Rethinking Decolonization*

The moment of decolonization is recorded by dates and signalled by ceremony: the guard, political as well as military, is changed; anthems are composed; flags are redesigned. When Malaya became independent in 1957, the national anthem, ‘My Country’, was adopted in the same year, and a new national flag was hoisted in 1963.¹ When Nigeria became independent in 1960, the national anthem, ‘Nigeria, We Hail Thee’, was composed for the occasion and the national flag was flown for the first time.² Similarly, when Jamaica gained independence in 1962, a new national anthem, ‘Jamaica, Land We Love’, was adopted, as was the national flag. These examples are just a few of many that could be cited. But no purpose is served by adding to the list because the point they make already has an accepted, if also a minor, part in the historiography of decolonization.

It is more interesting and also surprising, even for scholars who specialize in imperial history, to discover that a similar process was under way elsewhere in the empire-Commonwealth. Canada's national flag replaced the Union Jack in 1965 and a national anthem, ‘O Canada’, was adopted in 1980. Canada's experience was far from being an oddity. Australia's national flag was approved even earlier, in 1954, though ‘Advance Australia Fair’ did not replace ‘God Save the Queen’ until 1984.³ ‘God Defend New Zealand’ achieved equal status with ‘God Save the Queen’ in 1977, and thereafter began to supplant it; New Zealand's flag still retains its Union Jack quarter, but pressure to remove it has grown in recent decades.⁴ South Africa exchanged ‘God Save the Queen’ for ‘The Call of South Africa’ in 1957; the national flag, amended in 1928 to minimize the space allocated to the Union Jack, continued to fly until 1994, but was then replaced by an entirely new flag that eliminated the remaining minuscule symbol of the British connection.⁵

Juxtaposing these dates and artefacts may establish a wholly insignificant set of correlations. After all, the colonies achieved independence after the Second World War, and principally in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa had long been self-governing.⁶ Their superior status was recognized by the term ‘dominion’, which was adopted to distinguish the self-governing colonies of white settlement from parts of the empire that remained subject to imperial rule. The term was first applied in 1867 to describe the new Confederation of Canada, and was attached to Australia and New Zealand in 1907 and to South Africa in 1910.⁷ Dominion status was a characteristically ambiguous imperial invention that recognized various states of self-government while managing to convey overtones of continuing subordination.⁸ Nevertheless, the dominions were formally independent in internal affairs, and after the First World War they secured a degree of representation in foreign affairs too. Acquiring the ceremonial emblems of independence may have been, for them, merely a delayed tidying-up operation. In addition, it could be said that anthems and flags are epiphenomena that are not to be confused with much weightier forces that set the course of decolonization, and that any attempt to forge a link between Canada and Malaya in this regard is either trivial or spurious.

It is undoubtedly the case that the existing literature does not consider the possibility that the old dominions themselves might be an integral part of the process of decolonization.⁹ The impressive contributions made to the study of decolonization since Darwin referred to the subject in 1988 as being ‘very underdeveloped’ have dealt almost exclusively with Africa and Asia.¹⁰ None of the surveys of decolonization now available regards the old dominions as being candidates for independence; nor do the authors feel it necessary to justify omitting them from consideration.¹¹ Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa make just two brief appearances: one, a generalized reference to the development of the Commonwealth after 1945, occurs because of the need to discuss forms of continuing union while negotiating independence for the colonies; the other, a specific reference to South Africa, is included because of the impossibility of analysing nationalism in colonial black Africa without also referring to white South Africa.

The reason for this omission is not that the evidence has been assessed and the case dismissed, but that the subject has been fragmented in ways that have precluded the enquiry. A major shift in the historiography of the British Empire occurred in the 1960s, when the subject broke into two parts. One part took the form of a wholly desirable commitment to write the indigenous history of newly independent, ex-colonial states, thereby escaping the old and arguably racist view of the empire as a white-dominated and invariably progressive enterprise. The other part, which complemented this development, was formed by the rise in the dominions of a new, nationalist historiography that emphasized internal themes and minimized the importance previously attached to imperial connections. Both ventures have been remarkably successful, though at the price of creating a set of introspective histories of separate nation states. After half a century of scholarly endeavour, the former dominions have now achieved their historiographical independence, but they have done so at the cost of ensuring that the new history, excellent though it is, is scarcely known beyond the borders of the individual states concerned. Meanwhile, studies treating the old dominions as an entity have dwindled and the predominantly constitutional theme that once held them together has lost favour with historians.¹² Between them, these trends have shunted the study of the old dominions from the main line into a small siding, where it remains.

The only sound basis for excluding the old dominions from the process of decolonization after the Second World War is the claim that they were already independent. It is true that in 1926 the Balfour Report declared that the dominions were autonomous within the empire and stood on a basis of equality with Britain. It is also the case that in 1931 these sentiments were codified in the Statute of Westminster, which confirmed the legislative independence of the dominions.¹³ Leaving aside the ambiguities in both documents, and ignoring the fact that the statute was not accepted by Australia until 1942 and by New Zealand until 1947, neither proclamation was translated automatically or immediately into effective independence.¹⁴ Constitutional freedoms can still be limited by political will and circumscribed by continuing economic or cultural dependence. To deny these possibilities is to define imperial history solely by the legal status of the countries formally connected to Britain, and thus to reject any consideration of informal or invisible empire. This position is not easily defended, and indeed has been abandoned by historians of empire since Gallagher and Robinson changed the terms of the debate half a century ago.¹⁵

An alternative interpretation will be advanced here.¹⁶ Formal self-government did not confer full independence on the old settler colonies. It was only after the Second World War that they added substantially to the freedoms they had already achieved. The adoption of new anthems and flags, far from being mere window dressing, represented a fundamental and remarkably neglected transformation of the whole of the empire-Commonwealth and not just of the colonies. These ceremonial exchanges marked the end of long-established connections between the old dominions and Britain. Moreover, they did so in ways that in some respects were more profound than the achievement of formal independence was for the colonies because they involved the destruction of the core concept of Britishness, which had given unity and vitality to Greater Britain overseas, and the creation of new national identities.¹⁷

