An inquiry into the Empire

travelogue
This is a blog about a book which I have just finished (April 2026) but which I will hang on to while I think about it. The current title is “Travelogue of picturesque peoples”. The subject is British poetry and the Empire – but actually areas outside the Empire too. The subject is also the culture of the Right in Britain, how its relationship with poetry changed after 1920, and how privatisation works in the arts. It is an extension of a series of blogs which I posted, on nationalism and poetry.
There was a possible sequence where I would talk about the Nuremberg trials and say that there was no such juridical intervention in the aftermath of the British Empire. Nobody ever got dragged into court as a result of the Amritsar Massacre or the Black and Tan war. It would follow that you look at Europe around 1960 and see that the Germans are trying very hard to come to terms with the Nazi past and people in Britain don’t even see that there is a problem with the imperial past. So, in Britain, there was a gentle transition to a post-imperial condition without also a disenchantment, a critical re-living of the collective past and of collective illusions. In Germany, by 1960, there were a lot of people who were genuinely ex-Nazis – they had given the ideas up and recognised the errors of the national movement. In Britain, I don’t think there was a large body of ex-imperialists. Their activities changed because the Empire had gone, or was on the way to breaking up, but they hadn’t otherwise changed their view of race or of the colonial past. So that process of repentance might still be in the future. Young people who live through it in a rush, without the usual restraints, may have a hard time. They may come out as extremists. There is a sector of the Right which is defined by its members’ unwillingness to accept the basic lessons of what happened in colonialism and what suffering it caused.
So, why didn’t I write this up for the book. It seemed too backward-facing. And it seemed authoritarian, as I was unwilling to define one version of the Past and one set of acceptable attitudes. Maybe also because it doesn’t coincide with the poetry I was writing about. Describing what poets don’t do has a limited reach. Although I do have time to admire something like David Ashford’s John Company, dealing with the colonial past in India, or Jay Gao’s Katabasis, which deals with an effectively colonial war in Iraq. I have to observe how late in the day this critical memory is coming.

A topic I don’t include is 50s war films. Information is that there were 443 British war films made during the 1950s. My feeling is that these war films give an insight into Reform voters, the patriotic vote. I want to make a connection because my goal is to end up with one society, one government. We are all in the same boat. The problem with these films was partly their continuity with wartime propaganda. Stuart Hylton’s book on the home front records how the main street of Reading was bombed. The newspapers could not report the story even though everyone could see that their shopping street wasn’t there any more. Only several weeks later could they run the story. The media world was heavily controlled by the government. After the war, people wanted the untold stories. The stories had directly affected their lives. The films never supplied this.They tried to revive the uncritical mood of the war years and avoided the risk of showing what had gone wrong. Also, war films were amazingly popular. This meant that the industry was too eager to go with projects that were badly thought out and without the requisite talent and intelligence. The contract between the industry and the audience was not kept, and so the films got a bad reputation. There is a claim that the collective films were brought to an end by the enmity of a bloc of intellectuals, but the film industry had no interest in intellectuals. The reasons why the series came to an end are as I have set out already. The Sixties came along with a boom in satire and in subversion which was not conducive to war films. Certain parts of the audience interpreted this as a lack of concern for the broad collective, an exit from ideals of coherence and shared effort. Although anti-authoritarian, it could be interpreted as a hasty exit from the social contract.
Robert Murphy, on-line, has suggested that there was a dip in the popularity of war films between 1943 and 1950. People just got fed up with the war, and wanted entertainment at night. This would explain why the Fifties war films, however successful, were influenced by nostalgia and unwilling to explore deeper issues about the war. He also says that the post-1950 variant was more oriented towards officers as heroes than the wartime variant of film. I had not been aware of this, but during the war the unstated rules of propaganda meant that there was a stress on collective thinking, and working-class characters, as an inevitable part of the package. This suggests that the task of propaganda actually raised the standards of the film industry, dragging it out of the clutches of showbiz and towards something more memorable and less individualistic.

The historian A D Harvey, in a book about large-scale wars ("Britain in three world wars, 1793-1945"), asks the question whether there were two separate sets of war aims in the Second World War. One would be to defend the Empire and keep it in being, one would be an anti-fascist crusade which would have democracy and freedom as its goals. The latter obviously implies decolonisation. He asks which one was predominant during the war and goes into statements of the time to resolve the question. I don’t think the evidence is conclusive, especially because a large faction of opinion was concerned with defending the British Isles and saw invading Germany, seizing the Ruhr, destroying the Wehrmacht, as the only way to achieve that goal. A stand-off in the English Channel and North Sea was not enough to bring about peace. Still, Harvey has raised (esp. at pages 509-519) a question which had been un-asked before then. Another reason why this issue is inconclusive is that politics was not much in evidence during the war. I don’t think people were asking “what are our war aims”; their aim was to win, and return to peace; instead, the question became important because propaganda demanded that there be some named reason for fighting. The idea of a Welfare State became very popular, but surely fighting a war was not necessary in order to found it.
The propaganda of wartime and the speeches of the 1945 general election campaigns had not told people that India was about to be liberated and the majority of the population of the Empire about to leave and start their own democracy. The word “Empire” fell out of legal use in 1947, as it had referred to India. It was replaced by “Commonwealth”. A certain fraction of the population of the Home Islands saw this as not the result of the war which they had expected. A certain idea came into circulation which held that the sub-continent had wrongly been taken away from the British people, and that an educated minority had betrayed the people, carrying out a plan which nobody had been allowed to vote on, and making a decision behind closed doors. The outcome was visibly a lot more democracy for India, Pakistan and Ceylon. It was not an issue which had been explained and debated democratically in Britain. People felt vaguely that the reward for victory in a major war was an expansion of territorial power, not the opposite. There was no film which explained Indian politics and the last, weakening, phase of the Raj, and probably no audience for such a film. The film industry was part of the world of entertainment, even if it rose above that occasionally. Bhowani Junction (1956) doesn’t really fill the gap (“MGM’s drama aflame with love and revolt”).

