British Attitudes in the Metropole towards Empire
Working Class Trend
Working Class in the Era of Free Trade
Only 1 million men made up the electorate in the 1850s and thanks to British hegemony and the minimal costs of informal empire, the elites neither needed nor wanted the involvement of the working classes.
In the 1850s only 50% of working-class children attended school (other than Sunday school) and the average length of attendance for those children that did attend school was only 3 years.
The working-class curriculum was utilitarian and involved reading, writing, arithmetic, sewing and woodwork. There was an active effort to avoid discussion of empire, in case the working classes began to sympathise and identify with the colonised.
The literacy rate was 60% in 1840 and 77.5% in 1870.
1870 Education Act increased national literacy rate to 90% by 1900.
Before the 1880s there is a lack of evidence of empire in working class memoirs, books, music hall songs, newspapers, or popular shows.
The most popular form of illustrated literature for the working classes, ‘penny dreadfuls’ were focused on the exploits of detectives, criminals and supernatural entities and imperial themes were not covered. By the 1860s and 1870s, more than a million boys’ periodicals were sold a week. They were printed on cheap wood pulp paper, sold for one penny and explicitly aimed at young working-class men.
The working classes were too preoccupied with their survival to consider empire. In 1840, 57% of working-class children in Manchester died before the age of 5 and the average age of death for a factory worker in Liverpool was 15.
In the 1840s 46% of working-class families in Bristol occupied one room each.
A cholera epidemic in 1865-66 resulted in the deaths of 20,000 people.
The Great Exhibition of 1851 was not focused on Empire. Whilst the 1862 International Exhibition featured over 28,000 exhibitors from 36 countries, it also displayed a wide range of industry, technology and the arts. Exhibitions were certainly celebrations of patriotism, but they were not explicitly pro-imperial during the era of free trade.
Right at the end of the period, jingoistic songs began to make an appearance in music halls, with G. W. Hunt’s ‘By Jingo’ popularising the term jingoism in 1878. Music halls were popular and almost every town had one, with working class adults commonly attending once a week. They were a useful source of imperial propaganda, as popular performers dressed in military uniforms and celebrated the role of British soldiers against savage natives.
The working-class diet was based around the staple of bread, with seasonal vegetables and potatoes, oats and lentils to supplement it. Tea from China and India was popular in working class homes, but this was the only large-scale impact of Empire on the working-class diet.
Working Class in the Era of Formal Empire
The Third Reform Act of 1884 boosted the electorate to 5.5 million, or 60% of men. The elites now had to court the working-class vote and needed the working-class to support empire if they wanted to continue pursuing pro-imperial policies.
The 1884 Berlin Conference saw the formalisation of the move towards formal empire. Britain’s hegemony was being threatened by its rivals, especially Germany and there was a feeling amongst the elites that working-class jingoism would be required in order to maintain Britain’s power and prestige.
Thanks to the 1870 Education Act, the literacy rate was quickly improving and would reach 90% by 1900. This paved the way for a wave of pro-imperial propaganda.
The Boys Own Paper first appeared in 1879, featuring stories portraying soldiery and bravery across the globe.
The Boys’ Brigade (1883) reinforced imperial values by offering military training and by extolling the virtues of a ‘glorious’ British Empire.
In 1886 the Colonial and Indian Exhibition was held in South Kensington. This was explicitly jingoistic and focused on displaying the wealth of the British Empire.
The Africa Exhibition of 1890 justified the British presence in Africa as one that was Christianising the natives.
The Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897 were designed to make people feel proud of their country and Empire and happy with their place in the world. This theme was embraced by the popular press and the working classes participated passionately.
In 1924, working class families flocked to the British Empire Exhibition, which boasted 300,000 visitors in the space of one single day and 17 million overall. Visitors could view thousands of exhibitions from across the Empire, including a replica of an African village with carving and weaving from Ashanti nobles.
