The End of Empire: Wars, Suez & Independence
From World Power to Post-Imperial Power, 1914-1965
In 1914 Britain ruled around a quarter of the world’s population. By 1965 it ruled almost none of it. The First and Second World Wars, the rise of nationalist movements led by figures such as Mahatma Gandhi, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta, and the diplomatic humiliation of the 1956 Suez Crisis combined to end the largest empire in modern history. For a 16-mark factor essay, this is the textbook test of how war, ideas (especially anti-colonial nationalism) and the role of individuals interacted with each other — rarely working alone.
India and Pakistan became independent on 14-15 August 1947 (around 12 million people displaced and at least one million killed in partition violence). Ghana became the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence on 6 March 1957. The 1956 Suez Crisis exposed Britain as no longer able to act independently of the United States.
The First World War: Promises and Mobilisation
The First World War mobilised the empire on a scale never seen before. Around 1.5 million Indian troops served, more than 600,000 in combat. About 200,000 from Africa fought, and West Indies Regiment troops served on the Western Front. They returned home expecting recognition and reform. Britain’s 1917 Montagu Declaration promised Indians ‘the gradual development of self-governing institutions’. The 1919 Government of India Act delivered limited reform; the same year, the Amritsar Massacre killed at least 379 unarmed Indians at a Sikh festival, exposing the gap between promise and reality. Mahatma Gandhi’s Indian National Congress mass campaigns — non-cooperation (1920-22), the Salt March (1930), Quit India (1942) — built on the resulting anger.
The Second World War: The Decisive Blow
The Second World War broke imperial Britain economically, militarily and morally. Around 2.5 million Indians served, the largest volunteer army in history; West African and East African forces fought in Burma and Italy; West Indian aircrew flew with the RAF. The 1942 fall of Singapore to Japan — in which 80,000 British, Indian and Australian soldiers surrendered — permanently shattered the myth of European racial superiority in Asia. The 1943 Bengal famine killed at least three million Indians; Churchill’s government diverted food to British troops. By 1945 Britain’s debts were more than twice its yearly national income, it depended on a large American loan, it was still rationing food at home, and it had a Labour government committed to the welfare state. There was no money, no army and no will to maintain empire by force.
Attlee’s Labour government sent Lord Mountbatten as the last Viceroy in 1947. Boundary lines drawn by Cyril Radcliffe in five weeks divided Bengal and Punjab between India and Pakistan. Around 12 million people moved across the new borders; at least one million died in inter-communal violence. Gandhi opposed partition and was assassinated in January 1948 by a Hindu nationalist who saw him as too friendly to Muslims. Independence ended British rule over the ‘jewel in the crown’ — the empire’s biggest asset and the colony around which all imperial strategy had been built since the 1857 Rebellion (Lesson 9).
Suez 1956: The Public Humiliation
In July 1956 Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal — French-built and opened in 1869, part-owned by Britain since 1875, and the lifeline to the remaining empire. Anthony Eden conspired with France and Israel to retake the canal: Israel invaded the Sinai on 29 October; Britain and France issued an ultimatum and bombed Egyptian airfields on 31 October. Within ten days, US President Eisenhower ordered Britain to withdraw. The pound came under such pressure that the Treasury could not defend it without American help — help Eisenhower withheld until British troops left. The Suez Crisis ended Eden’s career and made it explicit: Britain could no longer act as a great imperial power without American consent. Decolonisation accelerated.
Africa: The Wind of Change
Kwame Nkrumah founded the Convention People’s Party in 1949 and used a programme of strikes and ‘positive action’ to make the Gold Coast ungovernable. Independent Ghana followed in 1957. Harold Macmillan’s 1960 ‘Wind of Change’ speech in Cape Town acknowledged that African nationalism would not be stopped. Nigeria became independent in 1960; Sierra Leone and Tanganyika in 1961; Uganda in 1962; Kenya in 1963 under Jomo Kenyatta.
Kenya’s path was the most violent. The 1952-1960 Mau Mau Emergency saw a Kikuyu insurgency against settler land-grabs and forced labour. The British response was extraordinary in its violence: at least 1.5 million Kenyans were detained or held in fortified villages; around 11,000 Mau Mau fighters were killed (some estimates run higher). Caroline Elkins’s 2005 book Britain’s Gulag exposed routine torture and unlawful killings in the camps. In 2013 the British government paid £19.9 million in compensation to 5,228 surviving detainees and apologised — an admission of state crime that the empire had denied for half a century.
Gandhi did not invent Indian nationalism — the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885 — but he transformed it. After his return from South Africa in 1915, he developed satyagraha (non-violent resistance) into a mass political technique. The 1930 Salt March, in which 78 followers walked 240 miles to make salt from seawater in defiance of the British monopoly, made the British Empire look ridiculous on world cinema screens. Gandhi’s influence reached far beyond India: Martin Luther King studied his methods, and Nkrumah’s ‘positive action’ in the Gold Coast was modelled on Gandhi’s.
The end of empire was not a single event but a process from 1945 to 1965. Britain’s post-1945 economic exhaustion, the Suez 1956 humiliation, and the leadership of Gandhi (India 1947), Nkrumah (Ghana 1957) and Kenyatta (Kenya 1963) combined to dismantle most of the empire in around 20 years.