The period between World War I and World War II was the fading dream-time of the British Empire. While the Great War exacted a terrible price from all participants, Great Britain alone among the major European powers seemed to exit the struggle unbowed. It had triumphed over the Germans, its imperial possessions and great power status fully intact. Indeed, the British Empire reached its maximum geographical extent in 1921, but all was not as it seemed.
In reality, Great Britain, Europe’s greatest power, had been bled dry by the war. The country was forced to abandon the gold standard in 1914 with the commencement of war. Although it briefly reestablished pre-war gold parity in 1925, it came at a crippling price. Not only did Britain suffer almost continuous recession until the mid 1930s, but the pound sterling was also increasingly displaced as the world’s reserve currency by the U.S. dollar.
Great Britain had become a paper tiger and yet throughout the interwar period the British elite pretended as if nothing had changed. Their perception of themselves was so bound up in the fabric of grand empire that its illusion was maintained at all costs.
The British still called India “the jewel in the imperial crown” even as it became increasingly apparent that growing Indian nationalism meant that British domination of the subcontinent was unsustainable. India was not alone either; a strong nationalistic desire for self-determination in colonial territories spread inexorably during the inter-war period.
Military developments were also instrumental in revealing the decline of the British Empire. World War I had been devastating for Great Britain as a world power. It had lost almost one million male youth in the conflict with perhaps another 1.5 million wounded. This same pool of men would have been, in better times, tapped to fill overseas military and administrative positions. Instead, many of them lay in the cold earth of rural France, unable to devote their lives for a second time to unrealistic imperialistic British ideals.
The situation for Britain’s vaunted royal navy was just as dire too. As the 1930s progressed, it became apparent that both Germany and Japan were likely to be foes rather than friends. But Britain’s imperial possessions were so numerous and scattered as to be utterly indefensible against these formidable opponents if they allied with each other.
In fact, the British navy’s secret plan for dealing with a simultaneous war against Germany and Japan was to immediately draw the German navy into a decisive defeat in the North Sea before sailing halfway around the world to protect its East Asian territories from Japanese aggression. This plan would have been laughable to any real military strategist, but still the British naval leadership believed it viable. Their national pride demanded it.
Needless to say, when war finally came all illusions of British strength were quickly shattered. The glittering British colony of Hong Kong surrendered to Japanese forces only 18 days after hostilities began. British Singapore – the Gibraltar of the East – fell after less than 10 weeks of fighting and with it the entire Malay Peninsula.
India was only saved because it was too far from Japan and too populous to be easily taken. Australia was forced to rely on the strength and magnanimity of the United State’s Pacific fleet for protection from the Japanese juggernaut.
And yet while it lasted, life in Britain’s colonies during the 1920s and 1930s reflected the dying embers of her imperial greatness. During these fleeting years Britain’s fading empire drifted gently through a hazy twilight that was equal parts arrogance and hedonism. British citizens walked through the streets of colonial Singapore or Hong Kong in the mid 1930s and imagined, foolishly, that the sun would never set on the British Empire. However, in only another couple decades the sun had indeed sunk below the horizon, never to rise on the Empire again.