The British Empire Exhibition was so popular that it reopened again in 1925 with the slogan ‘The Same Empire but a New Exhibition’. This attracted another 10 million visitors between May and October.
From 1916 onwards, all school children would celebrate Empire Day annually on the 24th of May by saluting the Union Flag and singing patriotic songs. They would listen to stories of the Empire’s heroes like Clive of India and Gordon of Khartoum, though Empire Day took a long time to catch on in Britain and the real highlight for most of the children was being able to leave school early.
By the 1890s papers like The Union Jack were challenging the popularity of the ‘penny dreadfuls’ and by 1914 they dominated the market along with similar publications like The Boys’ Own Paper, Magnet, Gem and Wizard. These papers focused on adventure stories set in the British Empire and at sea, as such they were actively pro-imperial.
The pro-imperial Daily Mail cost only a halfpenny, when other daily London papers cost a full penny. It was instantly popular from its inception in 1896, with a circulation of 500,000 in 1899. By 1902, at the end of the Boer War, the Daily Mail had a circulation of over a million, making it the most sold newspaper in the world.
Medievalism and Western genres were both more popular than jingoistic films in early cinemas.
Working class education still neglected empire entirely. The only imperial history taught was Roman and working-class children were discouraged from learning geography outside the borders of their home villages.
Some jingoistic school textbooks existed from the 1890s onwards, like Fletcher and Kipling’s ‘A School History of England’. But these were only used in private school and were widely mocked by the working classes.
The best example of a flashpoint of working-class jingoism came during the Boer War, when the relief of the siege of Mafeking led to famous riots in 1900, known as ‘Mafeking Night’.
These sentiments extended into the school playground, where children would play ‘Britons and Boers’, instead of ‘Cowboys and Indians’.
This jingoism somewhat translated into the Khaki election later in 1900, where the pro-imperial Conservatives made gains in areas of growing industry, such as Reading, Middlesbrough and Bradford.
The working-class vote was split though, as some railway towns were influenced by the anti-imperial organised labour movement. Socialism and trade unionism proved to be competing ideologies, that were highly critical of imperialism.
Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement had a deliberate imperial agenda and was aimed at the working class, but it was mainly the middle classes who joined and poorer boys would yell insults at the scouts as they marched by. Those who did join did so more out of an interest in camping, rather than pro-imperial sentiment.
The magazine The Spectator aptly summarised working-class attitudes to Empire by stating “Our people hardly watch or listen unless some favourite offices falls dead”.
Sugar, often procured from Barbados and Jamaica and produced by indentured labourers from India and Africa, became a staple part of the working-class diet during the era of new imperialism. Used to make jam and added to tea and coffee, sugar consumption per capita was 5 times higher in 1901 (90lbs), than it had been in 1800 (18lbs). Though the majority of the working-class diet in this period was still locally produced, tea, coffee and sugar were significant influences on the lives of the working class.
Working Class in the Era of Decolonisation
Labour shocked Britain by winning the 1945 election on a platform of trying to ‘win the peace’ by focusing on domestic issues. Their victory suggests these were far more important to the working class than Empire.
The Festival of Britain in 1951 was an exhibition that focused on the achievements of Britain alone and completely excluded any mention of Empire. It was a large-scale success with over 10 million paid admissions over the space of 5 months.
Empire Day was widely criticised by Labour until its eventual re-branding as British Commonwealth Day in 1958.
In 1948 the British Nationality Act was passed, giving full British citizenship to every inhabitant of the Empire and Commonwealth. This led to a huge rise in immigration to Britain with 115,000 West Indians, 55,000 Indians and Pakistanis, 25,000 West African and 10,000 Cypriots living in Britain by 1958. For the first time, working class Britons were coming face to face with large numbers of people who had been born in the periphery.
1958 saw gangs of ‘Teddy Boy’ youths attacking black people and violent riots broke out in St Ann’s (Nottingham) and Notting Hill (London). By 1962, 90% of the British population supported legislation to curb immigration and 80% agreed that there were too many immigrants in Britain already.
