Interesting Quora - Rise & Decline of British Empire

[a425couple]

Arvind Ravindran
May 4, 2020
History buff

The British Empire was once the greatest empire to ever have existed,
but now it is a shadow of its former glory. What were the most important
factors in the empires decline? Were they forced, or was it their own
doing which caused it?

To understand how and why the British Empire declined, we need to
understand what caused it rise in the first place. The British Empire,
like all other colonial empires, existed as a quirk of history, taking
advantage of a never before seen leap in technological and economic
superiority, called the Great Divergence

Colonialism itself was built on this newfound prowess of Europe.
Colonialism was observed in three waves : the first wave of settler
colonialism from the late 1400s to end of the 1700s, the second wave,
which was basically British and Dutch companies spreading their wings in
India and the East Indies, and the third wave from 1880 to 1914 with the
Scramble for Africa.

Britain had two things propelling it to the top by the 18th century.
That entire century was punctuated with various European wars of
succession and colonial rivalry. Spain had bankrupted itself by the end
of the 1600s, an extraordinarily violent century even by European standards.

The 18th century however, was predominantly a century long conflict
between Britain and France for colonial hegemony in the vacuum left by a
declining Spain. Britain won the seven years war in 1763 which killed
off the French colonial empire in the New World. Britain now had all of
North America east of the Mississippi to play with. The second big
advantage going for Britain was the industrial revolution.

As the first country in the world to industrialize, Britain was best
positioned to take advantage of an entire world of pre-industrial
civilizations. Till now, European powers would compete for control over
vast areas of the globe which gave them a monopoly over traded goods
with which they'd make a fortune. But industrialization completely
changed the game. With industrialization, Britain could undersell and
mass produce finished goods at prices nobody could match. While the rest
of Europe fought for colonies for the control of resources, Britain
fought for access to entire markets. Entire colonial empires like the
Spanish and Portuguese served as nothing more than sources of raw
material for Britain from whom they would buy raw materials, only to
sell them back finished goods putting their local cottage industries out
of business. It was in this period, the late 1700s, that Adam Smith
wrote the Wealth of Nations, showing to the world that wealth was not
created through mercantile control of trade routes jealously guarded to
the exclusion of others, but through free access to markets and material.

All this power and wealth caused great resentment in Europe, starting
the stereotype of "Perfidious Albion". Europe, particularly France, now
felt that Britain was getting too big for its britches and had to be
'cut down to size'. The rebellion in the thirteen colonies gave France
and its allies the perfect opportunity to strike. Britain was now faced
with a coalition of European rivals: France, Spain, and The Netherlands
declared open war. Austria, Prussia, and Russia, while remaining
ostensibly neutral, were nonetheless more favorably disposed towards the
allies.

By the 1790s, despite losing America, Britain was easily the wealthiest
nation in the planet. The fact that Britain didn't shrivel up and die
like expected when it's largest colonies left the Empire put an end to
the first wave of settler colonization. This basically proved Adam Smith
right, and that all Britain needed was a market amenable to trade with,
regardless of who controlled it. What mattered was that these markets
have stable governance and a pro-free trade outlook.

Then came the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars that ravaged Europe.
Post 1815, Britain was the only country unscathed by war. Being an
island made Britain a logistical nightmare to invade even without the
Royal Navy taken into account. But with the navy, the island was nigh
impregnable. The Royal Navy was at its peak of relative superiority, at
one point having more ships afloat than the rest of the world combined,
and there was no army in the world that could land on Britain. So
Britain had a secure base overflowing with wealth and technological
potential that allowed them to project power all around the world.

This period started the second wave of colonization. This era was marked
by Britain following a policy of Splendid Isolation. Britain was now so
strong and so dominant, she could completely ignore the goings on in
Europe since nothing happening there would threaten British security in
any way. Britain now needed markets that could buy British goods. For
that, one needs political stability which Britain had oodles of through
a centuries long tradition of parliamentary rule, and free trade.
Britain at this time was a libertarian's dream. They were stubbornly
wedded to the idea of completely free markets, minarchism, and free
trade. Import and export tariffs were non existent, since they weren't
really needed anyway. British manufacturers could compete comfortably
and confidently with the knowledge that they could out produce anyone.
Regulation was minimal if it existed at all, and British companies were
largely left alone to do as they pleased, up to and including forming
their own private armies and navies. Enter the British East India
company. This company was the quintessential British corporation of the
era. They were free to raise their own armies and navies, even up to
allowing them to handle their own diplomacy in the areas they traded in.

