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

46

The United
Kingdom’s Cabinet committee on defence co-ordination was called,
significantly, the “Committee of
Imperial Defence.” Moreover, in the age of sea
power, the existence of a world-wide network of ports and
bases and the
superiority of Britain’s fleet from gunboats to battleships facilitated the
Pax
Britannica. It is thus ironical that British power proved, after all, insufficient to
protect the
British Empire.

Among the
first eminent politicians aware of the challenges that Britain
was facing, as we saw briefly earlier on, was
Joseph Chamberlain. “To him the
ideal solution was a closed empire economy – an imperial Zollverein.
‘We people
of the Empire should treat each other better than we treat foreigners.’ “21 British
manfacturers and Chamberlain were unhappy that a few colonies were
thinking
of a role of rivalry by establishing an industrial base of their own and not simply
buying more
products from Britain. They were the third category of the nations
in the Empire that we described i.e. that
self governing communities of mostly
British stock or, as they were later called, the dominions. For example,
in 1913
they bought only 38% from Britain but were pleased to sell her 59% of their
exports.

As a
result, in the early years of the twentieth century, Chamberlain
favoured tariff reform, abandoning free
trade in favour of a system of imperial
preference. But most politicians and the public still held sacredly
to free trade,
with its supposedly cheaper food for the masses. But the experiences of the 1914-
18 war,
with closer imperial economic co-operation and the need for more
government interference in the economy,
helped start the erosion of the sanctity
of free trade. This was heightened by the 1917-18 Royal Commission
into natural
resources urging that an imperial trade policy be worked out and by a 1918 House
of Commons
Select Committee advocating imperial preference. It finally took the
crises of the great world depression of
the 1930s to cause a full abandonment of
the nineteenth century, liberal, free trade approach.

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