In the three years between 1960 and 1962, more immigrants arrived in Britain than in the whole of the twentieth century to that point. Immigration ran at just over 50,000 people per year between 1962 and 1965.
The 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act was introduced to control immigration. Free immigration for former colonial subjects was ended, even if they held a British passport. Instead, a work permit scheme was put in place. Although it did not explicitly discriminate against black and Asian people, it had the same effect, as black and Asian people did not have the skills that allowed them to obtain priority entry to the country. The Act was both unfair and difficult to operate, but it received massive public support, with opinion polls suggesting that 70% of the public supported it.
A survey in North London in 1965 indicated that half of British people would refuse to live next door to a coloured person and 90% disapproved of mixed marriages. Racist attitudes were highest in working class communities that had seen high levels of immigration.
The rise in racist attitudes and anti-immigration sentiment suggests an anti-imperialism based around xenophobia and a desire to focus only on Britain and those born in the metropole, though these views were also underpinned by decades of jingoistic propaganda that had led the British working class to feel that they were superior to the incoming immigrants.
The continuation of rationing through much of the interwar period right through until 1954 stunted the growth of a more wide-ranging diet, as it was difficult to obtain the imported goods necessary for foreign style cooking.
The end of rationing and the rise of mass immigration from colonies and former colonies into Britain led to greater access to Indian, Pakistani, Chinese (immigrants from Hong Kong) and West Indian foods and culinary influences. By 1958, Billy Butlin had started including ‘Chop Suey’ as part of the menu in his Butlins resorts. Eating out was still considered a luxury, but the number of restaurants and their popularity increased rapidly throughout the 1960s.
Middle Class Trend
Middle Class in the Era of Free Trade
Even in this early period there were occasional bouts of pro-imperial feeling. After he had recaptured Cawnpore and Lucknow, the press tuned Major-General Havelock into a hero, so that the public paid for a statue of him to be erected in Trafalgar Square. Such instances were few and far between however and focused on heroic soldiers, rather than explicit jingoism.
The aspiring middle classes involved themselves in Empire through missionary work. Showing that they bought into the Christianising and civilising ideals of Empire. This can be seen in the formation of the British Syrian Schools Association (1860), set up by Elizabeth Bowen Thompson. After 9 years she had established 23 schools, with 56 teachers.
In 1865, the China Inland Mission was founded by James Hudson Taylor. It would go on to bring over 800 missionaries to the country, who started 125 schools. These missions were an opportunity for the middle classes to see the world and have an adventure, all whilst feeling as though they were doing something morally virtuous.
Whilst members of the middle classes who wanted to progress socially would actively involve themselves in Empire, by doing missionary work, contributing to statues of generals etc. This was a conscious effort by an ambitious few to emulate the upper classes with the hope of one day becoming upper class. The passive majority of the middle class were fairly ambivalent towards Empire during this period. This can be seen in popular culture, as the work of Charles Dickens, including ‘A Christmas Carol’, ‘Oliver Twist’, ‘Great Expectations’ and ‘A Tale of Two Cities’, the most popular literature of the period, made no mention of Empire whatsoever.
Just like with the working classes, middle class involvement was of little use to the upper classes during this period. Porter in particular argues that middle class ambivalence towards Empire was the status quo during this period.
Middle Class in the Era of Formal Empire
In the 1890s, teacher manuals and textbooks began to stress the importance of the Empire and Geography, History, English and Religious Studies lessons were all supposed to stress the glorious spread of the Empire. Textbooks like Sir John Seely’s ‘The Expansion of England’, viewed British history as the universally positive expansion of Empire.
By the early 1900s, English literature was taught through the poetry and writing of pro-imperial writers, such as Rudyard Kipling.
Rudyard Kipling became one of the most popular authors in Britain with jingoistic works including ‘Kim’ (1901) and ‘White Man’s Burden’ (1899), which emphasised Britain’s right to rule their colonies, achieved acclaim amongst the middle and upper cases. He became the first English language writer to win the Nobel prize for literature in 1907.