In the early 1700s, they got the rights to collect taxes in one province
in one corner of India. From there, they grew into a powerful force,
building an empire larger than the Roman Empire at its peak, all with
zero state intervention. India was the empire that Britain built in a
fit of absent-mindedness. It was almost entirely built by non state
actors with one goal in mind: political stability, stability being
defined as the absence of hostility to British commercial activity. It
was obtained either by installing pliable client states or through
direct annexation. They would sign alliances with Indian princes by
dangling superior European technology and military doctrine as the
carrot, with the stick being the same superior technology and doctrine
used against them if they refused. Any time there was an imminent
succession crisis looming, the company would spring into action directly
annexing the entire kingdom. Any time a local ruler grew restive over
the presence of British trade in the area, they would replace him with
another, more receptive ruler: an ambitious general in Oudh, a scheming
nephew in Bengal, and a Hindu dynasty in the Muslim ruled Mysore Sultanate.

Indian history, like that of China, was very cyclical in a way. Petty
kingdoms / invaders from Central Asia or Persia would clash and over
time, one kingdom would emerge as hegemon that would then conquer most
of the subcontinent to form a new Empire that would last a couple of
hundred years only to then disintegrate and start the cycle all over
again. The early modern period saw the Mughal Empire reach its pinnacle
in the 16th and 17th centuries and was on its downward trajectory by the
18th century. Considering the hitherto unseen technological imbalance,
and the timing of Britain's and Europe's ascendancy coinciding exactly
with the disintegration of the Mughal Empire, this was the only
opportunity for a European power to take over India. This is exactly
what East India company did. It found itself in the right place at the
right time and took full advantage of the situation. The East India
Company basically saw its role as the only entity with the ability to
manage Mughal decline in an orderly fashion so as to not disrupt the
free flow of trade established under them.

While India at this time was a net loss to the British government, it
was a fabulous source of wealth for British industrialists and private
corporations. Company rule in India was not popular in Britain, who saw
the petty bourgeoisie returning with unheard of wealth and power and
assumed, rightly so, that this was the product of obscene corruption. If
the company was detested in Britain, it was nothing compared to how it
was received in India itself. After the rebellion of 1857, the British
government got the perfect excuse to relieve the company of India who's
influence was greatly resented in Whitehall and Westminster. By 1858,
Britain took direct control of India with, at least initially, a goal of
better management that would take into account the interest of Indians.
Short lived and idealistic as that goal was, it did prove that Britain
of the early 19th century didn't really need an empire to be top dog,
and yet it had one anyway.

All these advantages built up compounded by each other, so much so, that
the 19th century was called the British Imperial Century, or Pax
Britannica. But the nature of these advantages is that, they're not
permanent. These advantages were not something intrinsic to Britain,
which was their eventual downfall. Industrialization can happen
anywhere, given the right conditions, and that was precisely what
happened. By 1895, the United States overtook Britain was the largest
economy in the world, and Germany was industrializing at a blazing pace
post unification. Both of these countries were larger, had a greater
population, and could afford to challenge Britain any time it chose to.

Britain's advantage was now no longer structural, but institutional.
Britain had built the institutions for global hegemony, and these
institutions have an inertia of their own. Navies take decades to build
up and Britain had a century long head start. The Pound was the reserve
currency of the world giving Britain a unique advantage of borrowing
more freely. World finance flowed through London generating huge amounts
of revenue. It was now these institutions that kept Britain afloat, but
the very nature of Britain's supremacy meant that it came with an
expiration date. It would be only a matter of time till another, larger
country would build up its industry and economy. The only structural
advantage that Britain now possessed was its geography. As an island
nation, Britain would be hard to invade, and so the money spent on a
large army to protect its borders could be used on a large navy to
project power to distant shores.

