Kennedy G. Imperial Defence. The Old World Order, 1856-1956
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World War. By January 1945, the combat formations of Slim’s XIV Army
consisted of three African divisions, no fewer than seven Indian divisions,
but only two British divisions. The reconquest of Burma would have been
impossible without the part played by these colonial forces.
48
But the experience of fighting large-scale conventional operations was
an aberration for most British soldiers. They were far more likely after
1919, and more especially after 1945, to find themselves committed to a
series of counter-insurgency campaigns in which companies or platoons,
rather than the brigades or divisions, were the basic tactical units.
49
Some
were on a relatively small scale and were over quickly. But others, such as
Ireland between 1919 and 1921,
50
Palestine between the periods 1936–9
and 1945–8,
51
Malaya between 1948 and 1960 and Kenya between 1952
and 1956, spilled over into full-scale counter-insurgency campaigns and
tied down large numbers of troops for years on end. On each occasion,
troops were employed against a variety of colonial nationalist movements
in operations intended to buy the government in London time in which
to resolve its political difficulties.
52
Before 1914, the British had often been able to employ Indian troops
to conduct operations in the empire. But after the First World War, their
habit of doing so and then presenting the Indian taxpayer with the bill
ran into growing and effective political opposition in India. In 1919,
Indian army units were scattered across the Middle East in Iraq, Egypt,
Palestine and on the shores of the Black Sea. But the very rigour with
which the British had mobilised Indian resources during the First World
War had compelled them to make political concessions to the Indian
people, and nationalist politicians soon used their new power to insist that
India should no longer bear the costs incurred when Indian troops were
used outside India for wider British purposes.
53
Trenchard’s policy of ‘air
policing’ temporarily defused the issue, and a compromise was reached
between the British Raj and its Indian nationalist opponents. Henceforth,
six to eight Indian army units would be used to supplement the British
garrisons in Aden, Iraq, Ceylon, Malaya, Hong Kong and North China,
and India would provide more in emergency, and the costs would be split
between the Indian and British taxpayers. Furthermore, in the 1920s, they
began a cautious policy of Indianisation, granting commissions to a small
number of Indians in selected regiments and announced that their even-
tual aim was to grant Indians full control of the army. For another decade,
the Indian taxpayer still bore the cost of all troops, both British and
Indian, stationed inside India, but in 1933, even that began to change and
for the first time, the British taxpayer began to subsidise the Indian
defence budget.
In the process of negotiating Indian independence, the British tried
hard to retain some kind of control over the subcontinent’s armed forces.
They were willing, for example, to admit India to the Commonwealth in
1949, even though it was a republic, in the hope that India would then
102 D. French
commit troops to Commonwealth-organised military operations. But the
continuing dispute between India and Pakistan over Kashmir rendered
their efforts futile.
54
Henceforth, the British could no longer employ the
Indian army east of Suez and had to look elsewhere to find the troops
they needed to sustain their empire. In part, they solved this problem by
retaining conscription and sending their own men overseas. They also
tried to mobilise the resources of their remaining imperial possessions.
After Indian independence, they retained the right to raise troops in
Nepal, and some policy-makers also seriously contemplated drawing
upon the resources of their African colonies.
55
However, the latter was
never really a practical option. The African colonies were too poor to pay
for an expanded military establishment, and Britain itself could find
neither the money nor the large cadre of white officers and NCOs to
make good their deficiencies. Although some African and Fijian troops
were sent to Malaya in the early 1950s, by 1953 it was firmly established
once again that the forces in each colony would be paid for solely by that
colony, would belong to that colony and could not be used as part of a
unified imperial reserve unless the British exchequer paid for them.
56
The role of the army in the empire’s post-1945 emergencies has so far
attracted remarkably little attention from academic military historians.
This may be because historians of the British Empire have insisted that
there is nothing much for them to study. Jack Gallagher has asserted that
the British were not driven from their empire after 1945 by successful mili-
tary uprisings.