If this argument holds, the study of decolonization needs to be extended beyond Africa and Asia to include the old dominions. The subject needs to become truly global because, to complete the argument, decolonization was a response to changes in the process of globalization after the Second World War.¹⁸ The dialectic of empire had begun by promoting a form of imperial globalization that subordinated outlying regions and integrated them with a dominant metropolitan centre. Structures of dependence put in place in the nineteenth century survived the upheaval of the Second World War and were perpetuated for a decade after 1945. Hierarchical imperial systems were then subverted by a mixture of ideological and material forces that emerged in the mid 1950s, partly as a result of developments arising from imperial rule and partly in reaction to them. The propagation and implementation of principles of human and civil rights undercut systems of domination based on claimed ethnic superiority; profound changes to the world economy reduced the value of colonial forms of integration and created new alignments; principles of civic nationality were adopted to meet the needs of an increasingly cosmopolitan world. The result was a novel synthesis, post-colonial globalization, which washed over and eventually eroded the boundaries that had marked out both Greater Britain and the colonial dependencies.¹⁹

I

REVIVING THE OLD EMPIRE AFTER 1945

Decolonization used to be seen as a continuous process that accelerated after the Second World War and became irreversible with the loss of India in 1947. This interpretation still has merit when placed in the longest perspective, but it misses important discontinuities that have led to a reappraisal of the causes as well as the timing of the end of empire. Recent research using newly released official records has shown that Britain's aim in the years immediately following the Second World War was to reinvigorate the empire, not to abandon it.²⁰ Europe was devastated; its prospects were uncertain and distant. The empire, which had contributed generously and effectively to the war effort, seemed to be a far more promising ally in the urgent task of winning the peace.²¹ Following the loss of India, the British repositioned their empire in Africa, Malaya and the Middle East.²² A ‘second colonial occupation’²³ was devised to promote imports of raw materials and foodstuffs that were vital to the British economy; defence strategy was adjusted to assimilate the colonial empire into Anglo-American plans for countering the expansion of the Soviet Union.

The idea that the empire was revived shortly before its final fall is a valuable corrective to the older story of unbroken decline. As it stands, however, the argument is incomplete because it fails to incorporate the substantial part played by the old dominions in the strategy. Proposals to strengthen the British world by revitalizing ties with the dominions drew upon notions of racial superiority and racial unity that were still central assumptions of the imperial order. Belief in the continuing value of the empire was accepted by the leading figures in the two major political parties in Britain and had considerable popular appeal, given the contribution made by the dominions (and the empire as a whole) during the war.²⁴ There was also the possibility of a bonus if the readvertised Commonwealth could be transformed into a multiracial organization that would march in step, yet still be led by white officers.²⁵

If Britain was eager to reaffirm ties with the old dominions after the war, the dominions had a stake in the success of the venture too, providing it fitted their own interests.²⁶ To understand the relationship between imperial sentiment and national aspirations, it is necessary to recognize that imperialism in the dominions was a unifying force signifying loyalty to the empire, and that before the Second World War nationalism was, in essence, a movement for self-government and statehood, not a drive for full independence, still less a campaign for creating separate, ethnically based identities.²⁷ By granting ‘responsible’ government to settler colonies in the nineteenth century, Britain did indeed devolve important powers, but it was expected that the dominions would continue to function as satellites, even without direct political control.²⁸ By and large, the expectation was met. Although older versions of the history of the dominions traced the steps leading, in the well-known phrase, ‘from colony to nation’, this interpretation suggests a degree of maturity and independence that later writers have found unconvincing.²⁹

Separate identities were slow to develop in the dominions precisely because local affiliations were overlaid by a pervasive and continuing sense of Britishness. As Hancock put it, if with some exaggeration, ‘pride of race counted for more than love of country’.³⁰ Britain's influence continued to mark all forms of cultural expression. In Canada, anxiety about the increasing penetration of the United States and the assertive claims of Quebec separatists caused an even greater emphasis to be placed on the imperial connection. The importance and continuing vitality of the empire was imprinted on the educational system and advertised to the wider public in a bid to promote an English-based high culture that would offset what was seen to be the low culture seeping in from the south.³¹ In Australia, a young writer and commentator, Arthur Phillips, was inspired by his awareness of the dominion's continuing cultural dependence to produce the memorable, and subsequently much debated, concept of ‘cultural cringe’.³² Manifestations of cultural deference were even more pronounced in the smaller and more remote settler society of New Zealand, and also in South Africa, where the numerical preponderance of indigenous Africans, combined with an uneasy relationship with the Afrikaners, gave the minority English community an additional motive for holding on to the connection with the great metropolis.³³ The profound commitment to pan-Britannic nationalism ensured that, by 1945, the dominions had yet to become independent, if the term is applied not just to the achievement of self-government but to the creation of separate identities within different nation states.

Victory in 1945 was regarded in Britain and the dominions as an opportunity to reinforce what Stephen Leacock had called ‘the pure fire of imperial patriotism’.³⁴ The enduring sense of Britishness was well represented in the dominions by the leading political figures of the day, notably John Diefenbaker and Lester Pearson in Canada, Ben Chifley and Robert Menzies in Australia, Peter Fraser and Sidney Holland in New Zealand, and Jan Christian Smuts in South Africa, who were all committed supporters of empire and monarchy. Although South Africa's attitude cooled after Smuts and the United Party were defeated in the general election of 1948, the country remained bound to Britain by ties of finance and defence, and the ruling National Party stayed within the constitutional framework of the Commonwealth until 1960.