By the late 1800s, Germany and the United States has largely caught up
with Britain on the industrial front. Britain was still the largest
economy in Europe and the second largest economy in the world. But
Germany started overtaking Britain as the largest manufacturer in
Europe, and the United States was far ahead. Britain's economy was now
the first post-industrial one, with strengths in finance and services as
opposed to manufacturing. Britain failed to establish a lead in emerging
industries like chemical processing, petroleum, and industrial
machinery. They still retained a lead in old industries like textiles
and ship building, but Germany and the United States now produced more
steel than Britain, the US had a more efficient railway network, and
Germany was now leading the world in technological innovation. This
economic competition kick started the third wave of colonization: New
Imperialism. This was when Britain consciously decided to expand her
empire for a second time, this time, in search of larger markets.

In India, this eventually ended up with Britain negotiating highly
favorable trade arrangements since they were basically negotiating with
themselves, letting them get raw materials on the cheap. In return, what
Britain got was even more invaluable. India was a bottomless well of
consumers. With its innumerable population, India was the ideal captive
market. This was a market that only Britain had access to, to the
exclusion of the Germans and the Americans.

Also, Africa was now the next big thing. Every European power with the
ability to do so sought to carve pieces of the continent for themselves
in an effort to get what Britain had going with India. Britain got in on
the action as well, not because it feared running out of markets to sell
to, but because it feared being matched, or worse, being left behind.
This was also coupled with the notion that a country couldn't be
considered a Great Power if it didn't have colonies with black and brown
people in it. After all, that's what all Great Powers had now done for
the last four hundred years. Despite many skirmishes and clashes over
control of various parts of Africa, colonization of Africa did not cause
any wars in Europe.

But new conflicts were now brewing. Germany was chafing under the
British international world order, and started building a fleet to rival
the Royal Navy. This caused alarm in Britain, who had so far tried to
manage the rise of new economic powers with treaties and understandings
like with the United States, France, Japan, and Russia. Britain realized
by the end of the 19th century that they could no longer be aloof to the
affairs of Europe, and started building alliances to maintain a balance
of power. They signed treaties with both France and Russia, culminating
in what would eventually be the Triple Entente. They had already
practically ceded control of the western hemisphere to America in order
to focus more on Europe, and signed an alliance with a rising Japan to
fortify their far eastern possessions.

But the empire was now done. The white dominions got self government,
creating a precedent over what was to come with the non white colonies.
These dominions would progressively get more independent with time,
turning an imperial relationship into more of an alliance of equal
nations bound by a personal union.

By the 1890s, Britain was no longer the superpower it once was, and was
relegated to first among equals, with whom it had to negotiate for every
scrap.

The first world war was the first stress test on the empire, from which
it emerged further bruised but victorious. This war eroded Britain's
institutional advantages on the world stage, turning Britain from the
largest creditor nation to a borrower for the first time. Britain sold
its financial assets in the US and Argentina, which the US eagerly
snapped up. The Pound was no longer the sole reserve currency, the
Dollar had now arrived. And the war built up the American arms industry
to rival Britain's, and would only grow larger.

With the new League of Nations set up, Britain thought it was being
clever when it sought separate votes for its dominions and India in an
attempt to increase the number of votes it got. But this ended up
sealing the perception that these nations were their own entities,
distinct from Britain, and they need not be bound to it indefinitely.
This was another crack in the unity and integrity of the Empire, that
culminated in the Statute of Westminster of 1931 that made the white
dominions de facto independent nations that Britain had no control over.

The second world war was the death knell for British supremacy of any
form on the world stage. Till the second world war, Britain had still
retained it's one structural advantage of geography. As long as it had
its navy, it's lands will never be ravaged by war, or so it was
believed. This ended with the invention of the aircraft. With airplanes,
the English Channel was no real obstacle anymore when it came to raining
destruction upon British lands. The blitz proved that being an island
would not spare it the ravages of war and Britain basically bankrupted
itself fighting Nazi Germany.

The United States now possessed the advantage of geography. The English
Channel may not be a barrier for aircraft, but the Atlantic and Pacific
Oceans were. It was America that now played the part that Britain did in
the Napoleonic Wars. It was America that now stood unscathed by war as
it bank rolled its allies like Britain once did. With this, Britain lost
all the advantages it once possessed as the rest of the world simply
caught up to it.

