On the evening of 10 November 1959 Harold Macmillan went for dinner at the Savoy. The famous hotel in London’s West End offered a convivial meeting point for dignitaries and heads of state. It was especially favoured by those whose embassies had no sumptuous accommodation to offer. One such was Sékou Touré, the union organizer-turned-president of independent Guinea with whom the British prime minister chewed the fat that November night. The two men enjoyed an easy informality. They had previously spent two days shooting grouse together. But blowing little birds out of Scottish skies did less to cement their friendship than their shared exasperation with General de Gaulle.1 Macmillan, fresh from election victory, but mired in the problems of a collapsing Central African Federation, had Africa on his mind. The Moroccan and Ghanaian governments were leading a chorus of UN disapproval over the first French atomic tests at Reggane in southern Algeria. The blasts were the prelude to de Gaulle’s proud announcement of France’s force de frappe. Confirmation that France not only had ‘the bomb’, but reserved the right to use it unilaterally infuriated Eisenhower’s administration and made it harder still for the British government to keep in step with de Gaulle’s Algerian policy.2
Other, more fundamental challenges lay ahead. It was less than two months before a more anxious Macmillan, his face drained of colour, would rise to the podium in the South African parliament building in Cape Town to deliver perhaps the best-known affirmation of British governmental intention to close the book on colonialism in Africa.3 When he sat down to dine with Touré, however, ‘SuperMac’s’ ‘wind of change’ speech was yet to be written.4 In the event, the Prime Minister shared the task with Sir John Maud, British High Commissioner in South Africa.5 Macmillan’s words before a shocked audience of South African MPs, most of them apartheid supporters, have been cited ever since as evidence that Britain was, by then, committed to peaceful flight from empire.6 That withdrawal is often favourably contrasted with the upheaval that attended African decolonization elsewhere. Did the British Empire end with merely a whisper a few short years after Eden’s Suez misadventure? This chapter tests the proposition that it did. To do so, let’s first return to the Savoy dinner companions.
Like Macmillan, Sékou Touré blamed de Gaulle for many of his troubles. The Frenchman insisted that Touré’s Guinean regime be ostracized because it chose immediate, full independence during French West African referenda held in September 1958. Appearances, though, were deceptive. Touré’s isolation was less total than it seemed. For one thing, Guinean diplomats had tried to alter the terms of the 1958 referendum to make the choice, not a total break with France, but a more equitable ‘Community’ whose African members need not be in thrall to their former imperial master.7 For another thing, French diplomats became less hostile once it became apparent that discarding Guinea was tantamount to casting the country into a British and Ghanaian orbit. Touré, for his part, was happy to play all sides off each other. By the summer of 1959 there was a palpable sense that fundamental strategic realignments were taking place throughout the region.8
Figure 13. Macmillan’s Wind of Change speech as depicted by the Daily Herald on 4 February 1960.
In April 1959 British, French, and US governmental representatives convened in Washington to discuss their long-term strategic plans for Africa.9 These exchanges were a dialogue of the deaf. American delegates mocked French insistence that ‘the spread of Islam’ was dangerous. The British were equally dismissive of French alarmism about Soviet incursion into sub-Saharan Africa via Sudan or Ethiopia. More importantly, the notion that the three powers could determine the scope and pace of political change in Africa, or elsewhere for that matter, was increasingly ludicrous. Much of the European colonial presence in Southeast Asia was gone, replaced either by combative post-colonial regimes, as in Indonesia and North Vietnam, or by western clients in soon-to-be-independent Malaysia and Singapore. In the Caribbean, some of the oldest colonial settlements of all were edging towards independence via the detour of a short-lived British West Indies Federation for Jamaica, Barbados, Trinidad, the Leeward and Windward Islands. The geo-political complexion of empire, always predominantly African for France, was becoming more so for Britain as well. As we have seen already, both fight and flight approaches were adopted south of the Sahara. But the insurgencies that rocked French and British territories from Madagascar to Kenya were, by the end of the decade, in eclipse. There was less cause for optimism in the white-ruled regimes of Algeria and Southern Africa. But in the African expanses intermediate between them, adjustment to a post-imperial future was under way.
