ABSTRACT
The countries of Europe after the War rapidly shed their non-European territories. Both the speed and the air of inevitability with which this happened were astonishing. The causes of the dissolving of empires were already manifest at the beginning of the century. The indictment of late nineteenth-century imperialism was worked out by thinkers from Hobson (Imperialism: A Study (1902) is the best-known of his books on this subject) to Lenin (Imperialism, the Last Stage of Capitalism was published in 1916). It was difficult to argue against this indictment without such detailed knowledge of what had actually happened as few either by personal experience possessed or by historical reading acquired. Nor had many in the egalitarian atmosphere after the War the wish, if they had the power, to discriminate between some imperialist activity which Lenin's analysis might fit and other activity which need not be arraigned as greedy exploitation from which only a few capitalists benefited. Soviet Russia, of course, had her own policy of colonisation, though it was applied internally and not overseas, and it was not thought of as exploitation. Communist Russia was still part of the alliance of nations that had fought the War and was to remain so until 1947; there were Communist Ministers in the Governments of France, Italy and Belgium; there was generally a more open attitude in the western democracies to Communisim, the self-styled opposite of Imperialism. Nor did everyone distinguish between condemned Nazi plans for ‘colonising’ areas of eastern Europe ‘with Germans of pure Aryan blood’ and the colonial plantations of the British and French overseas. The notion of colonial settlement was permanently muddled with imperialism and loosely associated in the public consciousness with exploitation and enslavement. In Britain Churchill, in a speech after the British and American landings in North Africa, said ‘We mean to hold our own. I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire’ (November 10, 1942). But Clement Attlee, who became Prime Minister in 1945 and remained so until 1951, had said in the Cabinet two months before, ‘that in the view of the Labour Party the British electorate would not be content to go on bearing a financial burden in respect of Colonies from which the advantage mainly accrued to a capitalist group’ (September 10, 1942). 1
