PRESSURES FOR CHANGE IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE

For Britain, the leading imperial state, phase 4 was marked by losses as well as gains in power. Following World War I, leaders in the quasi colonies of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa were eager to take the next step after responsible government: greater control over foreign policy.

It was one thing for the British government to accept devolution of political authority to people of European descent in pure settlement or mixed settlement/ occupation colonies. It was quite another to accept, either in principle or in practice, a similar evolution for colonies of occupation whose political leaders emerged from an overwhelmingly non-European population. The white dominions were not sup­posed to set precedents for the rest of the empire. Yet it was in colonies of occupation that popular pressures for domestic self-rule, and even full independence, began to build in phase 4. Officials in London had to decide whether, when, and how to respond to nationalist demands that increasingly questioned the basic premises of the imperial project.

The observation effect was at work here, as in phase 2. Nationalists in colo­nies of occupation asked, initially in indignation and then in anger, why full self- government should be extended to white settlers in the dominions while people of color elsewhere were denied far more modest forms of autonomy.

British policy toward occupation colonies further fueled nationalist resent­ment. The critical period was the years during and immediately after World War I. What triggered anger was the willingness of British officials, savoring victory at war’s end, to renege on commitments given non-Europeans during wartime when victory was by no means assured and colonial support was deemed vital. This pattern of concessions offered and withdrawn could be most noticeably observed in the Middle East. A key wartime goal was to weaken the Ottoman Empire by encouraging Arabs living under Ottoman rule to revolt. In 1915 the high commissioner in Egypt, Sir Henry McMahon, privately assured Mecca’s Sharif Husayn that Arabs could obtain some form of independence if they took up arms against the Turks. The impact of Arab revolts that subsequently broke out was magnified by British tactical support. Only days before the Armistice was signed in 1918 Britain and France stated their goal as “the complete and definitive liberation of the peoples so long oppressed by the Turks and the establishment of national Governments and Administrations drawing their authority from the initiative and free choice of indigenous populations.”⁵ The two countries did not disclose earlier Sykes-Picot negotiations to share Ottoman territory among themselves.

When Arabs realized that Britain wanted to take what it had promised them, their positive sentiments quickly turned to suspicion and anger. Hostility intensified as the implications of a statement by Britain’s minister of foreign affairs, Lord Bal­four, supporting “the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people” became clearer. The Balfour Declaration (1917) was seen as contradicting commitments Britain subsequently made as a mandatory power to protect the inter­ests of Palestine’s overwhelmingly Arab population.⁶

In Egypt, demands that Britain terminate its recently imposed protectorate, coupled with war-related economic grievances among the populace, led to an upris­ing in March 1919 and to mass demonstrations under the leadership of Saad Zaghlul.

Though formal control over India in phase 4 was not relinquished as much as in the white dominions or Egypt and Iraq, it was seriously challenged by a mass political party, the Indian National Congress (inc). Cautious concessions to the demands of inc nationalists produced the Government of India Act in 1935, permit­ting provincial assemblies led by elected politicians to set their budgets and control important aspects of provincial life. Elected representatives from the eleven prov­inces were to sit in a Central Legislative Assembly along with delegates from the indirectly ruled princely states.

During phase 4 the inc progressively radicalized its goals and tactics. From its founding in 1885 through the early years of World War I the movement consisted largely of Western-educated urban professionals who communicated directly to the British their desire for modest reforms within the framework of foreign rule. But a series of fast-paced events between 1917 and 1920 transformed the inc and hence the political life of British India. More than 1.4 million Indians were mobilized to serve on the battlefields of France, the Middle East, and East Africa. In recognition of their invaluable contributions and in order to generate additional support at a critical juncture of the war, the secretary of state for India, Edwin Montagu, issued a public statement in August 1917. Montagu committed his government to “the increasing association of Indians in every branch of government, and the gradual development of self-governing institutions, with a view to the progressive realization of responsi­ble government in India as an integral part of the Empire.”⁸ His statement marked the first time that any metropole had committed itself in advance to alter a colony of occupation’s political status.

Having raised expectations during the war, Britain did little to satisfy them at war’s end with its modest Montagu-Chelmsford constitutional proposals of 1919. They had in mind a power-sharing arrangement in the provinces but not at the cen­ter, in New Delhi, where real power lay. At the proposed rate of progress, many dis­appointed Indians asked themselves, would not dominion status be decades rather than years away? Further alienating Indian opinion leaders was the decision by authorities in New Delhi—known collectively as the raj—to replace wartime internal security arrangements with the harshly repressive Rowlatt Acts in order to quash possible outbreaks of sedition and terrorism.

