Did the British Empire ruin Britain?

[Juubi Karakuchi]

The recent goings-on have returned my thoughts to a subject I first considered while researching my current PhD. Reading Corelli Barnett's 'Britain and her army' led me out of curiosity to check out his 'decline and fall' series, in which he covers the collapse of the British Empire and Britain's myriad problems since then. Barnett argues that the years immediately following WW2, the years of Marshall Aid, were a golden opportunity for Britain to reinvent itself as an industrial power, by investing said funds into industry and infrastructure. Instead of which, it blew the money on a Welfare State it was in no position to support and on playing a 'global role' which turned out to be a path to nowhere. Barnett traced Britain's industrial problems, which were an issue even in WW2, back to the Victorian era, describing a combination of factors. One was elite disinterest in science and technology generally, which he blames on the Public School system that began with Doctor Thomas Arnold, as well as faith in the 'practical man' who learned by 'sitting next to Nellie'. He also blames hopelessly disfunctional relations between unionized labour and management, with workers regarding any attempt at improvement as management trying to take their jobs. As for the British Empire itself, it was an economic and diplomatic burden, maintained through elite self-delusion.

Reading these books, I began to wonder how things had gotten to this point. The Britain that had conquered/acquired India in the first place came across to me as having its fair share of problems, yet nonetheless perfectly capable of a hard-nosed pragmatism that at times manifested as tolerance. In being perfectly willing to employ Hindu administrators and leave the Mughal administrative structure in place, the British were following the first rule of building the perfect empire: use the locals. Yet over the nineteenth century British attitudes towards its Imperial possessions begin to change. To begin with, they are simply territories from which resources need to be extracted as efficiently as possible. As the nineteenth century rolls on, and ideas like the 'white man's burden' and the 'civilizing mission' take hold, we British got it in to our heads that it was our God-given duty and destiny to rule over primitive peoples and elevate them to the heights of Christian civilization. We loved our Imperial subjects so much that we were willing to kill them in large numbers for objecting to such treatment. By the time the Empire is finally falling apart in the 1940's and 50's, Britain was behaving like an addict, trying to cling on to its power and prestige by any means necessary and refusing to see the writing on the wall. British policy in Kenya (amongst other places) is proof of how destructive these delusions could be, and the Suez incident of how utterly nonsensical and humiliating.

So it got me thinking. Was it the British Empire itself that turned us Brits into a pack of blithering idiots? To me it seems quite plain. Acquiring control of India left the British people, or at least the portion of them involved in such matters, with delusions of grandeur. Instead of building potentially lucrative trade relationships with India's various polities, we had to become a new Rome and actually govern them ourselves. We got it into our heads that some ineffable quality of ours had made us successful, when in fact it was that we managed to industrialize before anyone else. Because we had an empire to govern, and primitives in need of enlightenment, we decided that we needed an education system that produced Christian gentlemen who would be kind to the natives (so long as they don't touch our women). A ruling elite made up of said gentlemen, it may be argued, gradually ruined Britain by ignoring or misunderstanding the importance of industry (in contrast to Germany) and by clinging to and even trying to expand the Empire even when it had become a ruinous burden. The end result is a Britain which continues to miss opportunities to change its economic situation, and of which a certain portion of the population is still in thrall to Imperial delusions.

[Spoonist]

Are you seriously arguing against public education, unions and wellfare because you think they are a biproduct of imperialism?
That is deluded on many levels.
Wat about all the countries who benefitted greatly from such and did not have crumbling empires? What about it being a sign of progress for countries that right now move from mass poverty?

[Juubi Karakuchi]

Are you seriously arguing against public education, unions and wellfare because you think they are a biproduct of imperialism?
That is deluded on many levels.
Wat about all the countries who benefitted greatly from such and did not have crumbling empires? What about it being a sign of progress for countries that right now move from mass poverty?

Barnett's argument, not mine.

The term 'Public School' has a very specific meaning in this context. It refers to the oldest and most exclusive of what are now called Private or Independent schools. The archetype is Rugby school, of which Dr Thomas Arnold was Headmaster from 1828 to 1841. It wasn't anything to do with mass education, which arrived gradually in Britain over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. I was referring to the elite in any case, Barnett's argument being that those making the decisions in the first half of the twentieth century were products of the Public schools. Things have changed since then.

Unions? Whether or not unions are needed is another matter, but it seems hard to deny that the relationship between unions and 'management' was often antagonistic. To be fair to the workers, this derived from the exploitation and misery of the Industrial Revolution, against which unionization was a defence. The unfortunate side-effect, as Barnett describes it, is that unions tended to be highly distrustful of any attempt to alter working practices or technology, seeing it in the latter case as an excuse to deprive them of their jobs.

