anti-imperialism. The Second World War is widely believed to have encouraged the forces of anti-imperialism within the international system at large and undermined the viability of the various European colonial empires. John Darwin, for example, has argued (in his book
Britain and Decolonization, Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World, Basingstoke, 1989) that it was this experience and its effects which functioned as the ‘trigger’ for the long fuse of British decolonizations which exploded at intervals in subsequent decades, while one of the few major texts focusing on colonial aspects of the 1939–45 struggle, by Wm. Roger Louis, is tellingly entitled
Imperialism at Bay (Oxford, 1977). Paradoxically, other historians have been impressed by the fact that the same years witnessed a remarkable
revival of imperial confidence and virility, not least in the case of the UK (for example, see J. Gallagher,
The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, Cambridge, 1982).
The colonized areas most dramatically affected were those in South-East Asia following the outbreak of the
Pacific war. There the assault on the status quo, with its medley of British, French, Dutch, and American administrations, lent itself easily to Japanese propaganda as ‘a sacred war for the liberation of Asia’, and the fall of
Singapore—the greatest
imperial military defeat suffered by the British since Yorktown in 1781—was a massive blow to European (i.e. white) mystique throughout the region. Nor, for all the lasting resentments that they were undoubtedly to bring upon themselves, did Japanese invocations to their
Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere as an authentic Asian nationalism fall upon deaf ears. As one Indian administrator employed in the Malayan Civil Service later recalled his volatile emotions, ‘though his reason utterly rebelled against it, his sympathies had instinctively ranged themselves in their Japanese fight against the Anglo-Saxons’; one may guess that at the time reason was even more pliable than such recollections allow. The persecution disproportionately suffered by Chinese individuals and communities at the hands of the
Kempei (the Japanese secret police) naturally made them less susceptible to the siren calls of Tokyo, many fleeing into the Malayan countryside to escape; ironically, the guns which the British filtered through to the Chinese resistance groups which then established themselves were later (in the post- 1948 ‘Emergency’) to be turned against themselves. In China proper, however, the legacy of
Chiang Kai-shek's misrule and corruption meant that the Japanese were not without their supporters even there. Racial exclusivity, in short, was the Achilles' heel of the Western, self-proclaimedly ‘democratic’, powers in the Orient, and it was one that they were never entirely able to recover from.
The effects of Japanese rule on conquered territories were more profound than the implications flowing from the humiliating sight of Europeans boxed into their prison-cages. In identifying local politicians with whom they could work, the Japanese authorities provided openings for such figures as ‘Engineer’
Sukarno in Java,
Ba Maw in Burma, and
Subhas Chandra Bose as ‘Great Leader and Hero’ of the
Indian National Army, to sharpen their own brand of often charismatic anti-imperial leadership, and more widely nurtured the development of a secular politics which the Europeans had long sought to repress. One historian has, indeed, emphasized a qualitative difference in the methods employed by Europeans and Japanese in ruling subordinate populations in this part of the world. Where the former before 1942 had blocked off avenues by which local people might project themselves into the public arena, promoting instead the virtues of family life in the villages, the Japanese actually encouraged group endeavours in sports associations, religious organizations and even, in the Putera movement in Java, embracing displays of martial arts. Of course, all this hectic activity was intended to be firmly at Tokyo's behest, but there was implicit in it a measure of mobilization, of refreshing innovation, which was not easily compatible with any future restoration of European hegemony. The parting gesture by which the Japanese, with defeat looming in 1945, allowed power to be usurped by those indigenous elements least likely to welcome the Europeans back into their traditional haunts—such as the communists under
Ho Chi Minh in French Indo-China—only capped this situation. ‘The Japanese’, remarked one French observer who had spent most of the war imprisoned in Batavia, ‘though defeated in a general sense, have “won the war” in this corner of Asia.’
The Middle East, including North Africa, was the other major region outside Europe whose internal politics and society were most directly affected by the war. The fall of
France in June 1940 excited hopes of a rapid advance to freedom among Syrian and Lebanese nationalists; at the same time it heightened French determination to keep a grip on those overseas possessions which were now virtually that country's sole claim to Great Power status. This was a recipe for confusion and bloodshed; it culminated in the disastrous French cannonade on Damascus in November 1944. The unseemly mess in the Levant in which
Vichy Frenchmen fought with their Gaullist compatriots, and where British and French ‘allies’ were constantly at verbal and sometimes even physical odds with each other, sapped collective European prestige among the indigenous inhabitants much as in the Far East. Furthermore, if the British hoped to gain some scarce credit with Arab opinion by distancing themselves from French reaction in the region, they were soon disappointed. The emergence of a pro-German element in Iraq, and the investment of the RAF garrisons in that country during April 1941, were important in highlighting just how fragile the British imperium was in much of the Middle East. The revolt in Iraq was put down, and pro-British politicians propped up anew, but the episode left a strain of bitterness which continued into the post-war world and came to a climax with the revolution in Baghdad in 1958.
