The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (96 page)

The successful inclusion of republican India and Malan's public confession of Commonwealth faith were promising signs that the will was there to preserve the British connection and to acknowledge the Commonwealth as an informal alliance against the communist threat. Even Nehru agreed that ‘Commonwealth countries must be prepared to resist military and political aggression by the Soviet government’.
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It vindicated Attlee's willingness to reinvent the Commonwealth, recognising that ‘dominion’ was no longer favoured as a title (it was being discarded even in New Zealand
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), and that the name ‘British Commonwealth’ should sometimes give way to ‘Commonwealth of Nations’ as the best designation.
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The modified Commonwealth had become a key part of Labour's new world-system. But even more striking was the extent to which Britain's own role as its head and centre had come to depend upon an ever deeper commitment in two large spheres, in each of which British influence and authority suffered from potentially crippling sources of weakness.

The first of these was the Middle East. As we have seen, in post-war conditions the Middle East's value had risen sharply for Britain. As the base from which to attack Russian oilfields and industry in the event of world war, and as the source for ‘dollar-free’ oil extracted from British ‘concessions’, the Middle East had become much more than a bastion of the old Anglo-Indian nexus. It was no longer an adjunct to the British world-system but an integral part of it. This was the meaning of Bevin's victory over Attlee in 1946–7. Britain's ability to promote Western Union, to hold the Commonwealth together, to stage an economic recovery, or to deter Soviet aggression required a regional presence that was at least as commanding as before 1939, and much more intrusive. It was really made up of a four-cornered connection: with Iraq and Jordan, where the British relied on the local ‘strong men’, Nuri al-Said and the ageing King Abdullah; with Iran and the special position enjoyed by the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company; and above all with Egypt and the Suez Canal Zone. Indeed, for the British, Egypt remained the irreplaceable centrepiece of their Middle East
imperium.
It was not just a matter of their huge complex of bases in the Suez Canal Zone. There was also the vast depot at Tel el-Kebir (the Plassey of Egypt). Egyptian labour and Egypt's ports and railways were equally vital if the Canal Zone bases were to serve their purpose efficiently. This meant, in effect, that the British must enlist the cooperation, however grudging or reluctant, of the government in Cairo and its local officials. It was this realisation that had pushed Bevin and the Foreign Office into offering a large-scale withdrawal of the British military presence in return for the right to return in a Middle Eastern ‘emergency’. Those talks had failed (largely over Cairo's demand for a much larger say in the affairs of the Sudan). Meanwhile, their abrupt departure from Palestine had deprived the British of the alternative base where their troops could be kept and hardened their view about the value of Egypt. With the onset of the Berlin crisis in mid-1948, and the increased possibility of a war with Russia, the idea of any real withdrawal from Egypt disappeared almost completely. It was now essential, declared the Chiefs of Staff in September 1948, to keep at least 20,000 troops in Egypt, and to go on using the Tel el-Kebir depot.
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The reality was, as the British admitted to themselves, that not only was evacuation now inconceivable but that ‘our military requirements go beyond those of the present [1936] treaty’.
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There was no chance of finding any Egyptian regime that would agree to such terms.
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The embassy in Cairo was left, as so often before, to square the circle. Its tactics were well tried: every proconsul from Cromer to Lampson had played much the same hand. The aim was to tempt King Farouk with the promise of a treaty, or to bully him into allowing a government of the main popular party, the Wafd, who might also be tempted (as in 1936). The difficulty was that London had little or nothing to give. Worse still, there were growing signs of upheaval as the Arab defeat in Palestine, the effects of inflation and the Islamist influence of the Muslim Brotherhood undermined ‘pashadom’ and the king's prestige. They were facing 1919 all over again, thought some British observers. If violence broke out, it would be necessary to send three major military units ‘and dominate the European quarter of Cairo’.
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Nor could the British allow Egypt to fall into political chaos. But how could they stop it, or prevent a populist government from disrupting overtly or covertly the transport links and labour supply on which they depended? It might happen at a moment of great international tension, and ‘Egypt is the only country in the Middle East’, so the Chiefs of Staff declared, ‘possessing the facilities and resources for the conduct of a major war’.
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‘All interpretations of Middle East strategy require the location of a Middle East base in Egypt in war.’
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By hook or by crook some agreement must be made. 1950 was a year of desultory talks with the new Wafd government and the prime minister, Nahas Pasha, ‘an old, stubborn and enfeebled man’ in
The Times
' dismissive phrase.
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At the end of the year, Nahas raised the stakes. Egypt would end its treaty with Britain unilaterally if necessary. In October 1951, he made good his threat, and the real confrontation began.

