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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training
specialists; standardisation of equipment; joint co-operation as in the
Woomera rocket-testing range in
Australia or the Commonwealth strategic
reserve of British, Australian and New Zealand troops stationed in
Malaya;
assistance in training, equipment and personnel has been extended to new
members of the
Commonwealth after independence.”18

However.
not all the former members of the British Empire continued ties
with Britain. “There was the precedent
of the thirteen North American colonies
which forcibly took their independence between 1776 and 1783. In the
twentieth
century, however, the withdrawals were agreed to more amicably.”19 During the
1930s, as we saw in the previous chapter, the Irish, or at least the
southern Irish,
extracted themselves from the British connection though the independence of
Eire was not
formally recognised until 1949. Egypt had never formally been part
of the empire, although a protectorate was
established there between 1914 and
1922 and various degrees of British military occupation had been
imposed
between 1886 and 1956. The Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, which had been run as a
condominium by Britain
and Egypt since 1899, was granted its independence in
1956; and it withdrew from the Commonwealth.
Britain’s rule over League of
Nation’s mandate in the Middle East was exercised fairly lightly,
with
independence being granted to Iraq in 1932 and the Trans-Jordan in 1946. The
violence of the two
communities in Palestine led Britain to relinquish quickly its
charge there and the independent state of
Israel emerged. Burma, on receiving its
independence in 1947, immediately left the Commonwealth. In 1960
British
Somaliland joined up with Italian Somalia to become an independent state outside
the
Commonwealth; similarly, the Southern Cameroons joined the French
Cameroons in 1961 and left Commonwealth.
The People’s Republic of Southern
Yemen pulled out in 1967, while Pakistan left in 1972 after failing to
receive
support in its civil war. East Pakistan, however, stayed within the
Commonwealth, as the new
state of Bangladesh. In 1961 South Africa voluntarily

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