The few concessions made to local political aspirations left the basis of the constitutional arrangements agreed in 1931 undisturbed.³⁵ The position of the monarch as head of the empire-Commonwealth remained untouched, and indeed was enthusiastically endorsed, as popular support for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth in 1953 demonstrated.³⁶ Imperial honours associated with monarchical and governmental patronage were keenly sought and eagerly awaited everywhere except Canada (which had abolished them in the 1920s).³⁷ Although the dominions had obtained the right to appoint their own subjects to the post of governor-general by 1931,³⁸ only South Africa did so on a continuous basis before the Second World War.³⁹ The legal system in the dominions, though effectively decentralized, still recognized the Privy Council as the ultimate court of appeal, with the sole exception, again, of Canada, which abandoned the procedure in 1949. Nevertheless, Canada did not achieve full control over her affairs until the British parliament approved a new constitution for the country in 1982. The creation of separate citizenship in the dominions between 1946 and 1949 was probably the most important constitutional innovation of the immediate post-war years, but the measure supplemented rather than replaced rights to British citizenship, which were confirmed by the Nationality Act of 1948 and continued to be highly prized.⁴⁰

These constitutional formalities would have ceased to matter had the ‘crimson thread of kinship’ that gave Greater Britain its identity and unity been severed or significantly weakened.⁴¹ In an era that was still in touch with Milner and had yet to envisage Mandela, racial assumptions about the superiority of the British, and the associated goal of strengthening Greater Britain, continued to inspire imperial policy.⁴² Before 1945, the overwhelming majority of emigrants to the dominions came from the British Isles.⁴³ When the war ended, the British government decided to subsidize emigration to the empire to ensure that ‘British stock’ retained its vitality overseas, even though there was a shortage of labour at home.⁴⁴ Between 1948 and 1957, just over one million British migrants went to the dominions, many of them on assisted passages.⁴⁵ For their part, the old dominions continued to regard Britain as the ultimate source of their identities, and Britishness as the basis of their unity, throughout the 1940s and 1950s.⁴⁶ Australia took up the offer of assisted passages in 1946 and supported subsidized immigration plans until 1972.⁴⁷ The ‘white Australia’ policy, originally codified in 1901, was rigorously applied until 1973. New Zealand managed its own scheme for migrants from Europe from 1947; its discriminatory immigration policy, though modified in 1974, was not abolished until 1987. Canada's immigration scheme began in 1951 and remained discriminatory until 1962. Separatist nationalism was confined to the Québécois, whose aspirations were frustrated, and to the Afrikaners, who were hobbled by their continuing economic dependence on Britain.

South Africa's racist immigration policy, which survived until 1994, was allied to the most distinctive example of discrimination within the empire, the policy of apartheid, which was put in place after the National Party's election victory in 1948.⁴⁸ Although apartheid is usually treated, quite properly, as a theme that is specific to the recent history of South Africa, it should also be set in a wider imperial context. Its harshness and extremism gave it a special notoriety, but the other dominions shared the basic principles of white superiority, even if they were not acted on as fully or publicized as widely. Elevating Britishness entailed relegating indigenous societies, or ‘first nations’, as they are now called,⁴⁹ because to accept the validity of non-European cultures was a step towards agreeing to equality of treatment, which would have questioned white supremacy and endangered what Milner had called the ‘destiny of the English race’.⁵⁰

As South Africa transformed segregation into apartheid, Canada and Australia adopted assimilationist measures whose official justification was to increase the number of those who could become Britons by qualification.⁵¹ Assertive policies of acculturation sought to eliminate indigenous languages, customs and beliefs, and to curtail native land rights. New ‘national’ policies removed scattered groups, whose way of life depended on access to extensive land resources, from their homelands. The Inuit were compelled to serve as sub-imperialists by sending settlers to wave the flag over Canada's territorial claims in the High Arctic.⁵² The Innu of Labrador were transported, with appalling consequences, to make way for modernization and to be modernized more effectively.⁵³ The position was rather different in New Zealand. There, the Maori were placed at a higher point in the racial hierarchy than other indigenous peoples and their land rights enjoyed a degree of protection under the Treaty of Waitangi.⁵⁴ However, this qualification did not reduce the priority given to white immigrants or diminish the privileges they enjoyed; even ‘mild’ New Zealand attempted to renew policies of assimilation after 1945.⁵⁵ The version of history that casts political leaders in the dominions in the role of nationalists who won successive concessions from the home country tells only one side of the story. It fails to see that, from the perspective of first nations, governments in the dominions were also agents and instigators of colonial rule. Their commitment to asserting the supremacy of the British world caused them, in the middle of the twentieth century and on the eve of decolonization, to promote a form of aggressive internal colonialism that is generally associated with a much earlier phase of imperial history.⁵⁶

Sentiment needed material support. If the British world was to be the basis of continuing global influence, it had to offer its members a return to prosperity and a guarantee of security. Economic ties between Britain and the dominions remained robust and resilient during the decade of reconstruction after the Second World War.⁵⁷ Imperial preferences and the sterling area survived the war, despite attempts by the United States to dismantle them, and were powerful influences on the international economy into the 1950s. In 1950, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa accounted for over 27 per cent of all Britain's exports and supplied about 20 per cent of her imports. Seen from another angle, in the same year Britain supplied 60 per cent of New Zealand's imports, 50 per cent of Australia's and 41 per cent of South Africa's. The only relationship not to flourish was that with Canada, where competition from the United States reduced Britain's share of Canada's imports to 15 per cent of the total in that year.

Sterling held on to its position as a major international currency. It ranked second only to the US dollar and was the unit of account for about half the world's trade in the immediate post-war years. The sterling crisis of 1947 retarded hopes for an early restoration of open, multilateral trade relationships, but had the unplanned effect of strengthening ties within the empire and the sterling area.⁵⁸ Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were keen supporters of the sterling area, and generously, if self-interestedly too, cancelled some of their wartime sterling balances to ease the area's dollar shortages and to reduce pressure on the pound. They also relied heavily on the London capital market to an extent that, in the cases of New Zealand and South Africa, had an important influence on domestic policies.⁵⁹

Canada was equally keen to strengthen her connections with Britain, which she saw as a means of counterbalancing the increasing pull of the United States.⁶⁰ Canada needed the British market to generate an export surplus that would enable her to settle her trade deficit with the United States. Far from disowning ties with the empire, Canada pledged about C$1.25 billion in 1946 to help fund Britain's recovery and revive her import-purchasing power.⁶¹ However, Canada struggled to expand exports to Britain because her membership of the dollar bloc restricted her access to markets in the sterling area. Canada's inability to earn sufficient dollars from sterling sources, combined with growing evidence of the limits of the British market, obliged her to turn further towards the United States in the 1950s.⁶² But this was her second choice, not her first one. In this matter, the difference between Canada and the other dominions stemmed from disappointed expectations, and not from any desire to cut the ties of empire.

