The Sad, Dark End of the British Empire
Scottish independence could be the final
insult.
By Richard Halloran: A freelance writer
in Honolulu. Formerly with the New York Times as a foreign correspondent
in Asia and military correspondent in Washington, he is the author of a brief
biography: My Name Is Shinseki … and I Am a Soldier.
August 26, 2014
During the 19th and early 20th centuries,
Britain had dominion over so many portions of the Earth it was said, famously,
that “the sun never set on the British Empire.” Since the end of World War II, however,
that sun has been steadily dipping toward the horizon. Today, sundown is truly
at hand.
On Sept. 18, the voters of Scotland will go
to the polls to determine whether their nation will declare independence from
the United Kingdom after 307 years of union with England. Polls over the last
18 months reported by the website What Scotland Thinks
show a gradually rising tide for independence even though advocates of
remaining in the U.K. still lead in the surveys. But many Scots have said they
are undecided—and thus they hold a key to the decision. The Economist magazine
has suggested
that Scots voting with their heads will choose to stay with England, while those
voting with their hearts will opt for independence, but “it is the nationalists
who have fire in their bellies.”
The undecided Scots also hold the key to
the final dissolution of one of the greatest empires in history. The British
Empire brought profound changes to the world—but in the decades since its rapid
decline after World War II it has become a kind of a historical joke, sometimes
in poor taste. This week the British embassy in Washington decided, for reasons
only known to itself, to hark back to Blighty’s glory days and tweet a picture of
a sparkler-bedecked cake “commemorating the 200th anniversary of burning the White
House” during the War of 1812. After newspapers got wind of the tweet, the
embassy quickly retracted it, tweeting: “Apologies for earlier Tweet. We meant
to mark an event in history & celebrate our strong friendship today ….
Today UK-US celebrate a special relationship & work together shoulder to shoulder
across the globe.”
But even that assessment is somewhat self-delusional.
Since the beginning of the Cold War, America has done the lion’s share of the
shouldering. Britain, the colonizer of America, has become in some ways the
colony (or lapdog, as some self-deprecating British wags put it). And now it’s
about to get even smaller.
The downsizing process has been long and
hard. At its most extensive, the British Empire comprised 57 colonies,
dominions, territories or protectorates from Australia, Canada and India to
Fiji, Western Samoa and Tonga. From London, the British ruled about 20 percent
of world’s population and governed nearly 25 percent of the world’s land mass,
according to calculations by British researcher Stephen Luscombe. The spread of
British influence, including the English language, gave birth to the United
States, the world’s only superpower; the world’s largest democracy in India;
and, perhaps inadvertently, disseminated British concepts of freedom, democracy
and common law around the globe. On the negative side, Britain once corrupted
an entire nation, China, with opium purely to extract drug revenues, and its
haughty, racist dominance of subjected peoples left generations of rage in its
wake in many countries (not least of which are some of those closest to home,
like Ireland).
Today that empire has been reduced to 14
scattered islands such as the British Virgin Islands in the Caribbean and
Pitcairn Island in the South Pacific. The Commonwealth of Nations founded
before World War II and revived after the war comprises 54 former British
territories but is little more than a monument to the empire. Now the wave of
dissolution is lapping up against the shores of the British Isles themselves.
Of course it’s been many years since
Britain has acted like an empire, though some former provinces still
experience “colonial cringe” at the sound of upper-crust British English.
London’s imperial might began to crumble during World War II after Japanese
armies marched to gates of India and the shores of Australia, breaking the back
of Western colonialism before Japan was defeated in 1945. A nationalistic surge
ended the colonial era, beginning with the withdrawal from India and Pakistan
in 1947.
Some would say the empire officially came
to an end in February of that year when—utterly drained by the two world
wars—the British cabled Washington that they no longer had the money or troops
to defend Greece or Turkey as the Soviet Union threatened to extend its
influence in the early Cold War. “The British are finished,” Dean Acheson, soon
to be Harry Truman’s secretary of state, was said to have remarked when he read
the cable. The United States quickly displaced the United Kingdom as the main
stabilizing power in the West.
The decline of British power hasn’t come
without a fight. In 1942, Winston Churchill was famously quoted saying: “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.” But his successors have
been liquidating ever since. Over several decades, Britain withdrew from East
of Suez and from their possessions in Africa; Hong Kong, the city-state that
reverted to China in 1997, was among the last to go. There has been one
exception: In 1982, in a desperate effort to hold onto the miniscule Falkland
Islands in the South Atlantic, the U.K. fought a brief war with Argentina—which
it won as a kind of imperial consolation prize.
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