Other imperialist literature, such as Haggard’s ‘King Solomon’s Mines’ (1885) and ‘She’ (1887) were also popular amongst the middle and upper classes.
Imperialist children’s literature was popular amongst the middle classes, with G. A. Henty producing 25 novels focused on imperial themes, including ‘With Clive in India’ and ‘The Dash for Khartoum’.
It is important to remember that the majority of popular literature did not follow imperial themes. Examples being the work of Wilde, Whistler and Conan Doyle. It is estimated that 95% of adult literature and theatre productions made no mention of Empire.
From 1908, Baden-Powell’s Boy Scout movement, with its overtly imperial agenda became popular amongst middle class boys. Approximately 34% of boys were Boy Scouts between 1901 and 1920.
Some sections of the middle classes embraced the critiques of capitalist imperialism championed by J.A Hobson who concluded that imperialism was a capitalist plot designed to benefit a small elite.
Emily Hobhouse was a welfare campaigner who sparked a government enquiry into the conditions of British concentration camps during the Boer War. The Fawcett Commission (1901) corroborated her claims of horrendous conditions for the 110,000 civilians who had been herded into concentration camps. This tarnished the traditional view of Empire as a civilising mission.
Other proponents of anti-imperialism included Blunt (poet), Spencer (philosopher), Harrison (lawyer and historian), Digby (writer and propagandist) and Crane (artist and children’s book writer). Though these figures were in the minority overall.
Much of the middle class sided with the Liberal opposition during the Khaki Election of 1900, as liberal gains were made in smaller towns and rural areas where the nonconformist conscience was most troubled by the government’s record in the war.
The Church was vital in spreading imperialist values to the middle classes and missionaries were often drawn from the middle classes, joining organisations like the United Society for the Propagation of the Gospel and the London Missionary Society.
During the celebrations for Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897, middle class women were reminded that their access to affordable diamond jewellery was reliant on the Empire’s control of the diamond fields of South Africa.
Many of the 17 million visitors to the British Empire Exhibition in 1924 and the 10 million visitors when it reopened in 1925 were middle class families.
By the inter-war period, cinema had become a key medium for imperialists to exploit and films like ‘Sanders of the River’ (1935) and ‘The Four Feathers’ (1939), showed Empire as a place of adventure and excitement that Britons should be proud of.
Large traders played into the hands of inter-war imperialists by using imperial themes to advertise their products. For example, the Co-operative Wholesale Society offered collectible cards illustrating places in the Empire with each packet of tea.
Middle Class in the Era of Decolonisation
The continuation of rationing stunted the growth in variety of middle-class diets until 1954. After this, as a result of mass immigration, there was a huge rise in the popularity and range of foreign cuisines available. By 1960, there were 500 Indian restaurants in the UK and clusters of Chinese restaurants had appeared around Gerrard Street in central London and in central Manchester. The middle classes were affluent enough to make use of these at a time when eating out was still considered a luxury.
To avoid the continuation of rationing and make use of a higher demand for skilled labour, between 1946 and 1957 approximately 1 million people migrated from Britain to the dominions (primarily Australia and Canada). A survey in 1948 indicated that around 25% of the population of Britain were in contact with relatives in the dominions. Both immigration and emigration from the Empire/Commonwealth were measurably benefiting the lives of the middle classes during this period.
Whilst films such as ‘North West Frontier’ (1959) and ‘Guns at Batasi’ (1964), continued to push pro-imperial themes, these were very much in the minority and interest in American and European themes was much more common. Links with Europe and America were further augmented by the rise in charter flight holidays.
Even when Empire was represented on television, it was not always done so positively. In the 1960s satire boom, satirical comedy programmes like ‘That Was the Week, That Was’, hosted by David Frost from 1962-63 actively mocked traditional imperial attitudes of jingoism.