Formally speaking, the dominions were able to devise their own foreign and defence policies, though it was expected, and generally accepted, that these would not run counter to Britain's own interests. Experience during the war had given the dominions an incentive to take greater control of their security needs. The fall of Singapore in 1942, though particularly alarming for Australia and New Zealand, had advertised the much wider problem that Britain's limited resources were being stretched too far to be effective.⁶³ Nevertheless, the dominions did not establish independent security policies after the war. Victory in 1945 removed the most dangerous of the immediate threats. More important still, the huge cost of funding a separate, national defence policy ensured that independence in foreign affairs was constrained by continuing reliance on external sources of military support.⁶⁴

As the Cold War took shape, the dominions were incorporated, willingly enough, into the global strategy formulated by the United States and Britain for containing the Soviet Union. The military weight of the United States eventually prevailed, but Britain's influence remained strong for a decade after the war while she aspired to be an independent nuclear power, maintained a commitment to deploy conventional forces east of Suez, as well as in the Middle East, and held a string of bases in the remaining colonies. Australia continued to rely on Britain as a major source of security until the late 1950s, while also co-operating with her nuclear programme.⁶⁵ New Zealand's even greater vulnerability made her a compliant supporter of British foreign policy down to and including Suez,⁶⁶ and ensured that she remained wholly dependent on British military hardware until the 1960s.⁶⁷ South Africa also became fully integrated into Britain's imperial defence policy during this period, when she became a fervent and co-operative cold warrior, partly at least to blunt criticism of apartheid.⁶⁸ Canada's connection to Britain was qualified by the proximity and growing presence of the United States. Nevertheless, Canada took care to co-operate with Britain whenever possible (and did so, notably over the Korean War) and to maintain her commitment to NATO in the hope of offsetting the influence of her large southern neighbour.⁶⁹

The ingredients of change were present in the dominions. Their societies were more fluid than Britain's, their aspirations had few fetters, and, being self-governing, they had the power to revise the imperial connection. Yet, in the first decade after the war, a revitalized brand of new conservatism held the dominions to an imperial course. The idea of a greater British world, the just reward of victory, seemed to have a future that rested on more than the projection of nostalgia. Ties of kith and kin remained strong; economic links were substantial; security interests favoured imperial co-operation; the leaders of the day remained loyal to the monarch and the empire.

II

THE TRANSFER OF POWER

The second colonial occupation lasted for about a decade. A series of decisions signalling the retreat from empire occurred from the mid 1950s as imperial policy began to recognize changing realities. The generally accepted median date is 1960, when substantial parts of British (and French) Africa became independent. The Sudan (1956), Ghana (1957) and Malaya (1957) came shortly before; Tanganyika (1961), Jamaica (1962) and Kenya (1963) followed soon after. A detailed assessment of the adjustment would need to evaluate the claims made for the significance of particular dates and events.⁷⁰ For present purposes, however, an approximation is sufficient: in 1950 the empire appeared to be a going concern, notwithstanding the loss of India; by the end of the decade it was being taken apart at a speed that even some colonial nationalists thought was making haste too quickly.⁷¹

Historians have yet to recognize that this periodization also fits the timing of the effective transfer of power to the old dominions. By the close of the 1950s the white empire, which had been rejuvenated after the Second World War, was losing its vitality; by the close of the 1960s, its expiration date was in sight. Racial discrimination offended humanitarian principles and hampered economic growth. The increasing importance attached to human and civil rights damaged notions of racial superiority and encouraged international migration; the pattern of specialization that had underpinned the international division of labour for a century and a half gave way to new alignments that depended on free flows of labour; civic loyalties replaced ethnicity as the basis of national identity.

The central development, which was clearly visible by 1960, was the shrivelling of the concept, and the reality, of the British world. After 1960 there was very little talk of ‘pride of race’, and less still of the ‘pure fire of imperial patriotism’.⁷² Milner's age had given way to that of Nehru and Nkrumah; Mandela's was on the horizon. By the 1970s, it had become impossible to put the Greater back into Britain, and Britain herself was coming under siege from regional nationalisms in Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales. The obverse of these trends was the strengthening of independent, national identities in the dominions, which severed their ties to the empire at the same time as colonial nationalism asserted itself in Asia and Africa. The movement towards independence was less strident in the old dominions than it was in Britain's dependencies, and for that reason has received little attention outside the countries concerned, but it was no less decisive in creating separate and distinctive nation states.

The symptoms of imperial dissolution were everywhere to hand but were especially visible in constitutional changes that publicized the loosening of formal ties. The Crown lost its imperial status in Canada in 1952, when the monarch was restyled Queen of Canada; Australia followed suit in 1973. By the end of the century, republican sentiment had ceased to be confined to the political fringe. Imperial honours, which Canada had already abolished, were abandoned by South Africa in 1961, by Australia in 1975 and by New Zealand in 1996.⁷³ Canada ended appeals to the Privy Council in 1949,⁷⁴ South Africa in 1961, Australia in a series of measures in 1968, 1975 and 1986, and New Zealand in 2004. Nationals became permanent replacements for British appointees as governors-general in Canada from 1952, in Australia from 1965 and in New Zealand from 1967; South Africa eliminated the post when it became a republic in 1961. The trend towards separate citizenship for the dominions, which had been agreed after the Second World War, increased after Britain passed a series of acts, beginning in 1962, restricting ‘rights of abode’ for Commonwealth citizens.⁷⁵ After the passage of the Nationality Act of 1981, Commonwealth citizens ceased to be regarded as being British subjects. Canada repealed the Statute of Westminster and confirmed its independence as a sovereign state in 1982;⁷⁶ Australia and New Zealand followed in 1986.⁷⁷ In 1999 the Australian High Court recognized the cumulative effect of post-war constitutional changes by determining that Britain had become a foreign country.

