ABSTRACT
Britain’s troubles of 1919–21 in India, the Middle East and Ireland, though they were largely attributable to the extraordinary circumstances of the war, were at the same time symptomatic of a more fundamental and long-term trend, which was her relative political and economic decline in the world. For the 1920s and 1930s were abnormal times by most criteria, not easy years for any country; and Britain, though she no longer led the world, stayed among the front runners. In the 1930s, Britain’s balance of payments, even with invisibles and investment earnings counted in, began to go very badly into the red, for the first time in over a century. In 1915, a breach had been made in Britain’s long-standing free trade edifice when, to raise revenue for the war, a tariff of 33.3 percent had been levied on imports of certain luxuries.