Upper Class Trend
Upper Class in the Era of Free Trade
The British Empire employed about 20,000 highly-educated men as administrators. These men were usually drawn from the graduates of the public schools and Oxford and Cambridge.
A generation of upper-class thinkers, epitomised by Charles Dilke with his 1867 study of ‘Greater Britain’, openly viewed Europeans, Britons, or the English as being a superior race to those they colonised. This was apparent in both the Liberal and Conservative response to the Indian Rebellion.
The upper classes benefited from all of the goods and resources that could be procured from the growing Empire. Beaver fur hats (from Canada) became fashionable, Worcester sauce (adapted from an Indian recipe) became common, tea (from China and India) was ubiquitous, to name just a few. Though for the majority of the upper classes, French was the defining and most popular cuisine and continental fashion was dominant. These continental fashions were only ever augmented and supplemented by extras procured from the Empire.
The upper classes frequented the only Indian eating place in nineteenth century London – the Hindostanee Coffee House in Portman Square, which was explicitly opened ‘for the nobility and gentry’. Though the fact that there was only one suggests that it was seen as an exoticism rather than a mainstream part of British life, even amongst the elites.
Some of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s orchestral works followed an imperial theme, though much of his popular ‘Gilbert and Sullivan’ work did not.
Battle paintings by Lady Elizabeth Butler became so popular that when one was shown in 1874 at the Royal Academy Summer Exhibition, a policeman had to be stationed next to the paintings in order to regulate the crowds who came to see it. Such themes were not popular amongst the artistic community however and Lady Butler was looked down on by the Royal Academy, who preferred to admit those who produced rural landscapes, still lifes, portraits, or female nudes.
In 1872, Disraeli announced that the aim of the Tory party was to “uphold the empire of England” and to “build an imperial country”, reflecting the jingoistic mood amongst the elites.
Upper Class in the Era of Formal Empire
Universities such as the recently formed SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies), encouraged the select few (less than 1% of the population) who progressed to higher education to study Colonial Studies.
Taking over from Sir Arthur Sullivan, Edward Elgar wrote popular orchestral works between 1899 and 1920, some of which had an imperial theme, though again many of his other popular works did not.
Sullivan, Elgar and imperialist authors like Kipling were actively disapproved of and thought of as vulgar by the cognoscenti (knowledgeable/arty individuals).
Rich imperialists owned the popular press and used it as a means of spreading propaganda. One prevalent example was the Daily Mail, which was devised and first published by Lord Harmsworth in 1896. During the Boer War, the Daily Mail’s correspondent was pro-Boer, but produced anti-Boer articles in deference to his proprietors. The Pall Mall Gazette and the Daily Telegraph also produced jingoistic articles during Arabi Pasha’s revolt in Egypt (1882).
The same was true of the owners of children’s literature and The Boys’ Own Paper, Magnet, Gem, Wizard and Union Jack were all examples of imperialist propaganda utilised by the upper classes.
The 1886 Colonial and Indian Exhibition along with The Africa Exhibition of 1890 and the Diamond Jubilee celebrations of 1897 were organised by the upper classes and specifically designed to justify and promote the advantages of Empire.
The idea of an Empire Day was first suggested in 1897 and despite reluctance amongst the British working class to take up the celebration, the upper-class organisers like the Earl of Meath persevered and from 1916 it became an official annual event, celebrating the British Empire. It was held on the birthday of the late Queen Victoria (May 24th).
The British Empire Exhibition of 1924 was organised by the ruling class from 1919 when the Prince of Wales agreed to be President of the organising committee. It was opened by King George V in the purposefully built Empire Stadium (later renamed Wembley Stadium). A speech by King George V was broadcast over BBC Radio for the first time ever and the British Empire Exhibition was used as a huge propaganda event promoting Empire.
Individuals like Joseph Chamberlain and Cecil Rhodes made it their life’s mission to promote imperialism in any way that they could. As Colonial Secretary, Chamberlain was able to extol the economic and moral importance of Empire to the British people.