Welfare? I think Barnett was being a tad extreme on this point. It would be more reasonable to argue that Britain was not in the best position to support the welfare state because it didn't sort the economy out when it had the chance, though welfare was worthwhile in and of itself.

With regard to mass education specifically, Barnett tends to draw his comparisons with Bismarckian Germany (opening him to accusations of being a Nazi-sympathiser), which possessed arguably the best education system in Europe, having developed from the eighteenth century Volkschule. Popular education in Britain, by contrast, appeared in dribs and drabs over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A parliamentary paper of 1820 found that only one in every fourteen or fifteen people was recieving some sort of education, and that was considered an improvement over the situation at the beginning of the century. State primary schools did not appear until 1872, and secondary schools not until 1902.

My argument is that Imperialism created a mindset among Britain's political and social elite that ignored the necessity for modern mass education and industrial development, preferring to leave the latter to others who were either ill-equipped or too few to handle it effectively. This same mindset, specifically an overweening sense of superiority and entitlement, prevented them from coming to terms with an institutionally tribal (and quite understandably) distrustful workforce.

[Spoonist]

Uhm, it was quite clear that you left Barnett's argument in the first paragraph and that it was your own rant that continued in paragraph 2 and 3. So don't try to weasel out here.

That the end of imperialism would have anything to do with concepts that exist elsewhere and continues to give progress elsewhere is deluded. You are conflating apples and oranges.

That imperialism gives hubris is a given, but I'd think that that is so obvious that it wouldn't need mentioning. But your cause and effect thingie is very strange.

Did you miss that your example of germany vs britain fails when it comes to WWII? Which is when the empire does break down. Its british industries that deliver and german industry that fails when going into a war economy. Who needs overengineered stuff that breaks down in the field vs mass-produced stuff that outproduces the other so much that it was a given outcome.
How did you think that the "battle of britain" was won? Morale? Nope it was the massproduction of new planes, building them faster than they were shot down. It was also the resources going into building each plane etc.

But there is the crux you see, britain lost its colonies due to the after-effects of war.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I was half-expecting the WW2 response, and I can answer to some extent.

The problem wasn't really in WW2 itself, though it offered its own fair share of difficulties. Barnett for his own part goes into extensive detail on the number of shipyards that used cranes and the number of coal mines that still used hand-drawn wagons (IIRC). He goes so far as to claim in 'The Audit of War' that 833,000 days of coal mining were lost to miners strikes in 1942 alone (presumably the figure refers to 1 day per miner). British industy did manage significant improvements during the war itself, as it had done in WW1, but it took the pressure of global conflict to create the right environment. Also, a lot of the mass-producted equipment that proved so vital was actually provided by the US under lend-lease, on which Britain was forced to bankrupt itself. Britain didn't manage a decent tank until the Centurion, which shows the extent to which war forced improvement. It is interesting in itself that Britain was able to compete in terms of aircraft design and production, largely under the auspices of Vickers Armstrong (amongst other things), though this can be explained by a long-standing official interest in the possibilities of airpower as a cost-effective tool of Imperial control, as well as deterring against other bomber fleets, leading to plentiful investment. Britain's aircraft industry became one of its great might-have-beens.

In this respect, as I said, WW2 wasn't the actual problem. The crucial point that Barnett focusses on is what happened after WW2. Britain got $2.7 billion in Marshall aid compared to $1.7 billion for West Germany (Barnett's figures), and even managed to trick the US out of a $4 billion loan. Whereas West Germany invested a significant portion of it into industrial and infrastructure development, paying considerable dividends later, Britain blew over £5 billion on defence in 1945 alone while at the same time committing to a large-scale home construction programme and the creation of the NHS (two much more admirable projects). The price of Imperial hubris was massive debt and decades of decay in industry and infrastructure.

Britain, to be blunt, blew its chance to build a solid economic base in favour of desperate rear-guard attempts to maintain its Imperial grandeur. The theory I'm playing with in this thread is that the motivation behind this was a hubris engendered by that very grandeur.

[Zinegata]

I don't think Britain could have maintained an industrial lead anyway due to Germany and America having a bigger population and more resources to work with. They were already losing the lead as the world's leading industrial power even before the First World War. That's the problem with island industrial economies with few native resources (see Japan for another example) - once your trade declines you really don't have much to fall back on.

