Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance 1918–1939 PDF
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BRITAIN AND THE COMMONWEALTH ALLIANCE 1918-1939 CAMBRIDGE COMMONWEALTH SERIES Published in association with the Managers of the Cambridge Univer sity Smuts Memorial Fund for the Advancement of Commonwealth Studies General Editor: E. T. Stokes, Smuts Professor of the History of the British Commonwealth, University of Cambridge Roger Anstey THE ATLANTIC SLAVE TRADE AND BRITISH ABOLITION, 1760-1810 John Darwin BRITAIN, EGYPT AND THE MIDDLE EAST: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War, 1918-1922 T. R. H. Davenport SOUTH AFRICA: A Modern History B. H. Farmer (editor) GREEN REVOLUTION? Technology and Change in Rice-Growing Areas of Tamil Nadu and Sri Lanka Partha Sarathi Gupta IMPERIALISM AND THE BRITISH LABOUR MOVEMENT, 1914-1964 R. F. Holland BRITAIN AND THE COMMONWEALTH ALLIANCE, 1918-1939 Ronald Hyam and Ged Martin REAPPRAISALS IN BRITISH IMPERIAL HISTORY W. David Mcintyre THE RISE AND FALL OF THE SINGAPORE NAVAL BASE T. E. Smith COMMONWEALTH MIGRATION: Flows and Policies B. R. Tomlinson THE INDIAN NATIONAL CONGRESS AND THE RAJ, 1929- 1942 THE POLITICAL ECONOMY OF THE RAJ, 1914-1947 John Manning Ward COLONIAL SELF-GOVERNMENT: The British Experience, 1759- 1856 Further titles in preparation BRITAIN AND THE COMMONWEALTH ALLIANCE 1918-1939 R. F. Holland M MACMILLAN © R.F.Holland 1981 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1981 978-0-333-27295-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright Act 1956 (as amended). Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. First edition 1981 Reprinted 1985 Published by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG212XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Holland, R. F. Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance, 1918-39- (Cambridge Commonwealth Series) 1. Commonwealth of Nations-History I. Title II. Series 909'.09'712410822 DA 18 ISBN 978-1-349-04928-8 ISBN 978-1-349-04926-4 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-04926-4 To my parents Contents Acknowledgements viii I The Commonwealth Problem: Origins and Formation 1900-1925 I 2 The Inter-War Commonwealth: a British Perspective 24 3 1925: The Establishment of the Dominions Office and the Locarno Treaties 40 4 The Balfour Report and Constitutional Change 1926- 1930 53 5 The Problem of Diplomatic Unity 68 6 The Alliance under Strain 1926-1930 87 7 The 1930 Imperial Conference 115 8 The Commonwealth and the Economic Crisis 1931-1939 127 9 The Irish Impact 152 10 Commonwealth Cooperation and the International Crisis 1931-1939 167 II Conclusion 206 Notes 210 Bibliography 237 Index 243 vii Acknowledgements This book arose out of a doctoral dissertation completed at St Antony's College, Oxford. Particular gratitude is owed to Dr A. F. Madden, for his friendship and advice; to D. K. Fieldhouse, for a term's supervision which pointed me in new directions; to Lord Garner of Chiddinghurst, for passing a critical eye over the original text; and to Hillia Thomas, of the University of Amsterdam, for her encouragement. The University of Birmingham, the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the Confederation of British Industries and Lord Ponsonby of Shulbrede have all kindly allowed me to use materials in their possession. Above all, the staff of the Public Record Office must be thanked for their constant endeavours. Finally, I am grateful to the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London University for providing me with the facilities to complete this volume. 1 The Commonwealth Problem: Origins and Formation 1900-1925 This study is concerned with what the Commonwealth relationship meant to British policy-makers, how perceptions of it changed and how it was 'managed'. The first problem is to define at what point the diaspora of British overseas settlement solidified into a coherent political entity. Certainly in 1900 the Commonwealth did not exist. The Australian colonies were only about to be federated into a union; Ireland was subject to recurrent instability; whilst Britain was actually at war in South Africa. The mass phenomena of Empire - the Empire Shopping Weeks, the Empire Exhibitions and Empire Day celebrations-really date from the mid-1920s, and the current work is based on the assumption that it was only at this point, when the scale of Britain's post-1918 problems became clear, that a Commonwealth 'system' came to exist: it was a response to weakness, not an expression of strength. It is necessary, however, to begin by briefly outlining just how the main lines of that relationship were delineated between 1900 and 1925. From V ereeniging to Versailles The roots of Commonwealth lay in broad political changes taking shape in the early 1900s. These changes were the mature expression of what later became a fundamental characteristic of the twentieth-century situation: an accelerating competition among states to mobilise techni cal and economic resources to extend their power. This preoccupation with the mobilisation of power was central to the thinking of Joseph Chamberlain and Lord Milner, the two arch-exponents of the imperial tradition. Both recognised that international rivalry, state growth and economic transformation had shattered the nineteenth-century secu rities surrounding British society. To counter this new insecurity they believed that the state had to manage its resources more effectively than in the past. Both were convinced that the liberal democracy which had emerged after 1867 had proved inadequate to this task; the political I 2 Britain and the Commonwealth Alliance 1918-1939 elites in Westminster, immersed in the petty selfishness of the factional struggle, had consistently ignored vital British interests. This is not to say that Chamberlain or Milner were anti-democrats but rather that, in their view, the democratic process had to be made to work more effectively in the national interest. 1 Imperial reorganisation was their means to this end. It was in the Empire that stable markets could be located, which held out assurances of continued supplies of raw materials and food, and which provided some hope of insulation from the untidy rhythms of boom and slump in the international economy. Chamberlain and Milner never managed to control the Conservative party, whilst the Liberal party after re-election in 1906 remained loyal to its internationalist ideology. But the theme of efficient national reform nonetheless crystallised into a consensus which spread across the political spectrum. This consensus was related to the debacle of the South African war, which had finally ended at Vareeniging in May 1902, but it was reinforced by the parallel challenge of German economic and naval power. The Liberals themselves had to develop a policy to meet this situation, and they found it in the concept of social improvement-a healthy social organism and therefore an enhanced quality of human resources available to the state would provide national security. But was this enough? Was not some quantitative expansion of resources (an expansion possible through constructive imperialism) critical to Britain's future? Important elements in the military leadership thought so. The Committee of Imperial Defence was established in 1902 to effect liaison between the Army and Navy staffs, but it was also hoped to incorporate the self-governing Dominions into a system of military planning. 2 The Committee's purely consultative role was designed to convince the colonial premiers that they could participate in its discussions without infringing autonomy. They did so, if sporadically, beginning with the attendance of the Canadian Minister of Munitions in 1903. The 1907 Imperial Conference regularised the position whereby a Dominion had the right to attend the Committee whenever an issue arose which touched its interests. As the international crisis deepened, however, defence and foreign policy issues reacted increasingly upon each other. At the 1911 Imperial Conference, therefore, a radical departure was taken when the British Prime Minister, in a closed session of the Committee of Imperial Defence, put before the Dominion leaders the facts of Britain's international position. W. K. Hancock comments that in so doing Asquith was ushering colonial leaders into the arcana imperii of Empire, 3 for just like any sustained relationship in power politics, it was ultimately based on guns. By 1914 the outlines of an imperial military machine were in being. How did the Dominions react to these developments? Emphasis has usually been given to the growth of Dominion nationalism between 1900
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