The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire (52 page)

This put him at odds with his great World War II ally, President Franklin Roosevelt. Roosevelt was obsessed with promoting anti-colonialism, especially in India, which he thought should be reformed “somewhat on the Soviet line.”
¹¹
He told this to Stalin, with whom he
was in alliance to foster an anti-colonialist future, because, as Roosevelt said, “Of one thing I am certain, Stalin is not an imperialist.”
¹²
Stalin, of course, was a Communist, which to Roosevelt was a far lesser problem. As author Robert Nisbet noted, during the war, “second only to the defeat of Germany, the independence of India from the British Empire was Roosevelt's fondest aspiration. His ignorance of the real problems and issues in India was gargantuan.”
¹³
Roosevelt told Churchill he had an “injection of a new thought” to offer on India, which was that the Indians were in the same position as the American colonists of 1776—a comparison that might elude most disinterested historians—and should be treated to a similar independence. To Roosevelt, the Soviet Union fit in well with the world's democratic future, but the British Empire did not.

Roosevelt, though he did not live to see it, had his way. After the war, Britain was broke and dependent on American aid. Churchill, whose wartime attitude had been “hands off the British Empire,” was booted from
office in 1945, even before the war was over. The new Labour government seemed only too eager to dispense with India and several other troublesome spots, including Palestine. In a speech before Parliament, on 6 March 1947 Churchill said, “It is with deep grief I watch the clattering down of the British Empire, with all its glories and all the services it has rendered to mankind.... We must face the evils that are coming upon us, and that we are powerless to avert. We must do our best in all these circumstances . . . to help mitigate the ruin and disaster that will follow the disappearance of Britain from the East.” If ruin and disaster attended independent Burma (which never joined the Commonwealth) and India in the immediate aftermath of independence and partition, ruin and disaster were less in evidence in Malaya, where Churchill (prime minister again, from 1951 to 1955) ensured that the country defeated a Communist insurgency, or in Singapore, or in Hong Kong. Australia and New Zealand remain anchors of British values in the Far East, and India appears to have outgrown its anti-colonial reaction and to be benefiting from British ideas of parliamentary government and free markets.

In the Near East, Churchill approved a coup in Iran that kept that country pro-Western until the fall of the Shah in 1979. In the Middle East, Palestine was a hornets' nest, and if independent Israel is still bedeviled by enemies, it must nevertheless be considered the democratic and economic success story of the region. British influence has helped to keep the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan more pro-Western than they might
otherwise have been. In Africa, the story is certainly mixed, but it is British institutions and ideals that provide the appropriate direction for reform where corruption and dictatorship have held sway. In the Americas it can hardly be said that the United States, which grew from the Empire's thirteen colonies, or Canada have been anything other than a rousing success; and the Falkland Islands still remain a jolly good place to raise sheep.

If there was any consolation for Churchill in the retreat from empire, it was that Britain's global role had been transferred from one English-speaking, Anglo-Saxon people to another, his mother's people in fact. Churchill had long believed that “The British Empire will last so long and only so long as the British race is determined to maintain it.”
¹⁴
More than anything else this was why Britain had to shear itself of empire: the burden had become too great. In many parts of the world, Britain made a gallant fighting retreat against evil forces that threatened to derail a peaceful transfer of power, but the transfer itself had become inevitable.
¹⁵

To return to the question Churchill posed himself—was his life a failure, because he oversaw the demise of the British Empire? No, because the Empire was not a failure. And no man better represented that Empire than Sir Winston Churchill—its military adventures, its high ideals, its humane spirit, and its vision of the English-speaking peoples acting as an enduring global force for good.

1
Letter from John Adams to Nathan Webb, 12 October 1755.

2
Letter from Thomas Jefferson to James Madison, 27 April 1809.

3
John S. D. Eisenhower,
So Far from God: The U.S. War with Mexico, 1846–1848
(Random House, 1989), p. 367.

4
Worse if they are sentimental about, sympathetic to, or supportive of the murderers belonging to the Irish Republican Army.

5
Niall Ferguson,
Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power
(Basic Books, 2002), p. 113.

6
Robin Blackburn,
The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery: 1776–1848
(Verso, 2000), p. 472, n. 55.

7
Christopher Dawson,
Enquiries into Religion and Culture
(Catholic University of America Press, 2009), p. 17.

8
George Santayana,
Soliloquies in England and Later Soliloquies
(Barber Press, 2008), p. 32.

9
L. H. Gann and Peter Duignan,
The Rulers of British Africa
,
1870–1914
(Croom Helm, the Hoover Institution, 1978), p. 202.

1
The reference here is to British Foreign Secretary George Canning's famous affirmation of his de facto support for the Monroe Doctrine in a speech in the House of Commons on 12 December 1826: “I resolved that, if France had Spain, it should not be Spain with the Indies. I called the New World
into existence to redress the balance of the Old.” Winston Churchill echoed the famous phrase in his “We Shall Fight on the Beaches” speech to Parliament on 4 June 1940: “we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this island or a large part of it were subjected and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British fleet, would carry on the struggle, until in God's good time, the new world, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue of the old.”