57
That may be so, but it does not gainsay the fact that the
demise of the empire was accompanied by a great deal of military activity
and that much of the army spent the post-war period stationed in the
empire. Between 1945 and 1956, the British army took part in no fewer
than 20 operations outside Europe. They ranged from the suppression or
riots in Hong Kong and periodic border disputes on the frontiers of the
Aden protectorate to major counter-insurgency campaigns in Malaya and
Kenya and conventional wars in Korea and at Suez. In 1954, the British
army consisted of 11 divisions. Four were stationed in West Germany, two
brigades were stationed in the United Kingdom as part of the strategic
reserve and the remainder were garrisoning Britain’s remaining colonial
possessions.
58
The academic analysis of these operations is distinctly
uneven. While there is a growing body of academic literature on some
aspects of the post-1945 colonial emergencies, particularly policing, pro-
paganda and intelligence,
59
work on the role and behaviour of the army
still relies heavily on published secondary sources. The subject has hardly
been historicised.
60
British post-war, counter-insurgency operations were not invariably
successful. In Palestine, the army failed to suppress the Zionist insurrec-
tion largely because they were operating in a political vacuum. The
Labour government failed to devise a clear political goal around which
the army could develop a coherent military strategy. In Malaya and
The British Army and the empire 103
Kenya they succeeded, partly because the political goal was clearly
defined and partly because coordination between political ends and mil-
itary means was achieved, not just at the highest level of government in
the colony but also at regional and district level. The result was that
when British did depart, they did so only after they had suppressed the
armed groups challenging them, and in both cases, they left behind pro-
Western governments. On the ground, the army was slow to formalise its
counter-insurgency practices into a formal doctrine, but some habits
became common. Intelligence was of critical importance if the army was
to find the insurgents it was trying to suppress, so close cooperation
between the police and troops was essential. Without timely contact
intelligence, the troops often had no option other than to mount large-
scale cordon and search operations, which usually did little more than
antagonise the very people the security authorities wanted to win over
to their cause. The extent to which soldiers on the ground, be it in
Palestine, Malaya or Kenya, remembered the fate of Brigadier-General
Dyer and adhered to the principle of applying minimum force remains
unresolved.
61
But it was the Middle East, and more particularly Egypt, that was the
epicentre of Britain’s military commitments outside Europe in the decade
after 1945. Britain had good strategic reasons for wishing to remain in the
Middle East. Not only was it the source of most of their oil supplies, but
British planners assumed that if the Third World War began, the Soviet
Army would quickly overrun Western Europe. Given their massive inferi-
ority on the ground, the only way that the western powers could hope to
defeat the Soviets was by mounting massive air attacks on their military
and industrial infrastructure, and for these to be effective, they had to
have airfields in the Middle East.
62
This was the reason why the British
were willing to bargain hard with the Egyptians to renew their base rights
in the Suez Canal zone. But the Egyptians did not want British bases on
their soil at any price. Rather than negotiate, they mounted a guerrilla
campaign to drive the British out. By 1953, the British had between 70,000
and 80,000 troops, including the whole of their Strategic Reserve, in the
Canal Zone, merely to protect the base facilities. The resulting stalemate
showed the limits of military power. The Egyptians could not inflict a mili-
tary defeat on the army. But, confined to their camps and under a state of
virtual siege, the British knew that if the Cold War ever heated up, the
base would be unusable. The explosion by the Soviets of their first H-
bomb in August 1953 finally convinced them that the base was a military
white elephant. In 1954, they agreed that they would evacuate the last of
their troops by 1956.
63
But that did not mean that the British had also abandoned their intention
of defending the region against Soviet aggression or using it to mount
counter-strikes against the Soviets. But henceforth, they hoped to minimise
the commitment of ground forces to the region by allying themselves with
104 D. French
the ‘Northern Tier’ of states, Turkey, Iraq and Pakistan, in the Baghdad Pact.
The Pact gave them the right to base bombers even nearer to the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republic’s (USSR) southern frontier.
64
However, they had
reckoned without the new Egyptian leader, Colonel Nasser. The British
acted in collusion with the French and Israelis to invade Egypt in 1956 not
merely because Nasser’s nationalisation of the Suez Canal threatened British
oil supplies, but because Nasser’s wider political agenda threatened to
undermine British influence throughout the whole of the Middle East.