The high hopes expressed in the 1940s for the future of the Commonwealth itself also faded in the 1960s.⁷⁸ The old dominions were unenthusiastic about the influx of new members, who altered what they had long considered to be a British club and directed its management away from the homeland.⁷⁹ Their disgruntlement was a manifestation of a deeper fissure. Smuts had seen the Commonwealth as part of a Darwinian evolution that enabled political structures to adapt in a progressive manner to changing circumstances.⁸⁰ The empire, however, was a hierarchical order arranged by Britain and presided over by the monarch, whereas the Commonwealth was a multicultural, decentralized organization with democratic credentials.⁸¹ These conceptions of the world were irreconcilable. South Africa's policy of apartheid and Southern Rhodesia's declaration of independence in 1965 revealed profound divisions between old and new members of the Commonwealth.⁸² The failed attempt by Prince Philip and Lord Mountbatten to restore white elites to positions of authority in the Commonwealth underlined the incompatibility between the old order and the new.⁸³ The adaptation Smuts had envisaged could be achieved only by dismantling the structure of empire and replacing it with an entirely different organization that fitted the post-colonial era.

The severing of formal connections was matched by the decline of popular support for the empire in Britain and the dominions. Imperial patriotism, which provided a measure of the strength of informal ties, began to ebb from the 1960s. The empire, even in its Commonwealth guise, came to be seen as a threat to Britain's identity and social unity as non-white immigrants made their appearance in numbers that could readily be seen — and readily exaggerated.⁸⁴ Empire Day, an event already in decline, was commuted in 1958 to Commonwealth Day, which fared little better.⁸⁵ In the dominions, the old guard of nationalist-imperialists, who were born in the 1890s, was replaced in the 1960s. After Menzies left office in 1966, no other dominion leader would claim, as he famously did, to be ‘British to the bootstraps’.⁸⁶ Membership of imperial organizations, such as the Victoria League, shrank in the 1960s and 1970s.⁸⁷ Royal visits, once prime occasions for outbursts of imperial enthusiasm, began to generate controversy instead. Queen Elizabeth's tour of Canada in 1959 proved to be the last of its kind: it sharpened the differences between the English and French communities and provoked a debate about Canadian identity that exposed the fragility of Canada's ties with the wider British world.⁸⁸

The ethnic basis of Greater Britain began to disintegrate from the mid 1950s, when it became clear that the number of ‘race patriots’ emigrating to the empire was insufficient to maintain the required levels of ‘British stock’. Despite favourable publicity and financial inducements, British settlers accounted for only 51 per cent of immigrants entering Australia between 1945 and 1964, only 44 per cent of those entering New Zealand between 1946 and 1976, and only 33 per cent of those entering Canada between 1946 and 1965.⁸⁹ The status of the newcomers suffered too: in the 1940s they were regarded in Australia as wartime heroes; by the 1970s they had become ‘whingeing Poms’.⁹⁰ Virtually all the remaining immigrants were white, but they were not British. The recovery of the British economy from the late 1940s, the commitment to providing full employment at home, and a fall in the birth rate in Britain made it hard for the ‘mother country’ to continue to act as mother to the empire. At the same time, rapid economic growth in the dominions themselves created a demand for labour that Britain could not meet.

The first recourse was to non-British white migrants; later the doors were opened to all comers to ensure that labour supplies matched development demands. The proportion of immigrants from Asia rose from 12 per cent in 1966 to 42 per cent in 1986 in the case of Canada, and from 9 per cent to 43 per cent in the case of Australia.⁹¹ In New Zealand, which opened its doors later than Canada and Australia, the increase was even more dramatic: the proportion of Asian immigrants jumped from 1.5 per cent in 1986 to 66 per cent in 1996.⁹² The position of South Africa was rather different because it suffered, not from a shortage of labour, but from the maldistribution of the abundant supplies that were already present. However, the same processes were at work: the apartheid system was brought down partly by the cost of maintaining artificial barriers; thereafter, the movement of human resources was no longer directed by considerations of ethnicity but by the requirements of the economy, as it was in Canada, Australia and New Zealand.⁹³

As the concept of racial superiority was being diluted by the increasing presence of non-British immigrants, it came under attack from internal forces too, as indigenous peoples rebelled against assimilationist policies and claimed equal rights with other citizens. The resurgence of the Maori, which began after 1945, was based on population growth and migration to the towns, as well as on their notable contribution to the war effort.⁹⁴ First nations in Canada reacted to discriminatory and dictatorial policies by forming local political organizations, which came together in 1982, when the Assembly of First Nations was founded.⁹⁵ Australian aborigines, though less numerous and less well organized, engaged in pacific resistance and began to create an identity for themselves to repel assimilationist policies.⁹⁶ In South Africa, the African National Congress reorganized itself and co-operated with the trade unions and the (banned) Communist Party to lay the foundations of the campaigns of mass action that took place from the late 1950s onwards.⁹⁷ In the 1980s, the United Democratic Front (formed in 1983) mounted a series of increasingly effective demonstrations that led to a state of emergency in 1986–90, and to the collapse of apartheid.⁹⁸

Each of these movements had local roots, but all gained strength from a further consequence of globalization after 1945: the flow of ideas, expanding in volume and increasing in speed, across national borders. New concepts of universal human rights, enshrined in the charter and resolutions of the United Nations, and adopted vociferously by Afro-Asian nationalist movements, held the dominant nation states to account for their laws and actions.⁹⁹ First nations were quick to add weight to the cause by developing a novel form of supranational politics that appealed to the United Nations over the heads of their own governments.¹⁰⁰ The World Council of Indigenous Peoples, formed in 1975, became (and remains) an increasingly visible and effective presence at the United Nations. As a result of these activities, the 1960s saw a transformation in public opinion and state policies on a scale comparable to the shift in the nineteenth century from condoning slavery and the slave trade to condemning them. It became increasingly difficult to defend policies that endorsed racial inequalities, and impolitic to make the attempt. The balance sheet of political advantage called for fundamental change: it was vital to create conditions that would attract non-European immigrants into the workforce, defuse the threat of internal disorder, and avoid adverse international publicity at a time when the free world was trying to win hearts and minds throughout the globe.