2
It really was an English empire at this point; the union with Scotland was in 1707, after which the Scots took a disproportionate role in the British Empire.

3
“The Struggle for Legitimacy and the Image of the Empire in the Atlantic,” by Anthony Pagden in
The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I, The Origins of Empire
, ed. Nicholas Canny (Oxford University Press, 1998), p. 35.

4
Many half-educated people will protest here that Scotch is a drink and one should refer to the Scottish, but this is a myth propagated by chippy Scotchmen, as any reader of English literature can attest; see also Welch, as in the Royal Welch Fusiliers, rather than Welsh.

5
Except for galley slaves who were captured in wars against the Muslims.

6
Robert C. Davis,
Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast, and Italy, 1500–1800
(Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 23.

7
Paul Johnson,
A History of the American People
(HarperCollins, 1997), p. 124.

8
Imperial military service ran in the family. Washington's half-brother and unofficial guardian, Lawrence, from whom George inherited Mount Vernon, had served from 1740 to 1742 in a disastrous British campaign in the Caribbean that included an assault on Cartagena and a hostile landing at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

9
Walter O'Meara,
Guns at the Forks
(Prentice-Hall, 1965), p. 89.

10
Chris Wrigley,
Winston Churchill: A Biographical Companion
(ABC-CLIO, 2002), pp. 88–89.

11
Francis Parkman,
France and England in North America
, (The Library of America, 1983), vol. II, pp. 1325–56.

12
Geoffrey Treasure,
Who's Who in Early Hanoverian Britain
(Shepheard-Walwyn, 1992), pp. 228–89.

13
Geoffrey Regan,
The Guinness Book of Decisive Battles
(Canopy Books, 1992), p. 135.

14
Parkman, op. cit., p. 1400.

15
Major-General J. F. C. Fuller,
A Military History of the Western World
(Funk & Wagnalls, 1955), vol. II, p. 270n.

16
David Horowitz,
The First Frontier: The Indian Wars & America's Origins
,
1607–1776
(Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 206.

17
Ibid., pp. 203–04.

18
Dan Cook,
The Long Fuse: How England Lost the American Colonies
,
1760–1785
(Atlantic Monthly Press, 1995), p. 123.

19
J. M. Roberts,
The Pelican History of the World
(Penguin, 1985), p. 693.

20
Victor Brooks and Robert Hohwald,
How America Fought Its Wars: Military Strategy from the American Revolution to the Civil War
(Combined Publishing, 1999), p. 162.

21
Edmund Burke's Speech on Conciliation with America, 22 March 1775.

22
Taxation No Tyranny
was a pamphlet Dr. Samuel Johnson wrote in 1775 rebutting the charges of the American colonists against the British government.

23
Claire Berlinski,
There Is No Alternative: Why Margaret Thatcher Matters
(Basic Books, 2008), p. 173.

1
Francis Drake at Nombre de Dios, 1572, quoted in Dudley Pope,
Harry Morgan's Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1684
(House of Stratus, 2001), p. 34.

2
Harry Kelsey,
Sir Francis Drake: The Queen's Pirate
(Yale University Press, 1998), p. 109.

3
Stephen Coote,
Drake: The Life and Legend of an Elizabethan Hero
(Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2003), p. 179.

4
Coote, op. cit., p. 233.

5
H. E. Marshall,
Our Island Story
(Yesterday's Classics, 2006), p. 428.

6
Both quotations are in John Cummins,
Francis Drake: The Lives of a Hero
(St. Martin's Press, 1995), p. 256. I have modernized the spelling.

7
Alfred Noyes, from his poem “Drake” in
Collected Poems
(Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1913), vol. I, pp. 366 and 369.

1
Dudley Pope,
Harry Morgan's Way: The Biography of Sir Henry Morgan, 1635–1684
(House of Stratus, 2001), p. 70.

2
Pope, op. cit., pp. 96–97.

3
As per the Treaty of Tordesillas of 1494 in which the pope divided the western and eastern hemispheres between the then-dominant maritime powers of Spain and Portugal. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries an oft-invoked phrase was “no peace beyond the line” (or “lines”)—roughly speaking, west of the Canary and Cape Verde Islands.

4
Edward Morgan arrived in Jamaica in mourning. His eldest daughter, held to be a beauty and of good character, had died during the voyage. The cause: “a malign distemper by reason of the nastiness of the passengers.”

5
David F. Marley,
Pirates and Privateers of the Americas
(ABC-CLIO, 1994), p. 265.

6
Both letters quoted in Peter Earle,
The Sack of Panama: Captain Morgan and the Battle for the Caribbean
(Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 1981), pp. 110–11. Spelling and punctuation have been modernized.

7
Morgan had no children, but in his will stipulated that upon his wife's death his estate would pass to his nephew, Charles Byndloss, if he agreed to change his surname to Morgan.