[Juubi Karakuchi]

I don't think Britain could have maintained an industrial lead anyway due to Germany and America having a bigger population and more resources to work with. They were already losing the lead as the world's leading industrial power even before the First World War. That's the problem with island industrial economies with few native resources (see Japan for another example) - once your trade declines you really don't have much to fall back on.

Maintaining a lead was indeed out of the question. However, investment at that crucial point would have built on improvements made during the war and left Britain economically better off than otherwise. It's hard to be a trading nation when you've nothing to trade.

[mr friendly guy]

Uhm, it was quite clear that you left Barnett's argument in the first paragraph and that it was your own rant that continued in paragraph 2 and 3. So don't try to weasel out here.

That the end of imperialism would have anything to do with concepts that exist elsewhere and continues to give progress elsewhere is deluded. You are conflating apples and oranges.

That imperialism gives hubris is a given, but I'd think that that is so obvious that it wouldn't need mentioning. But your cause and effect thingie is very strange.

Did you miss that your example of germany vs britain fails when it comes to WWII? Which is when the empire does break down. Its british industries that deliver and german industry that fails when going into a war economy. Who needs overengineered stuff that breaks down in the field vs mass-produced stuff that outproduces the other so much that it was a given outcome.
How did you think that the "battle of britain" was won? Morale? Nope it was the massproduction of new planes, building them faster than they were shot down. It was also the resources going into building each plane etc.

But there is the crux you see, britain lost its colonies due to the after-effects of war.

I am no historian, but
1. Couldn't Germany field more planes than the British during the battle of Britain at any given moment? In which case the mass production bit comes into question, even if they could produce them faster than they were shot down, one wonders why the other side couldn't also start increasing its own production to shoot them down faster, especially when they started with more. Now obviously Germany had other problems to contend with, so one could argue that it couldn't devote all its resources to outbuilding the British, but then doesn't that render such a comparison between British production vs German production a tad unfair?

2. I thought there was a stage in the Battle of Britain where they weren't replacing planes faster than they were being lost. However the Germans then targeted London, and some British veterans while shocked at the targeting of civillians, were also aware that strategically this gave the British the means to rebuild their planes.

3. Wasn't one of the ways the British did so well (given they were outnumbered), was because they invented radar?

[Dass.Kapital]

I am no historian, but
1. Couldn't Germany field more planes than the British during the battle of Britain at any given moment? In which case the mass production bit comes into question, even if they could produce them faster than they were shot down, one wonders why the other side couldn't also start increasing its own production to shoot them down faster, especially when they started with more. Now obviously Germany had other problems to contend with, so one could argue that it couldn't devote all its resources to outbuilding the British, but then doesn't that render such a comparison between British production vs German production a tad unfair?

Just to raise a point here, but one of the main problems was not simply one side shooting down the other. It was one side operating at the extreme range for its' fighter aircraft.

This caused quite a few operational problems for the Luftwaffe, which my uneducated self is not clued up enough to really go into, but another thing was that a lot of British Airfields were in the North of the country and so effectively outside the area that the Luftwaffe could attack.

I also seem to recall that neither the Luftwaffe, nor the British/Allies at this time had good types of 'Drop tanks' for their aircraft.

I'm sure some one with actual links or more knowledge will be along to possibly expand upon these points.

As a modern (Relatively) example, look at the Falklands War. The British Sea Harriers were operating close to their fuel supply, where as the Argentinian's were operating at the extreme ranges for their Mirages and Sky Hawks. The logistics of which tended to dictate the combat tactics for both sides.
Much cheers to you and yours.

[D.Turtle]

2. I thought there was a stage in the Battle of Britain where they weren't replacing planes faster than they were being lost. However the Germans then targeted London, and some British veterans while shocked at the targeting of civillians, were also aware that strategically this gave the British the means to rebuild their planes.

British fighter strength and number of available pilots rose during the entire Battle of Britain. The reason it was seen as being so close, was that the British greatly overestimated German strength, while the Germans greatly underestimated British strength. At no point in time was Britain in danger of losing the Battle of Britain (or even having to abandon their southern air fields).

[PainRack]

Regarding plane production in the Battle of Britain, it has also been stated by both British and German officials such as General Thomas(German) that the Luffwaffe had breadth but no depth, whereas the British, who were more sensible in their armament buildup was able to build up a deeper reserve capacity and invested in it via pilot schools in Canada and stuff.

There's also the fact that Britain economy, especially once you add in the Commonwealth was larger than Germany.

Even so, Britain economy itself was smaller than Germany on its own, if you ignore the Commonwealth. It was Britain finanicial health which allowed it to hold on in 1940, and even here, it benefited greatly from American largese. Such as when it simply took over French orders for American aircraft.