Change was dramatic. In 1945 the Canadian government had opposed resolutions passed by the United Nations protecting human rights in sovereign states; in 1965 Canada emerged as one of the leading proponents of these principles.¹⁰¹ Assimilationist policies were abandoned after a long struggle.¹⁰² The new constitution, adopted in 1982, renounced the legal principle (derived from the Indian Act of 1887) that categorized indigenous peoples as colonial subjects, and recognized their status as members of first nations. In Australia, aborigines were given the right to vote in federal elections in 1962 and won protection against unequal treatment in the Racial Discrimination Act of 1975. The Aboriginal Land Rights Act of 1976 and subsequent legal decisions invalidated the doctrine of terra nullius and opened the way for native Australians to reclaim their lands. The ‘white Australia’ policy was reformed in the 1960s and abolished in 1973.¹⁰³ The door was then open to Asian immigration and to the end of the labour shortage.¹⁰⁴ By 1977, Malcolm Fraser, the Australian prime minister, felt sufficiently purified to be free to attack South Africa's racial policies. New Zealand established the Waitangi Tribunal in 1975 to hear Maori claims against the Crown for alleged breaches of the treaty signed in 1840.¹⁰⁵ The tribunal has had far-reaching consequences: it has been instrumental not only in facilitating Maori land claims, but also in compelling Pakeha (non-Maori) New Zealanders to rethink their identity.¹⁰⁶

The corollary of these developments was a growing sense of national identity in the dominions. The colonies of settlement had never been carbon copies of the metropolis, despite the hopes of British policy-makers that emigrants to the empire would act as ‘prefabricated collaborators’.¹⁰⁷ Conditions of life in the dominions were closer to those in the United States, where the mythology of the frontier celebrated ideals of individualism, opportunity and endeavour.¹⁰⁸ The dominions developed similar value systems, known in Australia and New Zealand as ‘mateship’, which generated a degree of solidarity that cut across social divisions, even though it embodied largely masculine virtues.¹⁰⁹ Consequently, the dominions failed to reproduce Britain's class-based, hierarchical model of social order, even though they were keen to link achievement to status and reward it with honours. This sense of distinctiveness ensured that Greater Britons were also rather different Britons. Imperial patriotism had long held the growth of a separate national consciousness in check. The decline of loyalty to the Crown and empire allowed national identities to develop fully.

Disengagement called for the creation of what Australian leaders termed a ‘national community’ that was neither British nor white.¹¹⁰ As ties of kith and kin slackened and non-British immigrants and native peoples became equal citizens, pluralism replaced assimilation and new national identities were founded on civic consensus rather than on ethnic solidarity.¹¹¹ The political leaders who followed imperial loyalists, such as Robert Menzies, were judged by their ability to uphold national interests in countries that were rapidly becoming cosmopolitan. Core values were redefined so that they could coexist with multiculturalism.¹¹² Culture, as well as the constitution, was repatriated. From the 1960s onwards, official policy and private sponsorship encouraged the development of national cultures to replace what had come to be seen as inauthentic imperial imports.¹¹³ During the last quarter of the twentieth century, the Queen's English and approved forms of pronunciation ceased to be role models and became targets for satire instead. Today, Australians cringe no more — and it is hard to imagine that they ever did.

The material basis of the British overseas world also began to dissolve from the late 1950s. By the middle of the decade, the conditions that had given new life to the imperial economy after 1945 had run their course. On the one hand, demand for imported food and raw materials slackened once post-war reconstruction had been achieved; on the other, Britain ceased to be a major exporter of industrial goods and had herself become heavily dependent on manufactured imports.¹¹⁴ Continental Europe had recovered with unexpected rapidity from the devastation brought by the war, and now offered attractive business opportunities. The transformation of the international economy, which was driven partly by the commitment of the United States to free trade, implied an end to the neo-mercantilist arrangements that had helped to sustain the imperial economy since the early 1930s. Britain herself hoped in the 1950s to move beyond the defensive imperial system, though without destroying it. However, Britain lacked the necessary manufacturing base and purchasing power, and was unable to make sterling convertible until 1958,¹¹⁵ by which time the diversification of the old imperial economy was under way.

The old dominions, apart from Canada, achieved a substantial measure of economic independence in external trade in the 1960s. Britain's trade with Australia dropped to the point where, in the early 1970s, she supplied only 20 per cent of the country's imports and took only 10 per cent of her exports. Even loyal New Zealand had fallen: Britain supplied only 28 per cent of her imports and accounted for only 24 per cent of her exports in the same period. South Africa, which was engaged in building a siege economy, managed to cut imports from Britain to 20 per cent of the total, while keeping exports at about 29 per cent. Britain remained an important supplier of capital for all three dominions, but here too her position was being eroded by competition from the United States and by the development of capital markets in the dominions themselves.¹¹⁶ Canada's trade with Britain became insignificant as a result of her growing dependence on the United States, which dominated her external trade and finance:¹¹⁷ by the early 1970s, Britain supplied only about 5 per cent of Canada's imports and took only 10 per cent of her exports. Diefenbaker's awareness of this trend explains his desperate, indeed hopeless, attempt to revive imperial trade in 1963, and the acceptance by his successor, Lester Pearson, that the imperial connection had ceased to matter.¹¹⁸

The decisive moment in the reorientation of the imperial economy came in 1961, when Britain applied to join the European Community.¹¹⁹ The application shocked the dominions: they had neither anticipated it nor been consulted about it.¹²⁰ Even though the application was denied, a signpost pointing towards new regional groupings had been planted. The move was both an admission that the imperial economy had ceased to be viable and a cause of its further decline. The jolt to the dominions prompted them to develop alternatives that fitted their economic needs better. The influx of non-British immigrants freed the dominions from traditional, constraining affiliations; the growth of manufacturing industries and financial services in the dominions created opportunities for regional specialization.

The result of these developments was the emergence of regional associations that replaced the remnants of the imperial connection. By the time Britain finally entered the European Community in 1973, Australia and New Zealand had already come together (in 1965) to form the New Zealand–Australia Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA).¹²¹ Since then, the engine of growth in the region's international trade has been driven by links with Japan and the countries in the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which was created in 1967. By the mid 1960s trade between Australia and Japan alone already exceeded the value of trade between Australia and Britain. Canada, perforce, drew still closer to the United States. In 1989 the two countries formed the North American Free Trade Agreement (also NAFTA), which Mexico joined in 1994.¹²²

South Africa stood outside these trends towards regionalism because her commitment to apartheid compelled her to adopt autarkic policies. Nevertheless, the forces that had altered Britain's relationship with the other dominions were at work there too. The development of local industries and services began to diversify the economy but required a skilled and mobile workforce and a strong consumer base, which the apartheid system denied and immigration policy was unable to correct. Swelling opposition to apartheid from the first nations of South Africa raised the costs of repression and in the end made the system unworkable. International pressures, drawing on principles of universal human rights that the other former dominions had come to accept, made South Africa's position increasingly untenable. She had succeeded in reducing her links with Britain, but had failed to fashion a viable alternative.¹²³ It was not until the 1990s, when apartheid was abolished, that South Africa was able to join the other ex-dominions in establishing international ties that fitted the needs of the globalizing world.

