THE EMPIRE PROJECT: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

Author:John Darwin [Darwin, John]
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: Cambridge
Published: 2010-12-30T23:28:48.715023+00:00

disaster. In December 1923, the Conservative vote held up well (at

38.1 per cent compared with 38.2 per cent in November 1922),

but Baldwin was swept away by the Free Trade opposition. But the

result was inconclusive. A minority Labour government took power

with Liberal support in January 1924. Neither circumstance, inclination, nor, perhaps, talent, could make Ramsay MacDonald a second

Gladstone.148 No great centre-left party emerged in a grand realignment of political forces. When MacDonald was pulled down by the petty

scandal of the ‘Campbell case’, and by public suspicion of his party’s

communist ties (the Zinoviev letter), it was Baldwinite Conservatism

that won the high ground electorally. In October 1924, it gained a decisive victory. With the long-awaited revival of European prosperity, and the return in Britain of a ‘social peace’,149 the domestic instability of the post-war years seemed a thing of the past.

Yet it had left its mark on the British role in their imperial system. Baldwin’s aim was a broad-based party that would annex the centre in British politics. He renounced protection and installed a free trade Chancellor (Winston Churchill). He embraced ‘economy’ in defence,

partly to fund the rising cost of welfare expenditure. He had learnt

from Chanak to fear confrontation abroad as a hostage to fortune. He

and other leading Conservatives accepted much of the ‘liberal’ outlook

on international affairs, as a rough approximation to informed opinion

417 / Making imperial peace, 1919–1926

and as a useful guide to the post-war world. As a result, the imperial attitudes of the post-war years seem curiously tepid. At another time, high unemployment, a vast new electorate and the nationalist revolts against

imperial rule might have prompted the embrace of a jingo populism.

Indeed, tariff reform at home, ‘splendid isolation’ abroad, opening up

the ‘undeveloped estates’, and a firm way with ‘agitators’, all had their

advocates in Conservative ranks. But the overwhelming need was to

bind the new political nation to an economic order (capitalism) it had

no reason to like. An attack on free trade (as Baldwin discovered) would

be deeply resented by the new constituency. Pre-war-style thinking on

imperial defence – as if Britain were still surrounded by rival world

empires – was (or seemed) obsolete at a time when the reconciliation of

Europe was the most immediate need and competing imperialisms at an

unusually low ebb. Coercive tactics against colonial (or semi-colonial)

dissidents in the Empire, Egypt, Iraq or China could not be ruled out.

But their likely cost, and the fear that they would lead to political

extremism and guerrilla war (the ‘Irish syndrome’ frequently invoked

after 1921) gave an added premium to emollient policies. To a much

greater extent than before 1914, the demands of empire on society at

home were to be monitored closely and reduced to the minimum. What

sort of empire that made in the age of depression the following chapter

will try to explain.

10

HOLDING THE CENTRE, 1927–1937

Until the mid-1920s, it had seemed as if the profound dislocation of economic and political life unleashed by the war would defeat all attempts to devise a new equilibrium. After 1925, the outlook improved. A

new economic order took shape in Europe, underwritten by the flow of

American investment.

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