By that time the British had suffered a highly damaging blow to their pride and pocket from Iranian nationalism. They had placed heavy reliance upon the British-owned Anglo-Iranian Oil Company (later British Petroleum) and its refinery at Abadan (then the largest in the world) to produce ‘sterling oil’, and reduce the dollar deficit (to which the cost of oil imported from the United States, much the world's largest producer, made the biggest contribution).
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To palliate Iranian discontent with its oil royalties, a ‘supplemental’ agreement had been negotiated. But, from Teheran's point of view, this did little to redress the
growing
imbalance between its share of oil revenues and those accruing to London. In 1950, the company made net profits of £33 million, paid more than £50 million in taxes to the British government (five times as much as in 1946) but barely £16 million in royalties to Teheran. New dividend rules applicable in London also depressed the income that the Iranians received.
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To make matters worse, at the end of 1950 it became known that, in Saudi Arabia, the region's second-largest producer, the Arab-American Oil Company (Aramco) had agreed on a fifty–fifty sharing of profits with the government in Riyadh. It was hardly surprising that the Iranians cavilled at a much less generous deal. Too late in the day, the British proposed the ‘Aramco’ terms. But, by early 1951, Iranian politics were being convulsed by the fierce nationalist rhetoric of Mohamed Mussadiq and the struggle for power between the youthful shah and his opponents, including the Tudeh, a mass radical party suspected of communist leanings.
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In this stormy climate, British interference and Anglo-Iranian's greed became irresistible targets. At the end of April 1951, the Iranian Parliament nationalised the company, and on 10 June the Iranian flag was raised over its main office in Abadan.

The British were nonplussed. They considered and rejected a familiar strategy: the occupation of Southwest Iran where Teheran's authority had always been weak. Without the Indian army, said the Chiefs of Staff sorrowfully, Britain lacked the military means to carry this out.
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They thought about occupying Abadan Island, where the refinery stood. But this Attlee vetoed, knowing that Washington was fiercely opposed to military action against which the Soviet Union might riposte in the north of Iran. ‘We could not afford a break with the United States on an issue of this kind’, recorded the Cabinet minutes.
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So the grand British concession closed down with a whimper. On 4 October 1951, the remaining British staff embarked on a cruiser and sailed away.

In Egypt and Iran, the British were thus caught in a vice. The logic of their economic and geopolitical position had deepened their dependence upon their Middle East ‘assets’. Far from slackening their ties with this turbulent region, they were determined to integrate its strategic and commercial resources much more closely into their post-war world-system, even while they acknowledged that Britain's own strength was, at least temporarily, in relative decline. The British largely hid from themselves the inconvenient truth that the burden they imposed upon Middle East polities was actually growing at a time when those polities were under intense social and political strain. Hence the unpredictable force of local nationalist feeling, as well as the growing American presence and the looming shadow of Soviet military power, heightened the risks and anxieties of this half-concealed ‘forward movement’. By October 1951, visibly in Iran, not much less so in Egypt, it had been stopped in its tracks.