The resulting fiasco highlighted the fundamental limitation of British
land power in the imperial context. It showed that Britain’s land forces
had only been sufficient to sustain the empire because, at least before
1945, they had operated in an auspicious international context. The
stability of the British Empire had rested upon the willingness of the ruled
to acquiesce in their own subjugation. Britain’s exiguous land forces had
been adequate to the tasks they had faced because British diplomatists
had been able to strike a series of accommodations with their Great Power
rivals to maintain a hands-off attitude to each others’ colonial possessions.
Before 1914, this had led them to sign an alliance with Japan in 1902 and
ententes with France in 1904 and Russia in 1907. Between the two world
wars, the empire was sustained because Russia and the United States had
withdrawn into isolation, the German fleet had been scuttled at Scapa
Flow in 1919, and no power was strong enough to dominate continental
Europe. In the absence of such agreements or circumstances, the British
would have soon discovered that they lacked the manpower to defend the
empire and that the cost of raising forces that were adequate to do so
would have made the whole imperial enterprise unprofitable.
65
After 1945, the imperatives of imperial defence led them towards
increasingly close collaboration with the United States. The fact that in
1956 the British no longer possessed the kind of rapid reaction force that
the Cardwell–Childers reforms had given them, and which had allowed
them to conquer Egypt in a matter of weeks in 1882, was only part of the
reason why they faced defeat at Suez. Far more important was the fact that
the international context had been transformed. The kind of aggressive
imperialism that the British had practised so successfully in the late nine-
teenth century was simply no longer internationally acceptable. The Eisen-
hower administration had no more love for Nasser than did the British.
The active role they played in the covert operations that toppled Dr Mus-
sadiq, the Arab nationalist premier of Iraq in August 1953, also showed
that they were quite willing to behave imperially in the Middle East.
66
But
what they were not prepared to do themselves, or to support the British in
doing, was to employ naked force in a way that was bound to alienate the
goodwill of every Arab government in the region. Suez was not the last
occasion when the British employed land power to protect or project their
The British Army and the empire 105
interests outside Europe. But it was the last time they did so without ensur-
ing that they had the active or tacit support of their superpower ally.
Notes
1 Hew Strachan, Wellington’s Legacy. The Reform of the British army 1830–54
(Manchester, 1984); P. Burrows, ‘Crime and punishment in the British army,
1815–1870’, English Historical Review, 100 (1985): 545–71.
2 C. Pulsifer, ‘Beyond the Queen’s Shilling: reflections on the pay of other ranks
in the Victorian British Army’, Journal of the Society for Army Historical Research, 80
(2002): 326–34.
3 A. R. Skelley, The Victorian Army at Hom: The Recruitment and Terms and
Conditions of the British Regular, 1859–1899 (London, 1977), 243–9.
4 R. L. Blancho, ‘Army recruiting reforms, 1861–67’, Journal of the Society for Army
Historical Research, 46 (1968): 217–24; T. F. Gallagher, ‘British military thinking
and the coming of the Franco-Prussian War’, Military Affairs, 39 (1975): 19.
5 E. M. Spiers, The Army and Society, 1815–1914 (London, 1980), 177–235.
6 T. A. Heathcote, The Military in British India. The Development of British Land
Forces in South Asia, 1600–1947 (Manchester, 1995), 90–125; P. Stanley, White
Mutiny. British Military Culture in India, 1825 to 1875 (London, 1998).
7 K. Roy, ‘The construction of regiments in the Indian army: 1859–1913’, War in
History, 8 (2001): 127–48; K. Roy, ‘Logistics and the construction of loyalty: the
welfare mechanism in the Indian army 1859–1913’ in P. S. Gupta and A. Desh-
pande (eds), The British Raj and its Indian Armed Forces, 1857–1939 (Delhi,
2002), 98–124.
8 J. Barrett, ‘The rank and file of the colonial army in Nigeria, 1914–1918’,
Journal of Modern African Studies, 15 (1977): 105–15.
9 A. Clayton, The British Empire as Superpower, 1919–39 (London, 1986), 40–2;
D. Killingray, ‘The idea of a British Imperial Army’, Journal of African History, 20
(1979): 421–36.
