Ireland and the British Dominions

The new challenge to empire in the post-1918 period was demonstrated most emphatically by the fact that the early 1920s witnessed the first major act of decolonization — the independence of Ireland.

Since before the Middle Ages Ireland's proximity to England and its strategic importance had made it an integral part of British life. Ireland was therefore never formally conceived as part of the British Empire but seen as part of the kingdom itself — the United Kingdom of Britain and Ireland. Yet the English attitude towards Ireland was undoubtedly colonial. Ireland contained a clear settler element and there had been extensive dispossession of ‘native' land. The Westminster government had the right of veto over Irish legislation, the key positions in the Irish executive were more often than not filled by Englishmen, Catholics were only enfranchised by the Emancipation Act of 1829 and the Presbyterian community, while possessing the franchise, was in practice not represented at all.

As a result of this treatment of Ireland as a British dependency, at least one, and arguably two, distinct Irish nationalisms — Irish (Catholic) republicanism and Ulster (Protestant, specifically Presbyterian) unionism — emerged in the nineteenth century. Both drew upon the same sources of inspiration, the American and French revolutions and the United Irishmen Rebellion of 1779, and upon the same grievances — political, economic and social discrimination by an Anglican ascendancy which had almost as much contempt for the Presbyterians as it did for the Catholics. While Irish Catholics embraced republicanism in pursuit of self-determination, Ulster Protestants sought equality rather than secession.

Although almost as many Irishmen as Ulstermen enlisted in the British army, in the end it was the actions of a couple of hundred Irish republican ‘volunteers' which went down in Irish history and sent shock waves around the world. Seeing Britain's preoccupation with war in Europe as Ireland's opportunity, on Easter Monday, 24 April 1916, this group proclaimed the Provisional Government of the Irish Republic from the steps of the General Post Office in Dublin. What came to be known as the Easter Rising was quickly and brutally suppressed; an estimated 3,500 suspected revolutionaries were detained, of whom 170 were tried and convicted, and 16 executed. Despite, or perhaps because of, the heavy-handed British attempts to restore order, the idea of Irish independence now flourished as never before. In 1919 the Irish Republican Army unleashed a guerrilla war that lasted for two and a half bitter years. In the end, both sides compromised, for in 1921 they agreed that southern Ireland would be given Dominion status as the Irish Free State, while the north-east counties would remain part of the United Kingdom. There was, however, no hiding the fact that this was a substantial defeat for Britain which had broad implications for the future of empire as a whole.

Ireland's new status as a Dominion also provided little consolation for the British, for Britain's relations with the Dominions were undergoing considerable change in the post-First World War era. The problems that Britain had with the Dominions can be seen as symptomatic of the general difficulties that the metropolitan Powers faced, for, while the government in London sought to use the Dominions to supplement its own power, the latter sought greater inde­pendence. Even before the First World War some thinkers in Britain, such as

autarky

A policy that aims at achieving national economic self­sufficiency. It is commonly associated with the economic programmes espoused by Germany, Italy and Japan in the 1930s and 1940s.

Joseph Chamberlain, Lord Milner and their acolytes, had espoused the idea that the constituent parts of the empire should draw closer together to form an autarkic bloc. The apparent imperial unity during the First World War stimulated further interest in this concept, with Milner proposing the need for some kind of imperial federation that would see a pooling of defence resources, preferential trade terms and perhaps even an imperial parliament. However, the Dominions, and in particular Canada, South Africa and Ireland, had very different ideas for the future. Instead of greater assimilation with Britain, they sought to gain more autonomy for themselves within the empire and to be treated as equals by the metropolitan government. After the First World War they accordingly made it clear that they were not prepared to see their armed forces subsumed into an imperial army and navy. In addition, when the Lloyd George government was on the verge of hostilities against Kemalist Turkey in the Chanak incident of 1922, Canada and South Africa indicated that they would not feel bound to go to war as their interests were unaffected.

A chance to reverse this process, at least in the field of economic co-operation, was offered by the Depression. The decision by the National Government of Ramsay MacDonald in 1931—32 to end Britain’s traditional policy of free trade raised the prospect, long cherished by imperialists, of the empire forming a protectionist economic bloc. Accordingly, at the Ottawa Conference in 1932, Britain and the Dominions discussed the introduction of a system of imperial preference, whereby goods produced within the empire were to be subject to preferential tariffs compared with goods produced outside. The end result was less favourable than the followers of Joseph Chamberlain and Milner had anticipated, for the Dominions were not willing to sacrifice the growth of their own nascent industries for the sake of Britain, and thus made only restricted concessions to British products. The imperial preference system, though, did lead to one important achievement, which was that it laid the basis for financial co-operation in the form of the Sterling Area. At least here the Dominions proved to be very useful to Britain, for the recovery of sterling after the tribulations of 1931, when it had been forced to forgo its parity with gold, was of vital importance to British power.