The second great sphere was in Britain's tropical empire, for long the poor relation of the imperial system. Shoe-string budgets and skeletal government had been the lot of most tropical colonies, especially during the depression years when their economies shrank. The war and its aftermath transformed their place in the imperial structure. Their potential value to the imperial centre now began to be recognised. And the war had driven home the lesson (robustly pointed out by Margery Perham in 1942) that, without a more pro-active approach by their rulers, many colonial territories would become tropical ‘East Ends’ with impoverished, disaffected populations, troublesome to govern and an economic liability. An energetic expansion of the colonial state was thus on the cards.
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What made it more urgent was the dawning realisation that tropical produce (cocoa, groundnuts, coffee, rubber) and minerals (tin and copper especially) from the ‘crown colony’ empire could provide a large dollar income and contribute significantly to the urgent recovery of the sterling economy. By 1948, it was estimated that the colonies were earning $600 million a year, with a net surplus of $200 million for the sterling area dollar-pool. Since this was enough to cover the dollar deficit of the self-governing countries of the overseas sterling area (i.e. excluding Britain), its contribution to the smoothness and cohesion of the sterling area's working relations was highly significant. But there were bound to be costs. To raise local production, the colonial state had to become (compared with its past) almost hyperactive. It would need to discard the allies that had served it in the age of immobility and seek new friends who would grasp the advantage of rapid development, not least to themselves. Local administration would need reforming to give them a voice. Advisers and experts would descend on the countryside: imposing new rules (against overstocking or deforestation); attacking diseases (like cocoa ‘swollen shoot’ where the trees were cut down); or commandeering labour (for anti-erosion activity). And, because colonial incomes could not be allowed to grow quickly (to prevent inflation and conserve the dollars), the colonial state would become an economic leviathan, setting prices and wages wherever it could. The tropical colonies were to be integrated forcibly into the sterling economy on terms not of their choosing, but, it was claimed, to their considerable benefit. What has aptly been called the ‘second colonial occupation’ was the most self-confident face of the fourth British empire.

But, almost immediately, there were signs that the colonial governments were badly under-engined for their demanding new role. They lacked the intelligence, the financial incentives and above all the manpower to assert their power over what had hitherto been very lightly ruled hinterlands. In the Gold Coast (modern Ghana), this opened the space for a mass movement of protest, when a breakaway group of coast politicians, led by Kwame Nkrumah, began to mobilise growing discontent against the government's rural reforms. In February 1951, under the slogan of ‘Self-Government Now’, Nkrumah's Convention People's Party made ‘practically a clean sweep’ in the elections to the new local legislature created to conciliate ‘moderate opinion’.
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In Kenya, where the colonial government relied on its old chiefly allies to force through a programme for better land husbandry, the result was a spiral of increasingly violent social conflict among the Kikuyu, the main ethnic group in the central highlands. What became known as Mau Mau – the spread of ‘oathing’, urban militancy and agrarian terror – was already well established long before London agreed to a state of emergency in October 1952.
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The crisis came earlier in Malaya, where British rule had been demolished by the Japanese conquest. Here the colonial state had to be rebuilt, so London insisted, on more robust lines. Singapore would remain the great centre of British power in the East, Malaya its outwork and economic annexe. A Malayan
Union
giving more power to the colonial centre would unite the ramshackle ‘Federated’ and ‘Unfederated’ states of the pre-war era with the old ‘Straits Settlements’, the four crown colony enclaves of which Singapore was the largest. The revived colonial state would extend its control into the forested hinterland, and over the labour force of the mines and plantations whose ‘discipline’ had broken down in the occupation period. In fact, ‘Union’ was abandoned in the face of the angry reaction of the Malay elite, who feared that including Singapore would give the Chinese a predominant voice in the new Malaya. Singapore stayed separate and Malay feelings were soothed. But, in the Chinese community (in both Singapore and Malaya), the effects of occupation and of civil war in China deepened social divisions, and the appeal of communism. When the colonial government entered the fray to check rural squatting and labour militancy, violence soon spread.
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In June 1948, the British declared a state of emergency, to protect the white planters and safeguard the dollar earnings from rubber and tin which London valued so highly. It was to take more than five years before they broke the back of the communist-led insurrection. In Malaya, the British were willing to make a huge effort to protect what they saw as an economic resource and a prime strategic asset. But, here, as in the Gold Coast and Kenya, it soon became clear that the colonial state had become much more dependent on the local indigenous elite. The imperial initiative had run out of steam.