It was Egypt, the ‘main base’ of the UK's ‘Mediterranean Strategy’, where the political and social consequences of the war in the Middle East were, however, to be most pronounced. With so many expatriate personnel crammed into strange and often congested conditions, it was predictable that relations with the local population should prove unstable. Thus the ‘tarbush game’—revolving around the purloining of headgear from innocent passers-by—became a favourite competitive pastime for off-duty English squaddies roaming the streets of the Egyptian capital. Anglo-Egyptian dealings at a personal level had never been easy; under the pressure of war they were to become more brittle than ever, until by 1945 the ill-feeling which contributed to the Suez débâcle just over a decade later was plainly to be seen. But social matters, with their racial connotations, apart, the very salience of Egypt for the British war effort gave rise to political misunderstandings which military success, initially against the Italians, and later (after many setbacks) against
Rommel'sAfrika Korps, only served to accentuate. Local newspapers and other organs of opinion held that the British could never have succeeded in holding on to their position in North Africa without the help and co-operation of Egypt, so that the latter should be rewarded immediately with
Istiqual-el-tam, or complete independence (as opposed to the quasi-independence which had prevailed since 1922); the English, on the other hand, thought that the Egyptians should be grateful for having been saved from German and Italian clutches, and never ceased impressing the fact upon them. This missing of minds and sympathies was perhaps most starkly illustrated by the incident in 1942 when the British High Commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, furious at the appointment of an anti-British premier by King Farouk (1920–65), surrounded the Abdin Palace with troops and browbeat the monarch into changing his nominee. In London this was regarded as an impressive display of strength, Lampson himself being elevated to the peerage, but the underlying effect was to humiliate the royal house on which the British connection had long depended for some of its access to political decision-making in Cairo. Decolonization, it has been alleged, is at bottom the result of imperial systems running out of the collaborators on which their local foundations rest; in Egypt the British had virtually exhausted its always scarce reserves of this commodity by the end of the Second World War.
Although India did not become an ‘active’ theatre, except very marginally, after 1939, the fortunes of imperialism and anti-imperialism were deeply affected by events. By declaring war against Germany on India's behalf as well as its own, without any attempt to sound indigenous opinion, the British government allowed the initiative within the Indian National Congress (see
India, 3) to swing back towards the ‘extremists’—including
Gandhi and
Nehru—who had opposed any participation in the British reforms under the 1935 government of India Act. All provincial Congress governments immediately resigned from office. Afterwards the crucial issue was whether the imperial administration would ‘go the whole hog’ and impose a war economy without negotiation with popular politicians, or strike a bargain in which concessions regarding a move to self-government were traded against Congress's assistance in mobilizing military resources. Since bargaining with Indians was one of Churchill's pet aversions, it was probably inevitable that the talks between the mission led by
Stafford Cripps and leading Indian nationalists in March 1942 should break down over what appeared to be points of detail. The ‘Quit India’ rebellion which followed in August of that year was the biggest such protest since the Mutiny of 1857–8; it ended with the incarceration of almost the entire echelon of senior Congress leaders. Having Gandhi, the ‘seditious fakir’ of old, behind bars again was one of Churchill's ‘finest hours’ during the course of the Second World War; whilst the manner in which Congress nationalism was swept off the streets of the cities, and the sub-continent applied anew to great imperial purposes, was an achievement which few Englishmen a few years before would have believed possible.
In India, however, as in Egypt, there was a high political and psychological price to pay for this vicarious triumph. The Raj had always been based on a complex system of compromises and accommodations with local society; in squeezing recruits and commodities out of this greatest of dependencies the bureaucracy proceeded to break many of the unwritten rules on which its acceptability had been based. To give just one instance: in fending off the famine in Bengal during 1942–3 threatening the entire war effort in the region, the surplus grain of the Punjab became liable to official sequestration, causing intense alienation among the rich peasant classes on whose co-operation the status quo depended. British rule in that strategic province was never to be the same again. More widely than this, industrialization and urbanization arising from the economic growth which war has always brought in its wake altered Indian society to a degree that made the ‘thin white line’ of alien rule suddenly appear unsustainable in the longer, or even medium, term; when
General Auchinleck returned in 1943 as C-in-C he found that he scarcely recognized the country in which many years of his professional life had been passed. These new, and inevitably unruly, conditions meant that by the end of the war British guarantees of ‘law and order’ in India, the basic test of any presiding power, had ceased to be credible. Overall, in India the hopes of the anti-imperialists after September 1939, that their foreign masters would quickly be forced into a political capitulation, were frustrated, but they had the more leisurely consolation (often in captivity) of watching the British sink deeper and deeper into a political quagmire largely of their own making. When Churchill told R. A. Butler in 1945 that all that remained for the UK in its once so lustrous ‘jewel’ was to get her army and administrators out in one piece, and leave the locals to a ‘good civil war’ of their own, he was only evoking with a typically savage twist what everyone knew to be the case.