Other individuals like Henry Campbell-Bannerman led the opposition against the excesses of imperialism, referring to the Conservative approach during the Boer War as ‘methods of barbarism’.
Those who vocally criticised imperialism were often turned on by their counterparts however and Gladstone was dubbed the ‘Anti-Christ’ by an MP and eviscerated in almost every section of the press for failing to support General Gordon in Khartoum, or immediately avenging British losses in the Battle of Majuba Hill, which concluded the first Boer War in 1881.
The same criticism of the Liberals was made in the Khaki Election of 1901, where Chamberlain claimed that every seat the Conservatives lost was ‘a seat lost to the Boers’. The manner of the Conservative campaign was probably the most jingoistic in history.
Upper Class in the Era of Decolonisation
Post-war, the same brand of aggressive imperialism that had previously been employed was no longer so attractive and Empire Day celebrations were changed to show the Empire as a family of nations, led by the British. Empire was supposed to be more about peace and co-operation, rather than adventure. This fed into its eventual re-branding as ‘Commonwealth Day’ from 1958.
There continued to be opportunities for upper class administrators, civil servants and senior army officers to leave Britain and experience life in the Empire. Even post decolonisation, some former colonial officials stayed on as expatriate advisers in key positions.
Anthony Eden, a member of the old school elite, who was educated at Eton and Oxford, made serious errors of judgement in his attempts to maintain a British foothold in the Suez Canal. Following his ignominious resignation, much of the upper class became conscious of the fact that decolonisation was inevitable and set about ensuring that it would happen in a way that would cause as little damage as possible to their investments.
Imperial nostalgia remained an important part of upper-class culture, as can be seen in the retention of Imperial Royal honours, ranging from ‘The British Empire Medal (BEM)’, to ‘Grand Cross of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire (GBE)’.
In 1954, during the second half of the ‘last night of the proms’, Sir Malcolm Sargent established the tradition of promoting patriotic British music. This included performances of Elgar, Wood and even Arne’s ‘Rule, Britannia!’.
Economic Trends
Economics in the Era of Free Trade
Between 1850 and 1870, around one third of British exports went to the Empire and about one fifth of imports came from the Empire.
The City of London became the world’s financial capital, as British investment overseas increased and sterling became the main currency of international trade.
Britain was the world’s largest consumer market for food and raw materials. Tropical goods such as sugar, coffee, cocoa, groundnuts, copra (from coconuts) and palm oil came to Britain from South Africa, West Africa, the West Indies and the Malayan Straits. Minerals and wool were imported from Australia, raw cotton from India and timber and wheat from Canada. Industrial Britain relied on its colonies to feed and provide for its workforce.
British tea imports from India had been worth only £24,000 in 1854. By 1876, they were worth £2.4 million. Wheat imports had risen from nothing to £1.6 million.
Tin was found in Nigeria, gold along the Gold Coast and diamonds in Sierra Leone. Copper was found in Northern Rhodesia and coal and gold were found in Southern Rhodesia.
By 1866, Victoria in Australia was producing £124 million worth of gold, a third of the total gold production in the world. New South Wales produced a further £25 million.
Economics in the Era of New Imperialism
Between 1880 and 1914, almost three quarters of British overseas investment was placed in the USA, Canada and Latin America, with only 25% going to the Empire. British investors considered non-Imperial ventures to be more profitable.
Newly acquired territories in Africa in particular were not considered suitable for investment. An article from the Economist in 1890 stated ‘we do not look for any rapid development of…financial success from these territories.’
27.5% of Britain’s trade was with the Empire in the 1890s, down from 28.5% in the 1880s and most of this trade was with Canada, Australia and India, rather than the newly acquired colonies.
The Empire accounted for 22.3% of Britain’s imports in the 1890s and 33.7% of her exports. This was important to Britain, as she had a big trade deficit with North America and Europe, so this export trade went some way towards balancing the books.
