Time's Monster by Priya Satia

Author:Priya Satia [Satia, Priya]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780141993935
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2020-10-20T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

´´ The Division of Progress

Serious nationalism is tied to internationalism.

—Benedict Anderson

´´ The empire did end, after a fashion, despite repeated renewals of its script. It ended in fits and starts, cracking first in 1776, and still cracking today as Scotland and Northern Ireland confront the implications of Brexit. The story of modern empire flowed, in a sense, from the opening crack in 1776: The need for a historical narrative to explain and make good on that loss drove much of British imperial activity afterwards. The empire continued to crack, and each desperately contained rebellion prompted further soul-searching about the historical necessity of the empire. The end of formal empire in Iraq in 1932 was a sham, a morphing of direct empire into indirect and even covert rule. More credible, if ephemeral, was the revolutionary end of British rule in Iraq in 1958.

In general, the reality of post–World War II decolonization was attenuated, for the British especially, by the idea of the Commonwealth. This body had been inaugurated between the wars to frame the shifting relationship between Britain and the “white dominions.” As Canada, New Zealand, and Australia asserted their autonomy, the Commonwealth preserved the imperial bond in other ways. Economic ties with colonies and dominions remained important, particularly the imperial trade bloc known as the sterling area. Until the 1970s, Britain stood back from the emerging institutions of the European Union, maintaining its orientation towards the empire. British imperialism had always been flexible, granting real and nominal autonomy as needed in order to better preserve the imperial bond. Informal, indirect, and covert forms of imperial rule were part of its tool kit. Against this backdrop, there was little reason to think that granting independence to India in 1947 would substantively alter its relationship to Britain. Indeed, many could reasonably read the moment of formal decolonization as yet another strategy for keeping the moral case for empire intact while maintaining the relationship in substance. That India became a member of the Commonwealth was spun as the culmination of liberal empire, another signal transition moment in its unfolding. There was no embarrassment in it. The postwar Labour government was deeply committed to this narrative and its incorporation of the notion of “colonial development”—that the empire could produce commodities that would earn much-needed dollars. In 1960, while the former Labour prime minister Clement Atlee extolled the empire for “voluntarily” surrendering sovereignty to its colonies, the ruling prime minister, Harold Macmillan, spun the “wind of change” blowing through Africa as fulfillment of the imperial narrative.

Such narratives of continuities with the past, real or imagined, framed understandings of decolonization. The British did not simply let go of the empire after the Second World War—whatever Atlee claimed. They fought hard and long to hold on to some colonies, such as Kenya and Malaya. In others, the promise of substantive continuity allowed more graceful transition. In India, the anticolonial movement forced the British out, despite efforts to crush it with massive force. As prime minister during the war, Churchill refused to countenance loss of the “jewel” anchoring the empire.

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