Britain now no longer had the resources to manage an empire, no longer
possessed the means to gain them, and no longer had the appetite for
imperial ambitions.

British rhetoric and propaganda throughout the war had been about an
underdog Britain fighting for freedom from oppression. Considering their
ghastly defeats in 1940, this rhetoric was all they had to keep Britain
going.

But this came back to bite them after the war. Firstly, colonial nations
have no reason to submit to a country that is an underdog. British
Imperial structures were built on a mirage of British invincibility and
grandeur. That could not be squared with the new propaganda line of
plucky little underdogs fighting for freedom. Secondly, from the
perspective of the British voting public, Britain fighting for freedom
put it in an uncomfortable position of denying its subject peoples the
very freedoms it said it fought for. All these contradictions came to a
head when Britain was shown to be vulnerable, making the Empire
impossible to sustain. And so, they let the colonies go. Starting with
India in 1947, one by one, colonies were let go in a largely peaceful
and orderly fashion, signaling the end of Britain's imperial era.

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[Byker]

"a425couple" wrote in message news:s2mi2...@news4.newsguy.com...

>
> Arvind Ravindran
> May 4, 2020
> History buff
>
> The British Empire was once the greatest empire to ever have existed, but
> now it is a shadow of its former glory. What were the most important
> factors in the empires decline?

Were it not for two world wars, Britain, France, Belgium, Portugal, and
other European colonial powers would still have their empires...

[Keith Willshaw]

In the case of Britain policy was already moving in favour of
independence before WW2. A decision to grant Independence to India had
been made in the 1930's. By 1939 Indian provinces, the equivalent of US
States already had their own elected administrations and progress at the
national level was only slowed by the inability of the Hindu and Moslem
parties to agree on the form of that independence. Australia, New
Zealand, South Africa and Canada were already independent and issued
their own declarations of war on the axis powers. Post war it was the
Labour government that tried to hang on to what was left of the Empire
in the far east and Africa but in the 1950's the incoming conservative
government announced the official policy was to make the remaining
colonies in Africa independent. Arguably this happened too quickly in
Africa as there was not the basis of a modern democracy and many became
military dictatorships

The bottom line was that by 1945 the benefits of maintaining an Empire
was outweighed by its costs and in a democratic country it was
increasingly seen as wrong.

France and Belgium tried to hang on to Empire with frankly disastrous
results in the Congo, Vietnam, Cambodia and Algeria. Portugal and Spain
were the last European powers to make their colonies independent,
Mozambique and Angola remaining colonies until 1975.

The oddities such as The Falklands, Gibraltar, Anguila, Bermuda etc are
considered British Overseas Dependent Territories. Most recently that
has meant the UK flying out covid-19 vaccines to vaccinate the local
population.

The odd man out was Hong Kong which remained a British Independent
territory as the bulk of the territory was leased from China rather than
being a colonial posession. Their residents have full British Citizens
which includes the right to settle in the UK.

Some of these territories of course are also used by US Forces , Diego
Garcia in the Indian Ocean is large naval and air base leased to the
USA. There is also a major Airbase on Ascension Island which is used by
both the RAF and USAF

[Barrk]

"Empire" is one of the greatest brainfarts that has afflicted
humanity for at least ten millenia.

It is a form of protracted suicide.

Sure, you conquer, take all the good stuff, count the coin.
But shortly AFTER the red ink appears. The costs of
administering, defending, securing, quickly add up. All
you get from the conquered is fraction of the initial haul.

The "solution" is to conquer MORE. Again you make short
term profit, but now you have to add all those other expenses
to the books. The bigger the empire, the faster the red ink
puddles up. Pretty soon it's just untenable and there are
no more territories even worth conquering in the first place.

This, and a few other things, killed Babylon and Rome and
the UK too.

Now a FEW figured this out. The Dutch, and to some extent
the USA, realized that the road to constant profit, rather than
deficit, was to infiltrate themselves into the TRADE equation.
Then they always get a cut, but avoid most of the expenses
of physical empire. Foreign regimes may rise and fall, but
they ALL need to buy and sell. The only effort required is
JUST enough force and guile to protect your trade network.