10 D. Killingray, ‘The “Rod of Empire”: the debate over corporal punishment in
the British African Colonial Forces, 1888–1946’, Journal of African History, 35
(1994): 201–16.
11 J. Keegan, ‘Inventing military traditions’, in C. Wrigley (ed.), Warfare, Diplomacy
and Politics. Essays in Honour of A. J. P. Taylor (London, 1986), 58–75.
12 P. Burroughs, An unreformed army? 1815–1868’, in D. Chandler and I. Beckett
(eds), The Oxford Illustrated History of the British Army (Oxford, 1994), 160–88.
13 K. Hendrickson, ‘A kinder, gentler British army: mid-Victorian experiments
in the management of vice at Gibraltar and Aldershot’, War and Society, 14
(1996): 21–33; J. D. Campbell, ‘ “Training for sport is training for war”: sport
and the transformation of the British army, 1860–1914’, International Journal
of the History of Sport, 17 (2000): 21–58; R. Hess, ‘ “A healing hegemony: Flo-
rence Nightingale, the British Army in India and a ‘want of . . .exercise’ ” ’,
International Journal of the History of Sport, 15 (1998): 1–17; S. Wood, ‘Temper-
ance and its rewards in the British army’, in M. Harding (ed.), The Victorian
Soldier. Studies in the History of the British Army 1816–1914 (London, 1993),
86–96.
14 D. Arnold, Colonizing the Body. State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-
Century India (Berkeley, CA, 1993); M. Harrison, Public Health in British India.
Anglo-Indian Preventive Medicine 1859–1914 (Cambridge, 1994); E. M. Colling-
ham, Imperial Bodies. The Physical Experience of the Raj, 1800–1947 (London, 2001).
15 S. Guha, ‘Nutrition, sanitation, hygiene, and the likelihood of death: the British
army in India, c.1870–1920’, Population Studies, 47 (1993): 385–401; M. Harrison,
106 D. French
‘Medicine and the management of modern warfare’, History of Science, 34
(1996): 379–410.
16 L. A. Sawchuk, S. D. A. Burke, and J. Padiak, ‘A matter of privilege: infant mor-
tality in the garrison town of Gibraltar, 1870–1899’, Journal of Family History,
27 (2002): 399–429.
17 S. Pagaard, ‘Disease and the British army in South Africa, 1899–1900’, Military
Affairs, 50 (1986): 71–6.
18 M. Harrison, Medicine and Victory. British Military Medicine in the Second World
War (Oxford, 2004), 84.
19 At the moment, the essential introductions are H. Bailes, ‘Technology and
Imperialism: a case study of the Victorian Army in Africa’, Victorian Studies, 24
(1980): 84–104; B. J. Bond (ed.), Victorian Military Campaigns (London, 1967).
A recent popular compendium based on published sources is I. Hernon,
Britain’s forgotten Wars. Colonial Campaigns of the Nineteenth Century (Stroud,
Gloucester, 2003). Lieutenant Commander A. C. Ashcroft, ‘As Britain returns
to an expeditionary strategy, do we have anything to learn from the Victori-
ans?’, Defence Studies, 1 (2001): 75–89, and, for a slightly later period, Brian
Robson’s Crisis on the Frontier: The Third Afghan War and the Campaign in Waziristan
1919–20 (Staplehurst, 2004), show the riches that await historians willing to
delve deep into the archival sources.
20 E. M. Spiers, The Late Victorian Army (Manchester, 1992), 285.
21 S. Miller, Lord Methuen and the British Army: Failure and Redemption (London,
1999), 15–22.
22 I. F. W. Beckett, Modern Insurgencies and Counter-Insurgencies: Guerrillas and their
Opponents since 1750 (London, 2001), 33.
23 E. M. Spiers (ed.), Sudan: The Reconquest Reappraised (London, 1998).
24 The Boer War is probably the most intensively researched of all of Britain’s late
nineteenth-century colonial wars. See: T. Pakenham, The Boer War (London,
1979); B. Nasson, The South African War 1899–1902 (London, 1999); K. Surridge,
Managing the South African War, 1899–1902 (London, 1998); D. Judd and K. Sur-
ridge, The Boer War (London, 2002); A. Wessels (ed.), Lord Roberts and the War in
South Africa, 1899–1902 (Gloucester, 2000).
