Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made

by Richard Toye

  How, then, should Churchill’s lifetime involvement with the Empire be assessed? His defenders amongst historians are certainly right to argue that the picture is more complicated than his diehard image would suggest. That reputation, acquired from the 1920s onwards, overlay an earlier picture of him as an imperial conciliator, based on his South African and Irish accomplishments. When at the Colonial Office before World War I he was even seen for a brief time as a ‘danger to the Empire’. Nevertheless, his detractors’ arguments also have merit. If Churchill became seen as a diehard, this was in part because of choices that he deliberately made, positioning himself unashamedly with reactionary elements in the Conservative Party. He used his own background selectively to reinforce the stance he now adopted. At the risk of sounding flippant, we might say that it was in the years between the wars that he decided to become a Victorian. This is not to play down the importance of his actual Victorian background but rather to emphasize that it cannot be used as a catch-all explanation, or excuse, for all the imperial attitudes he struck in later life.

  It is true that his background provided him with some foundational beliefs from which he never departed. His 1953 statement, ‘Wherever it had grown, British imperialism had meant steady progress for the masses of the people and the establishment and enforcement of just laws’ could easily have come from the mouth of his headmaster, Mr Welldon, in the 1880s.47 Yet, far from instilling in him a uniform set of principles which he applied remorselessly throughout life, his upbringing and early career provided him with two different sets of assumptions which were hard to square with one another. The first was the confident, Whiggish assumption of inevitable human progress. The second was a dark, pessimistic view of life as a harsh, evolutionary process that pitted human beings against each other in atavistic conflict.

  An interesting clue to the way in which Churchill tried to reconcile these assumptions in his own mind can be found in speech notes he prepared for a debate on India in March 1943. These remarks – aimed at ‘a particular class of simpleton by no means all resident in the British Isles’ – included the expected sideswipes at Gandhi and at the Indian capitalists who supported him. Yet there was also a more subtle passage in which he examined the idea of Indian independence. One might as well say ‘Give Europe her independence’, he said. Europe had in fact been given such independence with the final collapse of the Roman Empire, he argued, and she had used it to embark on a nearly ‘unending succession of bloody and devastating wars, of which we are at present passing through the latest’. He hoped, however, that after the war there would emerge a new regional organization, ‘some sort of central residing power’ which would put a check on such miseries. This had to be a force ‘external to Europe itself’; that was why ‘we seek so earnestly to bring the detached vast steadying power of the United States into the new Council of Europe’. He then turned more explicitly to the question of Empire. He acknowledged that in the past there had occurred the ‘exploitation of the weaker races by the white man’ and ‘the wicked and brazen exploitation of colonies and conquests’. However, ‘the broad, shining, liberating and liberalizing tides of the Victorian era’ had put an end to this. ‘For the last 80 years – four generations – the British have had no idea whatever of exploitation in India, but only service. In fact British rule has rendered to India exactly that function of central control, including an external element, which is what we seek to create in Europe.’48

  The speech was never completed or delivered, in part due to pressure of work and in part due to Churchill’s realization that it ‘might be contentious’.49 It raised as many questions as it answered. After all, he himself proved deeply hostile to the idea of making British colonial rule accountable to an external force, in the form of the United Nations. But the speech notes did provide at least a partial account of how a despairing view of human nature could be harmonized with a belief in the feasibility of progress. Progress was possible, but it needed to be imposed by a benign, disinterested outside force. Even in the face of clear abuses, some of which he denounced as such himself, he never lost faith that rule of others by the British fitted the bill in this respect. In that sense, he was a true imperialist, however much critics such as Leo Amery might cast doubt on his credentials. For him, moreover, running the Empire was not just about the careful weighing of policy options. It was an emotive issue. Charles de Gaulle put his finger on it during a discussion towards the end of World War II in which Churchill sought to damp down French ambitions in the Levant:

  CHURCHILL: Colonies today are no longer a pledge of happiness, or a sign of power. India is a very heavy burden to us. Modern squadrons are worth more than overseas territories.

  DE GAULLE: You are right. And yet you wouldn’t exchange Singapore for squadrons.50

  But what of Churchill’s concrete successes and failures? As a young officer and journalist he was not as much of a maverick as is usually suggested, but nor were his writings those of a mindless imperialist lackey. Unlike many other correspondents of the same stripe, he provided more than a chronicle of inspiring events. In the words of one contemporary, he went on his own lines: ‘Churchill reviews the past, and attempts to look into the future. He is original and instructive, as well as interesting.’51 As a young Tory MP he proved unable to conform successfully. His decision to plump for free trade and the Liberals may have involved an element of opportunism but – even though he did not stick to them with complete tenacity later – his beliefs on the issue were sincere. His efforts as a junior minister to conciliate South Africa after the Boer War were in some ways far-sighted, yet the failure to do more for the rights of the non-white population appears to modern eyes as a blot on the record. His grand visions for East Africa in the same period were well meaning but rather superficial and paternalistic. By the time that he returned to the Colonial Office after the Great War his attitudes had hardened and, although he was not a straightforward pushover for the Kenyan settlers, his decision over the land issue contributed to the country’s later problems. He has, however, been criticized too harshly over the creation of Iraq; he did not draw up the new Middle East map out of his own head but rather put his imprimatur on a problematic solution that had been placed before him by apparent experts. Likewise, his Palestine White Paper may have been an unsatisfactory response to an intractable problem but something quite similar would most probably have emerged under a different minister. His actions over Ireland at this time are more obviously praiseworthy. If the Anglo-Irish war was unnecessarily cruel and bloody, he and Lloyd George did at last grasp the need for negotiation and implemented a settlement in the face of much Tory hostility. It was, of course, an imperfect answer, but it was about the best that could have been achieved in the circumstances.