The re-design of African colonial relationships went furthest in French black Africa. Discussed in the next chapter, the Algerian political crisis of May 1958 that propelled de Gaulle’s return to office triggered constitutional reorganization not just in France and Algeria, but south of the Sahara too. Referenda were held in the member territories of the French Union to determine whether or not they wished to become members of a replacement confederation—the French Community, its name suggested by Madagascar’s premier, Philibert Tsiranana.10 De Gaulle insisted on a single, blunt alternative for any that did not: complete secession with the loss of French revenues that this implied. Hence, the position in which Touré’s regime found itself after selecting the latter option. Promulgated on 4 October 1958, Article 78 of the Fifth Republic constitution defined the local prerogatives that Community territories could expect. Matters of foreign policy, currency and finance, strategic exports, justice, higher education, transport, and telecommunications, were reserved for decision by the Community as a whole. Reading between the lines of this stipulation implied something else entirely: that France, still the Community’s sole independent state, would reserve ultimate control in key areas.11
In theory, the way remained open for some sort of federation of franco-phone African states within the larger Community. This was something to which the Senegalese leaders Léopold Senghor and Mamadou Dia remained attached.12 In practice, the entire Community project was hostage to the referenda decisions of its designated African members in September 1958. Only Guinea unequivocally rejected Community membership, and by a thumping ninety-seven per cent.13 Niger, another territory with a strong tradition of RDA-tinged radicalism, might have followed suit but for the lobbying, vote-rigging, and police intimidation organized by its colonial authorities.14 Such crude manipulation was the exception, not the rule. Most of the governments in French West Africa recognized what could be gained by negotiating concessions from Paris. Fewer were drawn to the Senegalese-led federation idea. The majority endorsed the Community in return for pledges from Paris of preferential economic treatment and a rapid transition to self-rule.15 Dialogue over the rights and benefits attendant on imperial connections was a logical progression from the claims-making culture of Francophone black African politics defined during the French Union’s early years. By 1960, during which year fourteen Francophone African territories became formally independent, the Community’s decision-making structures were reworked again, into the apparatus for a Franco-African clientelism that lasted for decades.16
British plans for Africa risked getting left behind by the French Community’s metamorphosis into a club of insider elites.17 The Suez expedition triggered an earthquake in British politics but it did not change relationships with African colonies to the extent that the May crisis did for the French Empire in late 1958. There were cross-Channel similarities even so. One was that from 1957 onwards Macmillan’s first government set about the most comprehensive stock-taking of empire since the Second World War. Cabinet committees with impressively grand titles—for Defence, for Africa, for Southeast Asia, reviewed the strategic, political, and economic worth of imperial territories. Overseas commitments, defence spending, and, of course, colonial policy looked set to be scaled back. All of this implied a magisterial redesign where none existed. There would be no empire-wide transformation. But the hubbub of backroom discussion did change the terms of Cabinet and Whitehall thinking, making colonial withdrawal seem more proximate and less earth-shattering.18 Another similarity was that British ministers and colonial administrators shared their French cousins’ concern with Africa’s pro-western orientation. Nasser, by now the leader of an Arab Federation incorporating Egypt and Syria, remained a worry; for the British at least, the racist militancy of apartheid South Africa even more so.19
Though usually at pains to deny it, government ministers in London and Paris were also increasingly sensitive to external criticism of colonialism, particularly if such attacks were framed in the language of human rights. A signatory to the 1953 European Convention on Human Rights, Britain was taken to task at Strasbourg over the hanging of nine Cypriot fighters.20 A Greek Cypriot lawyer, Glafkos Clerides, provided the Athens government with the evidence necessary to make a case before the Strasbourg judges. He went on to expose cases of detainee torture that led to the court-martial of two army interrogators in April 1956.21 Unfortunately, this did not herald any marked shift in counter-insurgency practices. The execution of two Greek Cypriot gunmen a month later provoked outrage in Greece. The hanging of another three in September was held to prove that the British were becoming more Draconian towards the Greek Cypriot community, not less.22 With the worst of the Algerian War and revelations about the killing of Mau Mau detainees still to come, external condemnation of colonial dirty war methods was set to intensify.23
America, as ever Britain’s leading diplomatic partner, could also be a severe critic, Eisenhower’s administration exploiting obvious opportunities to burnish its anti-colonial credentials.24 From 1954 onwards the annual round of UN General Assembly debates witnessed stinging denunciations of colonial abuses that united otherwise antagonistic states across the Cold War divide.25 Newer General Assembly members, generally supportive of the Non-Aligned Movement, rejected any distinction between British and other colonialism, tarring all imperial powers with the same brush.
In the colonies whose futures were being debated, first demonstrations and civil disorders, then sophisticated media campaigns and backstairs lobbying were organized to stir sympathetic UN delegates into action. Women and children were especially potent propaganda weapons. School strikes in Cyprus achieved greater prominence after urban marches were banned. Images of blood-spattered schoolchildren beaten to the ground by police in Limassol did more to discredit British actions than any number of Greek diplomatic protests.26 Newsreel footage of Algiers women crushed against a CRS-cordon in defiant support of the FLN was equally poignant. An incontrovertible shift was occurring. Beyond the confines of inter-state politics, public criticism of empire was becoming globalized, registering in diffuse cultural milieu from anti-colonial writings and civil rights activism to hostile coverage on film and its bumptious sibling, television.