25 I. F. W. Beckett, ‘Victorians at war: war, technology and change’, Journal of the
Society of Army Historical Research, 81 (2003): 330–8; H. Bailes, ‘Technology and
tactics in the British army, 1866–1900’, in R. Haycock and K. Neilson (eds),
Men, Machines and War (Waterloo, ON, 1988), 21–48; G. R. Winton, ‘The
British Army, mechanisation and a new transport system, 1900–1914’, Journal of
the Society for Army Historical Research, 78 (2000): 197–212.
26 W. M. Ryan, ‘The influence of the imperial frontier on British doctrines of
mechanized warfare’, Albion, 15 (1983): 123–42.
27 Spiers (ed.), Sudan; Spiers, Wars of Intervention: a case study – the reconquest of the
sudan, 1896–98 (London, 1998).
28 T. R. Moreman, The Army in India and the Development of Frontier Warfare,
1849–1947 (London, 1998), 53–67.
29 J. A. Mangan, ‘Duty unto death: English masculinity and militarism in the age
of the new imperialism’, International Journal of the History of Sport, 12 (1995): 10.
30 Spiers, Late Victorian Army, 298–9.
31 M. Lieven, ‘ “Butchering the Brutes all over the place”: total war and massacre
in Zululand, 1879’, History, 84 (1999): 620–1. See also I. Knight, The National
Army Museum Book of the Zulu War (London, 2004); J. P. Laband (ed.), Lord
Chelmsford’s Zululand Campaign 1878–1879 (Gloucester, 1994).
32 K. Surridge, ‘ “All you soldiers are what we call pro-Boer”: the military critique
of the South African War, 1899–1902’, History, 82 (1997): 582–600.
33 Nasson, The South African, 210–33; Judd & Surridge, The Boer War, 187–96.
The British Army and the empire 107
34 W. H. Millar ‘Statistics of death by suicide among Her Majesty’s British troops
serving at home and abroad during the ten years 1862–1871’, Journal of the Statis-
tical Society of London, 37 (1874): 187–92.
35 The Times, 19 Nov. 1890 and 25 June 1909; R. Edmondson, John Bull’s Army
From Within: Facts, Figures, and a Human Document from one who has been ‘through
the mill’ (London, 1907), 93–7.
36 E. Jones and S. Wessely, ‘The origins of British military psychiatry before the
First World War’, War and Society, 19 (2001): 91–108; E. Jones and S. Wessely,
‘Psychiatric battle casualties: an intra- and inter-war comparison’, British Journal
of Psychiatry, 178 (2001): 242–7.
37 K. Jeffery, ‘ “An English barracks in an oriental sea”?: India in the aftermath of
the First World War’, Modern Asian Studies, 15 (1981): 369–70.
38 M. Yapp, ‘British perceptions of the Russian threat to India’, Modern Asian
Studies, 21 (1987): 647–65; A. Preston, ‘Sir Charles MacGregor and the defence
of India, 1857–1887’, Historical Journal, 12 (1969): 58–77; A. Preston, ‘Frus-
trated great gamesmanship: Sir Garnet Wolseley’s plans for war against Russia,
1873–1880’, International History Review, 2 (1980): 239–65; R. A. Johnson, ‘ “Rus-
sians at the gates of India”? planning for the defence of India, 1885–1900’,
Journal of Military History, 67 (2003): 697–744
39 P. Burroughs, ‘Defence and Imperial Disunity’ in A. Porter (ed.), The Oxford
History of the British Empire. Vol. 3. The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), 321.
40 Clayton, The British Empire as Superpower, 11–13.
41 D. French, ‘The Dardanelles, Mecca and Kut: prestige as a factor in British
Eastern strategy, 1914–1916’, War and Society, 5 (1987): 45–7; D. Killingray,
‘Repercussions of World War One in the Gold Coast’, Journal of African History,
19 (1978): 39.
42 J. Cell, ‘Colonial rule’, in J. M. Brown and Wm. Roger Louis (eds), The Oxford
History of the British Empire. Vol. 4. The Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999), 232–54;
A. H. M. Kirk-Greene, ‘The thin white line: the size of the British colonial
service in Africa’, African Affairs, 79 (1980): 25–44.