  In the 1930s, it almost seems that we are confronted with two Churchills: the far-sighted one who boldly warned against the rise of Germany, and the reactionary one who inveighed against constitutional progress. In his own mind there was no contradiction. In that undelivered 1943 speech he observed: ‘For ten years before the war, I warned our British people against Hitler and Gandhi.’52 Yet few modern commentators will be prepared to grant the equivalence. It is certainly possible to pluck out meritorious aspects of Churchill’s critique of the government’s Indian policy, such as his statements of concern for the Untouchables. One can even point to the massacres that attended independence and partition as a kind of vindication of his predictions of chaos. However, his belief that India was unsuited to democracy was to be conclusively disproved. (Admittedly, Pakistan’s relationship with democracy has been troubled, but it seems highly doubtful that its problems could have been avoided if British rule had been prolonged.) If his continued rearguard action against reform during World War II is not much to his credit, this pales almost into insignificance next to his failure to respond adequately to the Bengal famine. Here he displayed genuine callousness, and short-sightedness to boot. This terrible episode must, however, be viewed alongside the m
any positive aspects of his war leadership, not least his capacity to inspire peoples throughout the Empire and beyond in the struggle with fascist tyranny.

  Even during the war itself, Churchill was forced to face the eclipse of Britain’s role as the superpowers rose. During his opposition years his attacks on ‘scuttle’ in its various forms may have been good politics but they do not look convincing in retrospect. Back in office after 1951 he found that the Empire’s atrophy could not be easily reversed. And some of the positions he adopted showed a retreat from diehardism, notably his (comparatively) conciliatory stance over Mau Mau. It is to his credit too that, in spite of his private encouragement of the Tory rebels, he finally bit the bullet and approved the treaty with Egypt. His efforts to foster the ‘special relationship’ with the United States are harder to judge. He deluded himself if he thought that this could ever approach an equal partnership. But if so it was a less damaging delusion than that which was to be suffered by Eden during the Suez crisis – the idea that bold unilateral action could be the means to reverse the tides of history and restore the British Empire to its place in the sun. Arguably, the achievement of Churchill’s final years was to cover a necessary and pragmatic retreat from Empire with a mixture of ‘no surrender’ bluster and sentimental appeal to Anglo-American unity.

  However, his most significant achievement of all was something broader. ‘Change was in the air in the 1940s’, recalled Nelson Mandela in his memoirs. ‘The Atlantic Charter of 1941, signed by Roosevelt and Churchill, reaffirmed faith in the dignity of each human being and propagated a host of democratic principles.’ Although some in the West viewed the Charter as hollow rhetoric, he wrote, this was not true of ‘those of us in Africa’. Rather, he and his ANC colleagues were inspired by it: ‘We hoped that the government and ordinary South Africans would see that the principles they were fighting for were the same ones we were advocating at home.’53 This, of course, was an unintended consequence: Churchill did not mean the Charter to be interpreted as a promise of imperial liberation. But by putting his name to the crucial pledge of national self-determination, he helped unlock the forces of anti-colonialism. The spirit of freedom, which he articulated so eloquently on so many occasions, escaped the bounds he would have set upon it. The decline of Churchill’s Empire, much as the man himself regretted it, can be seen in part as a tribute to the power of beliefs that he himself prized dearly.

  Notes

  Abbreviations used in the notes (see bibliography for further details):

  CV

  Companion volume to Churchill’s official biography by Randolph Churchill/Martin Gilbert

  CWP

  Churchill War Papers

  DAFP

  Documents on Australian Policy, 1937–49

  FDR

  Franklin Delano Roosevelt

  FRUS

  Foreign Relations of the United States

  IOR

  India Office Records

  MKG

  Mohandas K. Gandhi

  NA

  The National Archives, Kew, London: CAB Cabinet records; CO Colonial Office records; DO Dominions Office records; FO Foreign Office records; PREM Prime Ministers’ files

  TOPI

  India: The Transfer of Power, 1942–7 (ed. Nicholas Mansergh)

  WSC

  Winston Spencer Churchill

  WSC CW

  The Collected Works of Sir Winston Churchill

  Unless otherwise stated, all Churchill’s speeches, statements and radio broadcasts cited are from Winston S. Churchill: His Complete Speeches, 1897–1963, ed. Robert Rhodes James.