The decline of Britain's economic ties with the old dominions and the rise of new regional connections had important implications for foreign and defence policies. The Suez crisis in 1956 occurred at a moment when it still seemed possible, at least to Eden, to demonstrate to the world that there were costs to pulling the lion's tail.¹²⁴ In the event, the costs were borne by Britain. The split in the alliance with the United States, though temporary, revealed the frailty that stood behind Britain's claim to be a world power. The consequence was to speed the process of decolonization and, as a corollary, to quicken the search for ways of replacing the imperial connection. The dominions were divided by Britain's decision to invade Egypt, but united in recognizing that they now needed to devise their own policies for dealing with a world that was rapidly becoming decolonized.

Britain's reorientation towards Europe and her increasing budgetary problems led to a far-reaching reappraisal of strategic priorities in the late 1950s. As a result, Britain cancelled her plans for developing an independent nuclear deterrent in 1958, and in 1968 abandoned her long-standing, if also long-questioned, commitment to maintain troops east of Suez.¹²⁵ Australia and New Zealand were then obliged to formulate independent foreign policies to deal directly with emerging ex-colonial states in south-east Asia and to adjust to a rapidly changing relationship with a recent enemy, Japan.¹²⁶ Canada's problem, how to manage the expansion of the United States, was enduring and probably eternal, but it became more urgent once the traditional counterbalancing weight of Britain was removed. After 1986, when the United States belatedly turned against apartheid, South Africa was isolated from international sources of military supplies and had to devise an independent defence policy, which included the ambition to become a nuclear power. The outcome was that Canada, Australia and New Zealand freed themselves from reliance on Britain but became dependent on the United States for military supplies and protection. In this respect, however, their new dependence was no greater than that of much of the rest of the world.

III

CONCLUSION

Small events can signify large developments, even if their import is not always acknowledged. Changes to the flags and national anthems of the old dominions were not trivial events to be left for amateur enthusiasts to catalogue, but matters of deep significance that merit the attention they have not yet received in studies of decolonization. The argument advanced here suggests that the dominions remained dependent on the British connection until after the Second World War, even though they had already won formal self-government and, within limits, pursued priorities that reflected their own interests. From 1945 to the mid 1950s London and the dominions made considerable efforts to strengthen the imperial link; after the mid 1950s the ties that bound were stretched; in the 1960s they began to fray. Only in the second half of the twentieth century did the dominions attain full constitutional sovereignty, develop separate identities, establish cultural independence, promote diverse economic relationships, and free their foreign and defence policies from imperial influence.

If this argument holds, it will be necessary to enlarge the established format of decolonization studies to incorporate the dominions into the analysis of the end of empire after the Second World War. A full account of this process would have to allow for variations: Canada started early, New Zealand began late, and the consequences of independence are still unfolding in all the old dominions. However, similar variations apply to the non-settled empire too: India gained formal independence in 1947, but Brunei had to wait until 1984, and discussion of neo-colonialism, if pursued, would carry the story of the achievement of effective independence by the ex-colonies well beyond these dates.

The causes of this metamorphosis are to be found in the changing character and accelerating pace of globalization after the Second World War. The dialectic of imperial development can be seen as a diachronic process transforming one set of interlocking, symmetrical structures into another. Principles of human rights undermined established notions of racial superiority, encouraged non-British migrants to settle in the dominions, and ended the possibility of tailoring ethnic identities to political boundaries. Post-war economic recovery was first assisted by established imperial relationships and then outgrew them. Links between the metropolitan industrial centre and primary producing peripheries weakened; ties among developed economies, especially in the ‘triad’ of North America, Europe and Japan, grew stronger;¹²⁷ the ex-dominions expanded their manufacturing output and added financial and service sectors to their economies. These trends produced regional groupings that bypassed or cut across the old geography of imperial integration.¹²⁸ The idealism of human rights and the materialism of economic development came together in refurbished polities that reshaped national identities to reflect the creation of multicultural societies and the evolving needs of the globalized world.

The transformation of the imperial order can also be viewed, synchronically, from two angles. Imperial integration was vertical: economic links joined Britain to her distant satellites in exchanges that tied production and consumption together; social relations were governed by a racial hierarchy that ranked Anglo-Saxons above other peoples; political ties were based on the dominance of metropole and monarch and the ranked subordination of the constituents of empire. Post-colonial integration was horizontal: economies became specialized in a narrow range of intermediate goods and services that were traded among multiple regional centres; social relations were founded on a belief in equality that was the necessary counterpart of the creation of multicultural societies; political systems were correspondingly open and, in principle, democratic. New or expanded techniques of communication — a further hallmark of globalization — ensured that ideas, people and economic decisions flowed across borders with a speed and degree of penetration that, in the end, not even South Africa's autarchic state could control. By the close of the twentieth century, the imperial era had ended. The idea that the United States is capable of creating a new empire to deal with weak states, failed states and rogue states rests on a misreading of history. Imperial systems are incompatible with the process of globalization as it has now unfolded, and not even the world's superpower can recreate, in the twenty-first century, the conditions that allowed the age of great empires to flourish.¹²⁹

The transfer of power to the dominions fits the chronology already devised by historians of empire to explain the decolonization of the dependencies because globalization affected all segments of the empire. The achievement of post-war reconstruction and the expansion of trade among the advanced economies reduced the demand for many primary products and diminished the value of the colonial empire. Like the dominions, the ex-colonies were confronted with the need to adapt to declining imperial ties by industrializing and by developing new trading partners. The outcome, which was uncertain at the time of independence but clear by the close of the century, was a marked differentiation in the performance and fortunes of the ex-colonies. Some large or well-placed new states, such as India, Malaysia and Singapore, had become important manufacturing and financial centres; some small or poorly endowed countries, notably in Africa and the Caribbean, had languished.