43 D. G. Boyce, ‘From Assaye to Assaye: reflections on British government, force
and moral authority in India’, Journal of Military History 63 (1999): 643–68.
44 C. Townshend, ‘Military force and civil authority in the UK, 1914–1921’,
Journal of British Studies, 28 (1989): 262–92; M. F. Noone Jr, ‘Tort claims in
counterinsurgency operations: the British experience in Ireland, 1919–1921’,
Journal of Military History, 57 (1993): 89–109.
45 I am most grateful to Mr Simeon Shoul, who is completing a doctoral thesis on
the British army’s operations in aid of the civil power in the empire between the
wars, for giving me the benefit of his knowledge and understanding of this point.
46 D. Omissi (ed.), Indian Voices of the Great War. Soldier’s Letters, 1914–1918
(London, 1999).
47 G. W. T. Hughes, ‘African manpower statistics for the British Forces in East
Africa, 1914–1918’, Journal of African History, 19 (1978): 101–16; D. Savage and
J. Forbes Munro, ‘Carrier corps recruitment in the British East Africa protec-
torate 1914–1918’, Journal of African History, 2 (1966): 313–43; T. Tai-Yong, ‘An
imperial home front: Punjab and the First World War’, Journal of Military
History, 64 (2000): 371–410.
48 D. Killingray, ‘The idea of a British imperial army’, Journal of African History, 20
(1979): 430–3; D. Killingray, ‘Military and labour recruitment in the Gold
Coast during the Second World War’, Journal of African History, 23 (1982):
83–95; J. Hamilton, ‘African colonial forces’, in D. Smurthwaite (ed.), The
Forgotten War: The British Army in the Far East 1941–1945 (London, 1992), 67–77;
M. Hickey, The Unforgettable Army. Slim’s XIV Army in Burma (Tunbridge
Wells, 1992).
108 D. French
49 J. van Wingen and H. K. Tillema, ‘British military intervention after World
War Two: militance in a second-rank power’, Journal of Peace Research, 17
(1980): 291–303 provides an almost complete list of these operations for the
period after 1945.
50 C. Townshend, The British Campaign in Ireland 1919–21. The Development of
Political and Military Policies (Oxford, 1975); P. Hart, The IRA and its Enemies.
Violence and Community in Cork, 1916–1923 (Oxford, 1998).
51 D. A. Charters, The British Army and Jewish Insurgency in Palestine, 1945–47
(London, 1989); C. Townshend, ‘The defence of Palestine: insurrection and
public security, 1936–1939’, English Historical Review, 103 (1988): 917–49; M.
Kolinsky, ‘The collapse and restoration of public security’, in M. J. Cohen and
M. Kolinsky (eds), Britain and the Middle East in the 1930’s: Security Problems,
1935–39 (London, 1992), 147–68.
52 F. Furedi, ‘Creating a breathing space: the political management of colonial
emergencies’, in R. Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorders in the European
Empires after 1945 (London, 1994), 89–106.
53 Jeffery, ‘An English barracks’, 372–86.
54 Anita Inder Singh, ‘Imperial Defence and the transfer of power in India,
1946–47’, International History Review, 4 (1982): 475–87; Anita Inder Singh,
‘Keeping India in the Commonwealth: British political and military aims,
1947–49’, Journal of Contemporary History, 20 (1985): 469–81.
55 R. Gregorian, The British Army, the Gurkhas and Cold War Strategy in the Far East,
1947 to 1954 (London, 2002).
56 C. A. Crocker, ‘Military Dependence: the colonial legacy in Africa’, Journal of
Modern African Studies, 12 (1974): 277–81; Killingray, ‘The idea of a British Imper-
ial Army’, 433; A. Nissimi, ‘The illusion of power in Kenya: strategy, decolonisa-
tion, and the British base, 1946–61’, International History Review, 23 (2001): 827–8.
57 J. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982),
73–4.
