ABSTRACT
The Empire bulked large in British discussion and policy making during the inter-war period. It has become fashionable to ignore this fact. The imperial rhetoric which survived from Victorian times is now profoundly embarrassing to the intellectuals of a Britain whose role they now see in very different and more limited terms. For post-imperial Britain, Commonwealth Preferences, sugar and butter are now incumbrances which make it more difficult to enter the Common Market. It is hard for us to empathize with those who believed, in the aftermath of a bloody war, that Britain’s military security could only be secured by the peopling of the Empire. In today’s fashionable ideologies, ‘population planning’ means agricultural depopulation, abortion, birth control, and euthanasia—not agricultural settlement on virgin lands. We think we have learned to manage the British economy by monetary devices and by government spending and taxing—not by tariffs. Those who wish to make reputations and fees in the guiding of economic development would find it distressing to admit that their creative breakthroughs of the nineteen-sixties were the stock-in-trade of grey civil servants and flamboyant imperialist politicians in the nineteen-twenties. And there is the Britons’ bad conscience with respect to the Empire. It is evil enough to have been willing—eager—to rule all those lesser breeds without the law. But had not Britain—somehow or other—grown rich by exploiting her Imperial subjects? How else could Britain be so rich while India is so poor and Tanzania so backward?