Anti-Rowlatt demonstrations in the Punjab capital of Amritsar resulted in the death and injury of several Europeans. In response, on April 19, 1919, Brig. Gen. Reginald Dyer led his Gurkha troops to the Jallianwala Bagh, a large but virtually enclosed open area in the center of Amritsar where a crowd had peacefully gathered to protest the new regulations. Dyer ordered his troops to fire repeated rounds, without warning, into the crowd. By the time his soldiers ran out of ammunition more than 370 Indians lay dead, about 1,100 injured. Almost every bullet found a human target.⁹

News of the Amritsar massacre hit politically aware Indians like a seismic shock. Almost overnight formerly moderate leaders of the inc were transformed into committed activists for Indian self-rule. Compounding the shock was realiza­tion that General Dyer’s actions were supported by many British in India and conser­vative politicians and newspapers in the United Kingdom. Among those radicalized by the massacre were Mohandas K. Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru, two English- trained lawyers who were to play leading roles during the next three decades in mobilizing mass support for the inc’s agenda. Gandhi had lived in South Africa from 1893 to 1914 and while there, as an activist lawyer, had devised innovative methods of nonviolent resistance to laws discriminating against Indian residents. His South Afri­can experience strongly influenced the satyagraha (“soul-force” or “truth-force”) campaigns he later led in India, which began in 1920 and were employed intermit­tently into the 1930s.

Until 1929 inc leaders demanded dominion status for India, comparable to the constitutional position held by the white dominions. But authorities in London and New Delhi were unwilling to go along. At issue was not only continued control of domestic policy in Britain’s most important possession but also foreign policy, since dominion status was redefined in the 1920s to include greater control over foreign affairs. Indian troops and infantry battalions of British troops stationed in the sub­continent were responsible for defending other parts of the empire. London feared that an Indian dominion able to chart its own foreign course might not act in accord with Britain’s geostrategic interests. If anything, fears about imperial defense grew as the 1930s progressed, with the increasingly likely prospect of a Japanese attack on Britain’s southeast Asian colonies.

Leaders of the inc for their part grew less interested in dominion status as the struggle against foreign rule wore on. In 1929 they declared that their goal was puma swaraj, “complete freedom.” This raised the possibility of exit from the British Com­monwealth once independence was attained. A new round of mass-based civil dis­obedience campaigns followed the puma swaraj declaration. That Indians remained powerless to set foreign policy was dramatically underscored in 1939 when the vice­roy, Lord Linlithgow, committed India to war against the Axis powers without bothering to consult inc leaders. Though hostile to the Axis cause, Gandhi and others demanded in 1942 that Britain quit India so the country’s leaders could decide whether to participate in the war. The British responded by placing leading inc figures under house arrest and swiftly crushing all signs of insurrection.¹⁰

The principal reason India (and Pakistan) won independence in 1947, earlier than the vast majority of phase 5 new states, was because of the inc’s success in mobilizing mass support during phase 4. The raj found itself on the defensive in the interwar years, compelled to respond in largely ad hoc fashion to initiatives taken— and issues and tactics selected—by leaders from the colonized population.

Another sign of the decline of European power in phase 4 was the termination of special privileges Europeans and other foreigners extracted earlier from Ottoman and Chinese authorities. Financial and diplomatic concessions known as capitula­tions were abrogated by the Ottoman Porte when it entered World War I but were in effect reimposed in 1920 by the victorious Allies. By mobilizing Turkish armed forces and nationalist sentiment against the threatened dismemberment of Turkey by Al­lied powers, the military leader Mustapha Kemal (Ataturk) managed to have the capitulations abolished in 1923 in the Treaty of Lausanne. Five years later the Turkish Republic gained full control over tariff-setting policy. In China, collapse of the Ch’ing dynasty in 1911-12 did not immediately lead to renunciation of the humiliat­ing “unequal treaties” Ch’ing rulers had signed with the European powers, the United States, and Japan over the preceding seven decades. But Chinese nationalist sentiment ran strongly in favor of “rights recovery.” At the Washington Conference of 1922 the Chinese were able to restrict the right of foreign governments to exercise jurisdiction over foreign nationals residing in China. By 1930 the Nationalist govern­ment in Nanking had gained effective control over tariff policy. In 1943 it abolished the last vestiges of the unequal treaty regime.¹¹