in either country that needed to be protected or that could pull on the heart strings of public opinion back home. In 1921, for instance, there were only 157,000 Europeans in India, and 60,000 of those were troops who would leave automatically in the event of independence. What is more, the numbers were falling as Indians replaced Europeans in the Indian Civil Service as the likelihood of further Indian autonomy made career prospects for Britons ever less certain. In Palestine the overwhelming majority of the British present were soldiers, and even though some British Jews migrated there, their loyalty was mostly to the aspiring state of Israel rather than to any colonial motherland.

Talking of soldiers, India and Palestine had both originally been held because of their military and strategic significance. India had been a major source of men to fight Britain’s wars, and as late as 1946 there were still over 250,000 Indian troops serving Britain overseas, mostly in the Middle East and South East Asia, all paid for by the British Exchequer. Palestine, on the other hand, had never been a reservoir of fighting men. Rather, the British military had valued Palestine because of its strategic position at the crossroads of the Middle East, where it could protect the Suez Canal and offer a base from which to deter other powers from meddling in the region. Post-1945, though, these assets were rapidly becoming liabilities as instead of providing security both countries needed ever more British troops for internal security. India was, of course, simply too large to be dominated by foreign soldiers, while Palestine – where ten percent of the British Army was tied down trying and failing to hold the peace – was a quagmire where if Britain sided with the Arabs she would antagonise her most crucial ally, the United States; whereas if she favoured the Jews she would alienate her Arab allies in the region.

As the costs of imperial security grew, Britain’s ability to pay for it fell. By 1945, having once been by far the largest owner of overseas assets in the world, Britain had become the world’s largest debtor, to the tune of £4.6 billion. The government’s total national debt by 1946 was 250% of GDP (Greece’s is currently 177% [2015]). Bankruptcy was only averted thanks to a $3.5 billion loan from the Americans. Bread was rationed and fuel was in short supply. Labour had been elected to spent money on domestic reforms, notably in health and education, and with the Soviet Union seen as a looming threat in Eastern and Southern Europe, the UK needed to save money where it could, and troublesome bits of the Empire seemed a good place to start. Particularly when those bits were becoming ever less beneficial to the British economy anyway.

Palestine had always been too small to have any economic significance for Britain, but this had not been the case with India, which had traditionally provided a huge market for British exports, particularly cotton goods; a source of labour to man not only the imperial armies but also plantations, farms and shops across the tropical empire (the source of the substantial ethnic Indian populations of such countries as Guyana and Singapore); and source of cheap finance in that Indian goods sold in Britain could be paid for with pounds rather than scarce dollars. But by the interwar years the use of indentured Indian labour elsewhere in the empire had been stopped, whilst the Indians were making more of their own cotton goods and what they did import they got increasing from places such as Japan, which were more competitively priced than Lancashire. By the 1940s Britain provided only 8 percent of Indian imports, down from two thirds in 1914.

Finally, in a world where Britain was reliant on American loans to support her economy and American military power to defend Europe against the Soviet Union – the only potential enemy that could really threaten Britain – hanging onto reluctant parts of empire largely for the sake of imperial prestige simply seemed a luxury that was no longer affordable. All the more so when, if possible, as was the case with India, the departure could be made on good terms with the new countries so that the British could hope, or at least pretend, that this was not a case of imperial ‘scuttle’ but rather the start of a new relationship with friendly powers that Britain had successfully nursed to home rule within a greater than ever British Commonwealth. As Piers Brendon puts it – … the British, basking in the afterglow of their finest hour, liked to think that little had changed. An almost empty House of Commons had nodded through the [Indian] independence legislation. The Daily Mail merely replaced on its masthead the legend ‘For King and Empire’ with ‘For King and Commonwealth’. Politicians at Westminster stressed the continuity and amity of relations with India and Pakistan. They claimed that everything had gone according to plan and that nothing became the British Raj like the leaving of it. [Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, Kindle edition, 10437].

That was not how it seemed to the millions of victims of India’s communal bloodbath, nor to the tens of thousands of Palestinians who were displaced by the continuing series of Arab-Israeli conflicts. For while Britain could probably not have left India and Palestine in a better way than it did, it cannot avoid at least some share of the responsibility for creating such viciously factional communities in the first place.

Bibliography

• Wm Roger Louis, ‘The Dissolution of the British Empire’, in The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol.IV. (1999)

• Judith M. Brown, ‘India’, ditto.• Francis Robinson, 'The British Empire and the Muslim World‘, ditto.• Glen Balfour-Paul, 'Britain's Informal Empire in the Middle East', ditto.• Piers Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-2007 (2007)• A.J. Stockwell, 'British Decolonisation: the Record and the Records', Journal of

Contemporary European History 15(4) (2006), pp.573-583• Ritchie Ovendale, ‘The Palestine Policy of the British Labour Government

1947: The Decision to Withdraw’, International Affairs 56(1) (1980)• Michael J. Cohen, ‘Appeasement in the Middle East: The British White Paper

on Palestine, May 1939’, The Historical Journal, 16(3) (1973)• B.R. Tomlinson, 'The Political Economy of the Raj: The Decline of Colonialism'

in Journal of Economic History 42(1) (1982), pp. 133-7• L.J. Butler, Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World (2002)