The newly acquired and less economically developed colonies were particularly important when it came to re-balancing British trade. In the 1870s, when British hegemony was still alive and well, British imports from tropical and Southern Africa were £8.3 million, compared to exports of £6.9 million. But by the 1900s, imports from tropical and Southern Africa were worth £12.3 million, compared to exports worth £25.8 million.
Similarly, in the 1870s, British imports from Asia were worth £52.6 million, compared to exports of £37.4 million. By the 1900s, the figures were £55.7 million and £71.0 million. All of this went some way towards alleviating Britain’s poor balance of payments.
In 1875, 26% of all Britain’s exports went to the Empire. By 1914, this had reached 35%, with India taking about 20% of Britain’s total exports, worth almost £150 million to British businesses.
Still, the Empire did not prevent Britain’s global economic decline, as between 1880 and 1900 Britain’s export trade grew by only 23%, compared to 63% for Germany and 172% for the Netherlands. The Empire was making a small contribution towards alleviating this, but it was nowhere near enough.
The 1880s saw a return to the use of chartered companies to reduce expenses and maximise profit from the Empire. In 1881, the North Borneo Trading Company received a charter allowing them to administer the territory, leading to the mining of deposits of coal, iron and copper, as well as the development of tobacco and coffee plantations.
This was followed by a charter for the Royal Niger Company (1886). The Niger region of West Africa supplied palm oil, rubber and cocoa. These resources underpinned the soap, tinplate, tyre, electrical insulation and chocolate industries in Britain. Under this charter, the Royal Niger Company had permission to serve as a government of the Niger region.
Chartered companies were supported by the development of the Imperial Federation League. This was founded in Britain in 1884 to promote colonial unity, though it was disbanded in 1893, reflecting a waning interest in the Empire’s commercial importance.
Canada supplied upwards of 10% of Britain’s beef and 15% of its wheat flour by 1914. Wheat to make bread was the main staple of the British diet, whilst beef was incredibly popular amongst the middle and upper classes.
Only in cheese, apples, potatoes and fresh mutton was the Empire Britain’s main food supplier however. Overall, the Empire provided less than 10% of Britain’s food needs.
Anti-imperialists argued that the Empire cost middle class Britons more than it benefitted them, as their taxes were paying for imperial defence. Indeed, work from historians Davis and Huttenback has suggested that British expenditure on defence was 2.5 times higher than other developed nations, a bill largely shouldered by middle class taxpayers.
Similarly, anti-imperialists made the argument that cheap food imports were undermining British farming and depopulating the countryside. Whilst cheap foreign labour in the colonies was depressing wages within Britain. This is disputed by the historian Offer however, who argues that British real terms wages were the highest in Europe.
Economics in the Inter-War Period
World War 1 cost Britain about £35 billion. This is over 13 times as much as the Boer War, which was regarded at the time as an enormously expensive war. For the first time, Britain became a debtor nation, after borrowing $4 billion from the USA. This was in addition to the loss of almost a million British lives.
The pound sterling (£) also had to be removed from the gold standard for the duration of the war, as gold reserves ran so low. This made sterling investments riskier and reduced the attraction of imperial ventures to investors.
As Britain had been focusing on war production, they had been unable to make consumer goods to export to the Empire. This meant that during the war, they lost their dominance in some of these export markets to foreign competition. A disadvantage that they were never able to recover from. For example, Japanese textiles began to outcompete British textiles in East Asia and India. British shipbuilding, coal, iron and steel industries also faced an unprecedented level of challenge and difficulty during the inter-war period. These core industries had been central to Britain’s wealth.
Britain’s finance and banking sector also struggled in the inter-war period, as the 1931 financial crisis resulting from the Great Depression in 1929 forced Britain off the gold standard again, inevitably reducing earnings from overseas investments. Britain had only been able to return to the gold standard 6 years earlier in 1925.