I am still reading histories of the imperial mind-set, but I must say none of them seems to have any interest in poetry. The links between imperialism and “naval poetry” in the period roughly 1897-1920 are obvious and important, but historians seem to have filed them under “omit”. This at least justifies my project.
I was reading a book on-line about Fascism in Britain between the wars and saw a list of the committee of the Right Book Club. One of these was Trevor Blakemore, credited as “a poet”. "Another notable collection, The Flagship: and Other Poems, appeared in 1915 from Erskine Macdonald, including patriotic naval imagery amid the era's global tensions." I can see several books of his in the second-hand market. I am letting myself off reading them. There was lots of naval poetry in 1915. Clearly, he was associated with the outside Right, whether Tory dissidents or something further out. But I can’t be sure that he was able to articulate those ideas in poetry. And I find it unlikely that he was influential, someone whose symbolic discourse appealed to wider circles even in the extremist wing. His name does not appear in Herbert Palmer’s 1938 book, which describes well over 100 poets of the time. It follows that Blakemore wasn’t on the map.

(US policy and the Empire)
I have been reading Max Hastings’ book Armageddon, about the last 8 months of the war in Europe. Of interest to us is his discussion of Roosevelt and how the US-Britain relationship deteriorated in the last year of the war, not least because of Montgomery and his arrogance. Simultaneously, Roosevelt was completely deceived by Stalin and didn’t realise that he was going to turn Eastern Europe into a cluster of satellite states for the next 45 years. The Americans were very angry about Britain sending troops to Greece in late 1944, to prevent a communist take-over. They saw this as establishing a “sphere of influence”, and thought it was just the same as Stalin occupying Poland. But the big question is why the US didn’t insist on the decolonisation of the British Empire. It was just a matter of chance that this didn’t happen. Nobody in Washington wanted to expend a single American life to defend the Empire. This rift didn’t reach the surface because of a series of chance events, for example that defending India was the same as fighting the Japanese, so that the imperial war aim coincided with the US war aim. This was true in half a dozen other situations, and the split just never quite reached the surface. Compare the US-Soviet Union split, which didn’t come to the surface until 1947 or so. It could have happened that the US presided over the end of the British Empire, in the spirit of 1776. After the Cold War became established as the new bundle of doctrines, the US wanted the Empire to survive for long enough to install anti-communist parties as the new and legitimated political elites in the various colonies. That is, as part of restricting Soviet or Chinese influence. The point is that the foreign policy posture of the US in December 1944 was completely different from its posture in December 1947. And this is something I have avoided getting into; foreign policy involved multiple players and rapid shifts of direction which demand too much effort to describe. It is easy to describe British decolonisation at its end point, but complicated to describe how the few thousand people involved in policy shifted from being aggressively pro-Empire towards being in favour of rapid decolonisation tempered only by anti-communism. Simply about Greece, I am sure it is a good thing that Greece didn’t live under a communist dictatorship from, say, 1944 to 1990. Also, I am sure that Britain did not plan to reduce Europe to a British sphere of influence in the way that Stalin reduced eastern Europe to Soviet satellites. Roosevelt failed to follow the development of European politics and did not understand the possibilities.
America did not, in 1946, take the stance that Europe had to decolonise and that it could use the power of the dollar (and of US export goods) to enforce this outcome. It was always a possible stance. My guess is that alienation from the Soviet Union, and world communism, made the decolonisation (and anti-Western European) stance impossible. The US could not adopt both stances at once. The path towards decolonisation – a desirable outcome, a democratic outcome – was more tortuous than that.
The US set up the United Nations but did not accompany that with a promise to break up the British, Dutch, and French Empires. A missed opportunity? It is worth posing the question, why was this not the initial “theme music” of the UN.
For our purposes, the question is why the Labour Party, or the political class more widely, did not explain decolonisation to the electorate. I think the answer was that the various decisions to decolonise and break up the Empire were taken very reluctantly, and came unexpectedly, as the result of crises. Foreign policy was, in this case, removed from the sphere of democracy. The electorate would probably have said No. The outcome was a residual electoral factor of voters who thought that the elite were in the embrace of foreigners and were consequently traitors to the British people. The suspicion that holding on to the Empire would have benefited the ordinary people, in many or most constituencies, was the basis for a ressentiment which could be mobilised against immigrants, against the ex-colonies, against globalisation, and against the politicians (more obviously, the politicians in Brussels). By a freak of chronology, this ressentiment has been a big political factor in the period 2008-2026.