As these developments began to manifest themselves, policy-makers concluded that Britain's long-term interests were better served by working with colonial nationalists rather than against them. The colonies were not to be thrown away, but they were no longer to be held at all costs. This calculation was influenced by rising nationalism and rising expenditure. Nationalist sentiment in the colonies drew on the same principles of racial equality and self-determination that were bringing discrimination in the dominions to an end. The British version of these principles had an important influence on colonial elites, even though, in the absence of white settlers, the ethnic conception of Britishness was confined to small expatriate communities. Consequently, nationalist claims in the colonies, as well as in the dominions, were strongly coloured by ideals that the imperial power had propounded — initially to justify its claims to superiority. The Indian National Congress was the first to confront Britain with its own liberal precepts; other independence movements followed India's lead during the first half of the twentieth century.

The rising cost of retaining the empire was reflected in the defence budget, which had to compete with pressing domestic claims, notably commitments to full employment and the welfare state. There was a growing ideological cost too. The perpetuation of colonial rule, which was regarded as a vital part of winning the Cold War in the immediate post-war years, came to be seen as a liability by the 1960s. By then, the ideological contest between the two forms of globalization represented by the Cold War compelled the United States and its allies to enact reforms at home and abroad that would reduce the gap between the rhetoric of freedom and the reality of continuing subordination.¹³⁰

International migration was linked to decolonization in the dependencies, as it was in the dominions, though the relationship was one of consequence rather than of cause. The old dominions parted from the British world when they failed to attract sufficient numbers of British immigrants and were obliged to turn to other sources of labour in continental Europe and Asia. The colonies had no need to import labour; their problem was finding employment for the existing, expanding workforce. In default of adequate opportunities at home, increasing numbers of migrants left the ex-colonies in the second half of the twentieth century to seek work in the advanced economies of Europe, North America and Australasia.¹³¹ Migration from Britain had made the old dominions Greater Britains; migration from the rest of the world made them cosmopolitan nation states. Today, the English ‘race’, which is declining in numbers at home, is being supplemented by a reverse flow of immigrants from the ex-empire. Milner's vision of a Greater Britain made strong by Greater Britons had become impractical, irrelevant and, finally, absurd.

If the existing literature on decolonization is expanded to incorporate the transfer of power to the old dominions after the Second World War, as argued here, other fresh and important research prospects, within and beyond the empire, come immediately into view. One possibility, the effect of decolonization on Britain, is already being explored, though the subject would gain from the wider setting suggested here.¹³² A further possibility, which has yet to be pursued, is to incorporate the literature on the process of internal decolonization in the dominions and the United States into studies of the end of empire.¹³³ These subjects are currently contained in separate compartments. By connecting them, historians can recast the analysis of decolonization in ways that reflect the full extent of its global reach.

The emancipation of first nations has transformed the history of the dominions during the past twenty-five years in ways that are comparable to the historiographical revolution that has recreated the indigenous history of Africa and Asia. Canadian history has been rewritten to incorporate research on indigenous peoples before, during and after European settlement.¹³⁴ A similar trend in Australia has given rise to an animated controversy, known as the ‘history wars’, about the effect of white settlement on indigenous peoples.¹³⁵ Studies of the history of New Zealand have been profoundly affected by the Waitangi Tribunal, which has directed attention to the history of the Maori.¹³⁶ The history of South Africa has been reworked to draw it into line with new research into indigenous African history in other parts of the continent.¹³⁷ Knowledge of these advances is at present confined mainly to specialists on the countries concerned (apart from the case of South Africa, which inevitably spills into African studies in general). Yet, as suggested here, first nations in the hinterlands contributed to the effective decolonization of the old dominions by advancing claims for equality that could no longer be denied. This development was the clear counterpart of the nationalist movements that gained momentum in the colonies after the Second World War, and accordingly needs to be inserted into existing studies of decolonization. Linking the new histories of the old dominions to the indigenous history of other parts of the empire will broaden the domain of historical studies in general and, more particularly, create opportunities for comparative research that will greatly enhance our understanding of colonial nationalism.

This theme can be extended beyond the empire to the United States, an ex-colony of white settlement that shared the racist assumptions of the Anglo-Saxon world down to the 1960s. Indeed, the dominions regarded the United States as the mentor of discrimination. Segregationist legislation passed in the United States strongly influenced both the ‘white Australia’ policy and South Africa's apartheid system.¹³⁸ Renewed efforts to apply assimilationist policies to Native Americans after 1945 paralleled similar efforts in the dominions.¹³⁹ Discriminatory measures were rescinded in the United States at the same time as they were being unravelled in the old dominions: the Supreme Court outlawed segregation in schools in 1954; the Jim Crow laws dating from the late nineteenth century were repealed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964.¹⁴⁰ As first nations made their presence and claims felt in the dominions, so the National Congress of American Indians (founded in 1944) fought and eventually halted assimilationist policies in the United States,¹⁴¹ and the broader civil rights movement brought down racial discrimination. The ideological battle with the Soviet Union affected all constituents of the free world and was as powerful an incentive to making concessions to the civil rights movement in the United States as it was to meeting the claims of nationalists in Europe's colonies.¹⁴²

If the link between the dominions and the United States suggested here is accepted, it might be appropriate to let Martin Luther King contribute the last word to this analysis of decolonization. The story of the civil rights movement in the United States is usually regarded as part of the national epic, which it undoubtedly was. But it was much more than that: Martin Luther King understood that the parallels with the history of colonialism were too striking to be treated in an insular manner.¹⁴³ Gandhi was one of his heroes; Nkrumah was another. King borrowed the principle of non-violence from the Indian nationalist movement and drew fresh inspiration from the celebrations (which he attended) marking Ghana's independence in 1957. He deplored ‘our willingness to continue to participate in neo-colonialist adventures’, most evidently in Vietnam, which he referred to as a ‘war that seeks to turn the clock of history back and perpetuate white colonialism’.¹⁴⁴ King recognized that the movement for full emancipation in the United States was part of a broader struggle to eliminate discrimination and oppression everywhere. It is a perception that should encourage historians to think of the transfer of power after the Second World War as being a global (and globalizing) process that overrode rather than underwrote conventional political and historical boundaries.