58 M. Dockrill, British Defence Since 1945 (Oxford, 1988), 51.
59 See, for example, D. M. Anderson and D. Killingray (eds), Policing and
Decolonisation. Politics, Nationalism and the Police, 1917–1965 (Manchester, 1992);
R. Holland (ed.), Emergencies and Disorders in the European Empires after 1945
(London, 1994); S. L. Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds. British Govern-
ments, the Media and Colonial Counter-Insurgency 1944–1960 (Leicester, 1995).
The journal Intelligence and National Security is also publishing a growing
number of articles about the role of intelligence in Britain’s counter-insur-
gency operations.
60 Among the best such works are General Sir W. J. Jackson, Withdrawal from
Empire (London, 1986); G. Blaxland, The Regiments Depart: A History of the British
Army, 1945 to 1970 (London, 1971). Significant and welcome exceptions to this
generalisation, and books that are firmly grounded in the extant archives, are
Charters, The British Army and the Jewish Insurgency in Palestine and Gregorian, The
British Army, the Gurkhas (London, 1989).
61 See T. R. Mockatis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–60 (London, 1990) and
J. Newsinger, British Counterinsurgency from Palestine to Northern Ireland (London,
2002) for the opposing views.
62 M. J. Cohen, ‘The strategic role of the Middle East after the war’, in M. J.
Cohen and M. Kolinsky (eds), Demise of the British Empire in the Middle East:
Britain’s Responses to Nationalist Movements, 1943–1955 (London, 1998),
23–37.
63 R. Ovendale, ‘Egypt and the Suez Base agreement’, in J. W. Young (ed.), The
Foreign Policy of Churchill’s Peacetime Administration 1951–1955 (Leicester, 1988),
135–58.
British Army and the empire 109
64 A. Jalal, ‘Towards the Baghdad Pact: South Asia and Middle East Defence in
the Cold War, 1947–1955’, International History Review, 11 (1989): 409–33; B.
Holden-Reid, ‘The “Northern Tier” and the Baghdad Pact’, in J. W. Young
(ed.), The Foreign Policy of Churchill’s Peacetime Administration 1951–1955
(Leicester, 1988), 159–79.
65 Wm. Roger Louis and R. Robinson, ‘The imperialism on decolonisation’, Journal
of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22 (1994): 462–511; J. Darwin, Britain and
Decolonisation: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (London, 1988).
66 M. J. Gasiorowski, ‘The 1953 coup d’etat in Iran’, International Journal of Middle
East Studies, 19 (1987): 261–86.
110 D. French
6 The Royal Navy and the defence
of empire, 1856–1918
Andrew Lambert
In November 1901, the First Lord of the Admiralty, Lord Selbourne,
minuted the Cabinet that: ‘Its Credit and its Navy seem to me to be the
two main pillars of power on which the strength of this country rests, and
each is essential to the other’. For Selbourne and his contemporaries, ‘this
country’ was an imperial construct, not an insular geographical fact. The
same point had been made 200 years earlier; nothing had changed in the
interval,
1
nor would the underlying realities be altered by the end of
formal empire. Britain remained a major international capitalist economy
with a powerful navy.
This understanding gives a particular significance to the role of the
Royal Navy (RN) in ‘Imperial Defence’. This phrase is loaded with mean-
ings that have prompted some to argue that no such thing existed;
2
others
have extended the concept of empire, while this chapter will argue that
the term ‘defence’ is highly, and in many ways, deliberately, misleading.
What kind of empire?
While this is not the place to debate the nature of the British Empire, it
is important to establish what was included within this construct and what
was considered worth defending. There have been two major structural
explanations for the pattern of imperial development in this period, those
of Robinson and Gallagher, and of Cain and Hopkins.
3
While the former
stressed the strategic imperatives, the dominance of India and direction
from the Centre by an ‘Official mind’, the latter preferred to rebuild the
economic picture, stressing the primacy of ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism’, the
City of London and finance, in British Imperial policy. The importance of
these two texts lies as much in the debate they prompted as their core
arguments.
4
The two strands of thinking are not mutually exclusive, and
for this purpose we may find it more profitable to see how their perspec-
tives can illuminate our subject. Both stress the relative unimportance of
land, the value of markets, and the use of naval force to secure them. Criti-
cally, both theories use the concept of an ‘informal’ empire to widen the
reach of British power and the range of countries where the power of the