  PROLOGUE

  1 The account here is taken from Michael Blundell’s A Love Affair with the Sun: A Memoir of Seventy Years in Kenya, Kenway Publications, Nairobi, 1994, pp. 108–10, with additional details from his earlier book, So Rough a Wind, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 1964, pp. 183–5. For a critique of Blundell’s liberal pretensions, see David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: Britain’s Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2005, p. 54.

  2 ‘Arrest & Impeachment of Mr Churchill’, Manchester Guardian, 27 Sept. 1920.

  3 Lord Winterton to Leo Amery, 11 June 1953, Leo Amery Papers, 2/1/49.

  4 Ronald Hyam judges that Churchill ‘was not all that interested in the empire, apart from its rhetorical potentialities, and as distinct from what he regarded as the larger and more portentous issues of international relations’: Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2006, p. 172.

  5 John Barnes and David Nicholson (eds.), The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945, Hutchinson, London, 1988, p. 993 (entry for 4 Aug. 1944).

  6 Mark Pottle (ed.), Daring to Hope: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1946–1969, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London, 2000, p. 137 (entry for 29–30 May 1954).

  7 WSC, minute of 23 Jan. 1906, NA, CO 446/52/2224, quoted in Ronald Hyam, Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908: The Watershed of the Empire-Commonwealth, Macmillan, London, 1968, p. 208.

  8 ‘Conference of Prime Ministers and representatives of the United Kingdom, the Dominions and India, held in June, July and August, 1921’, Cmd. 1474, August 1921, p. 39. It should be noted that ‘Secretary of State for the Colonies’ was the formal title of the office. In this book, however, the simpler term ‘Colonial Secretary’ is used frequently. Similarly, the Secretary of State for the Dominions (a post which existed between 1925 and 1947) is often referred to here as the ‘Dominions Secretary’. These usages, although informal, were regularly deployed by contemporaries.

  9 Speech of N. M. Samarth, Indian Legislative Assembly Debates, vol. II, no. 31, 9 Feb. 1922, p. 2319, copy in NA, CO 533/287.

  10 Ashley Jackson makes this point persuasively. It is, however, more common to assert that the Empire reached its maximum extent during the interwar years: The British Empire and the Second World War, Hambledon Continuum, London, 2006, p. 5.

  11 Technically, South Africa after 1910 was a ‘union’ and Southern Ireland from 1922–49 was a ‘free state’, but in effect both had Dominion status.

  12 For more detailed explanations see Alan Palmer, Dictionary of the British Empire and Commonwealth, John Murray, London, 1996, pp. 87, 109, 172.

  13 See, for example, Peter Clarke, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, Allen Lane, London, 2007, p. 506.

  14 WSC, Lord Randolph Churchill [originally published by Macmillan, London, 1906], CW, vol. VI, p. 487.

  15 J. E. C. Welldon, ‘The Imperial Aspects of Education’ (paper delivered on 14 May 1895), Proceedings of the Royal Colonial Institute, 26 (1894–5), pp. 322–39, at 324–5.

  16 Speech of 21 Feb. 1942, Selected Works of Jawaharlal Nehru, vol. XII, B. R. Publishing Corporation, Delhi, 1979, p. 134.

  17 This can be seen especially on the left, for example Clive Ponting, Churchill, Sinclair-Stevenson, London, 1994, p. 23. For a right-wing critic’s take on Churchill’s Victorian mindset, see John Charmley, Churchill, The End of Glory: A Political Biography, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1993, p. 16.

  18 John Colville, preface to WSC, The River War, Sceptre, London, 1987 (first published 1899), pp. 9–10.

  19 Roland Quinault, ‘Churchill and Black Africa’, History Today, June 2005, pp. 31–6, at 36.

  20 W. L. Mackenzie King diary, 5 March 1932.

  21 Mark Pottle (ed.), Champion Redoubtable: The Diaries and Letters of Violet Bonham Carter, 1914–1945, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1998, p. 252 (entry for 6 Jan. 1943).

  22 Kirk Emmert’s Winston S. Churchill on Empire (Carolina Academic Press, Durham, NC, 1989) does not offer such a survey but rather attempts to outline Churchill’s views on Empire ‘as he would have had he set out his views systematically’ (p. xvii). Raymond A. Callahan’s Churchill: Retreat from Empire (Scholarly Resources Inc., Wilmington, DE, 1984) deals only with the years 1940–55.

  23 In the former category, Ronald Hyam, ‘Ch
urchill and the British Empire’, in Robert Blake and Wm. Roger Louis (eds.), Churchill, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1993, pp. 167–85, an extended version of which will be published in Hyam’s forthcoming book Understanding the British Empire, and Piers Brendon, ‘Churchill and Empire’, unpublished lecture. (I am grateful to Dr Brendon for providing me with a copy of his text.) Of the numerous books in the latter category, special mention must be made here of Hyam’s magisterial Elgin and Churchill at the Colonial Office, 1905–1908. He did consider writing a book on Churchill and the Empire more broadly but was discouraged by the comparative paucity of archival records for Churchill’s second Colonial Office period in 1921–2: letter to the author, 25 Oct. 2008.