The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

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evacuation
of Dunkirk.”37 Burma became a republic in January 1948 and left
the
Commonwealth. Quite a few of the colonies in Asia were experienced politically,
such as Ceylon
and Malaya. Therefore, Britain had no objection to their
movement to independence. For example,
Ceylon’s progress towards
independence was not dramatic. A month after Burma gained its full
nationhood,
Ceylon became a Dominion within the Commonwealth, but the United Kingdom
retained a
number of naval bases which they had held during the years when they
controlled the politics of the
island, and only withdrew the bases in 1957. Similar
patterns of granting independence to India took
place in other Asian colonies.
However, the process of attaining political independence for the colonies
in other
parts of the British Empire, such as East Africa and elsewhere, was not as smooth
as the
way the Asian colonies gained their full nationhood. This was mainly
because the policy-makers in London
were reluctant to recognise the legitimacy
of the local nationalist leaders, which we witnessed in
Chapter Three of the thesis.

As
the studies in Chapter Three indicated, by 1951 when the Labour
Government was defeated at the General
Election, a gigantic transformation had
already taken place in the empire. The Labour Government had
effectively
transferred power to about 500 million people and the Modern Commonwealth
had been
created.

However, as Professor Partha Gupta has said, “an oversimplified or
sentimental view of the
Labour’s Commonwealth and colonial policy should not
be taken.”38 He continued by pointing out that “considerations of national
and
imperial self-interest, especially in relation to defence and to the needs of the
British
economy, helped to determine Labour’s policy in Malaya, Ceylon, East
Africa, the proposed Central
African Federation, and elsewhere, between 1945
and 1951.”39

When
the Labour Government came to office, in 1945, Britain was still
involved in vast areas of the world-the
Far East, the Middle East, Europe, and

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