In the aftermath of the Great Depression, Britain was forced to give up on recreating the economic situation that had existed pre-war, which had largely been based around free trade. Instead, greater emphasis was placed on the Empire, which was closely tied to sterling and presented a profitable outlet for British investment, when most other international opportunities were closed down. In this way, Britain was able to use the Empire to soften the damaging effects of the Great Depression.
The Ottawa Conference of 1932, confirmed this new period of ‘imperial preference’, by introducing a 10% tax on all imports from outside the Empire, whilst Britain and the Dominions gave each other’s exports preferential treatment in their own markets.
The importance of imperial markets can be seen in the fact that 44% of British exports went to the Empire in 1934, compared to 37.2% in 1913. Though it should be noted that the value of these exports actually decreased from £195 million to £166 million over this same period. Thus, showing that although the Empire helped to cushion Britain’s decline, it did not alleviate it completely.
A similar story can be seen in imports, with Imperial imports making up 24.9% of Britain’s total imports in 1913 and 35.3% in 1934.
This was particularly important in certain sectors, for example in 1913, 48.5% of total wheat imports came from the Empire. Whereas by 1934, this figure would rise to 63.3%. Similarly, in 1913, 50.9% of cocoa imports came from the Empire. Whereas by 1934, this figure would rise to 90.7%. From feeding the working class, to providing luxuries for the upper and middle classes, the Empire was integral to helping Britain through the Great Depression and the inter-war period.
World War 2 was even more damaging to Britain economically than WW1 had been. Britain had lost 11.7 million tons (54% of total) of merchant shipping due to U boat attacks. The loss of major colonies in South East Asia to the Japanese had disrupted trade and cut off supplies of vital raw materials such as rubber from Malaya. A third of Britain’s overseas assets (investments and businesses), had been sold to pay for the war and Britain had built up huge debts to the USA through the Lend-Lease scheme and Keynes £900 million loan in 1945.
Economics in the Era of Decolonisation
In the immediate post-war period of reconstruction, the Commonwealth became increasingly important to British investors and by 1956, approximately 58% of all overseas investments were in Empire companies and governments.
Commonwealth markets also provided essential imports of food and raw materials at a time when Britain’s reserves of foreign exchange were too limited to source imports from other parts of the world. This can be seen in the continued rise in imports from the Commonwealth, which were worth £933 million (44.9% of total imports) in 1948, rising to £1.6 billion (48.3% of total imports) in 1954.
Finally, the Commonwealth provided a ready-made market for British exports. Crucially, by prioritising the sale of industrial goods to the Empire, Britain could earn payments in dollars (areas like the Malay States had built up a surplus of dollars by trading raw materials with the USA). This allowed Britain to pay back her debts more easily. This process can be seen in British exports to the Empire, which rose from a value of £757 million (46.1% of total exports) in 1948, to £1.3 billion (48% of total exports) in 1954.
In 1957, following the Suez Crisis MacMillan had compiled a ‘balance sheet of Empire’, which showed that the Kenyan State of Emergency had cost £55 million. To capture one Mau Mau fighter had cost over £10,000. MacMillan concluded that decolonisation was inevitable and that in many cases it would be economically advantageous to Britain.
Also, in 1957 the European Economic Community (EEC) was formed. Britain chose not to join, prioritising trade with the Commonwealth. However, the EEC immediately began to flourish and Britain felt stuck between deepening ties with Europe, or continuing with the Commonwealth.
Ultimately, a European future won out and Britain applied to join the EEC in 1963 (though they were initially rejected due to their insistence on special concessions for British trade with the Commonwealth).
The reduction in the importance of Commonwealth trade can be seen in the fact that by 1965, the proportion of British imports coming from the Commonwealth was down to 29.8% and the proportion of British exports going to the Commonwealth was down to 27.9%. The importance of the Commonwealth to Britain’s economic future was quickly dwindling and there was little desire to invest soldiers and money into continuing British rule in the remainder of the Empire.