Compared to the Middle East and Asia, sub-Saharan Africa was a backwater in the military history of the era. In the
First World War there had been large-scale campaigning between British and German forces in East Africa, with much disruption to native life; during the Second the fighting was on a much smaller scale (see
Dakar expedition and the
Fezzan and
Gabon campaigns). The impact on social and economic structures, though less than in India, was none the less of great importance for the future. In the words of the British Colonial Secretary, Lord Cranborne, after early 1942 colonial Africa became ‘a vast armoury for the war effort’, and in tracing what this meant in practice one scholar has remarked that Tanganyika came to experience ‘colonialism with the gloves off’; much the same could be said for other territories. Yet if some Africans lost out materially during the conflict, others indubitably gained on the inflationary roller-coaster that was set in motion, so that in general the result was a more stratified and combustible society. ‘The war had brought more division because it had brought more money,’ John Lonsdale has commented in his article ‘The Depression and the Second World War in the Transformation of Kenya’ ( D. Killingray and R. Rathbone (eds),
Africa and the Second World War, London, 1986, p. 125). ‘Money brought more politics.’ This expanded politics set black increasingly against black in the struggle for the post-colonial succession whose outlines now became discernible, and the climax of which in Kenya was to be the Mau Mau ‘emergency’ in the 1950s. Most importantly, or at least more vividly, it set white settlers against the African majority, since the former were able to exploit the administrative machinery of war in those colonies where they were concentrated to regain a primacy which had slipped away from them during the preceding depression. In this sense the war established the terms on which black nationalism and white privilege were to vie after 1945, though the structural shift which also took shape at this time, from an ‘old’ Africa, with its close European supervision and collaborationist tribal chiefs, to the ‘new’ Africa with mushrooming cities and a recognizably modern proletariat, may be said to have made the final outcome inevitable.
Finally, what of the argument that the war gave an immense boost to anti-imperialism in general within the world political system? In this regard emphasis is usually given to the
Atlantic Charter of August 1941, in which Roosevelt manoeuvred a reluctant Churchill into issuing a joint statement, Article III of which asserted ‘the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live’. Scarcely was this declaration made before the British leader began to backtrack by pointing out that the principle only applied in Europe, while simultaneously promoting an alternative ethic of ‘What We Have We Hold’. Yet the Charter did give an ideological and, as it were, moral respectability to anti-imperialism which it had previously lacked; certainly the self-confidence and maturity evident in the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in July 1945 would have been inconceivable six years earlier. By much the same token, imperial agencies were forced (if only to deflect American criticisms) to adopt more respectable rationales and methods than hitherto; the British colonial office, for example, spent much of its war evolving a fresh credo for empire summed up in the phrase ‘Development and Welfare’. Under the exigencies of the moment this may not have meant a great deal, but before long such liberal presuppositions were to limit critically the options open to imperial rulers when faced with recurrent challenges after 1945. The world did not as a consequence become the oyster for the enemies of territorial empire, but it did become a safer place in which to conduct their activities than it had been before the conflagration began (though even here there were bloody exceptions to prove the rule, as the massacre of Muslim protesters at Sétif in French Algeria during May 1945 illustrated). Perhaps even more telling in the end was the fact that the two main ‘victor’ powers of the Second World War—the USA and the USSR—were both, in their different guises, ill-disposed to European colonialism, so that as time went by the British, French, Dutch, Belgian, and Portuguese empires were to be deprived of the oxygen they needed to survive.
Any discussion of imperialism and its antithesis, however, must always end in caveats and ambiguities, and this one is no exception. ‘It is our turn to bat in Asia,’ an American official encapsulated what was, for him, the real benefit of the sacrifices that had been made in the Second World War, while the Yalta agreements of February 1945 (see
Grand Alliance) meant that it was the Soviet Union's turn to bat in Eastern Europe. The upheavals between 1939 and 1945 did not, therefore, so much resolve the issue between imperialism and anti-imperialism, as shake up the
dramatis personae in the perennial contest for mastery between nations, peoples, and élites. See also
collaboration.
Robert Holland
Bibliography
Killingray, D., and Rathbone, R. (eds.), Africa and the Second World War (London, 1986).
Thompson, M. , The French Empire and War, 1940–45 (London, 1998).
Thorne, C. , Allies of a Kind: The United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–5 (London, 1978).
—— The Issue of War: States, Societies and the Far Eastern Conflict of 1941–45 (London, 1985).