These transnational forces of civic activism also had their equivalents closer to home. Strongest among these in Britain was the Movement for Colonial Freedom (MCF), founded in 1954 on the remnants of older, less strident anti-imperialist groups whose political impact had been limited. The MCF was confrontational. Fiery press articles, hostile parliamentary questions, and a nose for unearthing embarrassing episodes of colonial violence combined into a strategy calculated to win public support. The MCF’s leading lights, Fenner Brockway, former general secretary of the Independent Labour Party, and two of the newer stars in Labour’s firmament, Anthony Wedgwood Benn and Barbara Castle, ran rings around the stodgy arguments put forward by Hugh Gaitskell’s Labour Party leadership to justify gradual reform. But we should not take the argument too far. Few of the MCF’s three million rank-and-file members, most of them trade unionists automatically ‘affiliated’ to the Movement, shared the radicalism of the group’s activist core.27 And the MCF’s leftist rhetoric facilitated official efforts to discredit it, making it harder to mobilize public opposition to colonialism in general rather than against egregious human rights abuses in particular.28
South Africa was the one territory to provoke broader-based popular opposition to colonial-style abuses. Opposition to racist rule, formerly confined to a loose coalition of anti-colonial groups, trade unionists, and anti-nuclear protestors, entered the British political mainstream as the 1950s drew to a close. While Macmillan headed towards Cape Town in early 1960, Britons were being urged to boycott South African products including Outspan oranges and Craven A cigarettes. In January Liverpool City Council became the first metropolitan local authority in Britain to ban South African goods. The Council’s decision only affected some £2,000-worth of canned fruit, but the worthiness of the principle involved became sickeningly clear after the police shootings of South African protestors in Sharpeville three months later. Public revulsion at the killings transformed the cause of anti-apartheid into something approaching a mass protest movement.29 By now the strongest common thread linking French and British trajectories of decolonization was the persistence of colonial conflicts that sullied international reputations and divided domestic opinion. For France, Algeria was, by 1960, more or less everything. For Britain, less blood-soaked conflicts—in Cyprus and in Southern Rhodesia above all—proved even more intractable.
Despite the prosecution of ‘successful’ counter-insurgency strategies in Malaya and Kenya, the Cyprus Emergency indicated that anti-British violence was not subsiding everywhere. Between 1954 and 1959 increasing numbers of British troops were used to lock down the island through curfews, searches, collective punishments, and targeted operations.30 As a result, the garrison island of Cyprus, under British colonial rule since 1878, became the unlikely setting for some of the severest restrictions anywhere in the British Empire. Unlikely because the island’s Turkish minority remained substantially pro-British. Unlikely, too, because the Cypriot Greek majority, uniquely among anti-colonial movements of the day, wanted, not independence but unification with another state. It was this Enosis, or union with Greece, that the British denied. Greek Cypriot representatives dismissed new constitutional arrangements in 1948 that conceded limited home rule.31 The British authorities responded in kind by ignoring a January 1950 plebiscite organized by the pro-Enosis Ethnarchy Bureau, which registered overwhelming Greek Cypriot backing for union.32 Countervailing demands from Turkey, NATO’s eastern linchpin, were harder to overlook. Prospects for a flight solution looked grim.
The repressive turn in Britain’s Cyprus policy also had a longer history. Press censorship, broader prerogatives to lock up protesters and prosecute sedition, and, most controversially, the authority to deport ‘troublemakers’ were added to the Governor’s legislative armoury after Government House was razed to the ground during previous Enosis demonstrations in Nicosia in October 1931. The colonial government in Nicosia bolstered its arsenal of arbitrary powers after the UN rejected Greek demands for Cypriot self-determination in December 1954.33 So the island was already subject to stringent regulation before a state of emergency was declared following the latest assassination of a British serviceman on 26 November 1955.34 Colonial policy, it seemed, began from the proposition that Cypriot political expression should be discouraged. To borrow the phrase of Labour MP Richard Crossman, the policy’s most trenchant British critic, Cyprus resembled ‘an amiable police state’. Hard-line parliamentary statements by Conservative ministers flatly ruling out Cypriot self-determination confirmed Crossman’s impression that the British were spoiling for a showdown with the pro-Enosis insurgents of Colonel George Grivas’ National Organization of [Greek] Cypriot Fighters, the Ethniki Organosis Kyrion Agoniston (EOKA).35
The array of legislative instruments available to the authorities in Nicosia goes some way to explaining this combativeness. The peremptory replacement of the Governor Sir Robert Armitage following the September 1955 riots in Nicosia, with Britain’s most senior soldier, Field Marshal Sir John Harding, underlined the government’s willingness to wield these powers to the full.36 Also critical was the mounting official exasperation with Archbishop Makarios, the political voice of Enosis and, in British eyes, an exceptionally slippery customer.37 The accretion of various emergency powers and the visceral dislike of Makarios do not tell us much about the solution preferred in London. Anthony Eden dispatched Harding with only vague instructions ‘to get moving on the road to self-government if possible’, and, more pessimistically, ‘to have a look around first’ before resorting to emergency rule.38
The Field Marshal never claimed to have a particular political solution in mind, but he held stronger views about the heightened security measures necessary to avert another Palestine-type humiliation. The gloves were about to come off in the war against Cypriot ‘terrorism’. Within weeks of Harding’s arrival the island was sealed off to prevent arms supplies coming in. Police and army ranks swelled. An intelligence war was launched in a bid to flush out EOKA cells. In December the Communist Progressive Party of Workers (AKEL) was banned.39 To cap it all, on the afternoon of Friday 9 March 1956, Makarios was herded onto an RAF transport plane at Nicosia airport. To the dismay of Greek Cypriots, their leader was deported first to Mombasa, then onwards by sea to the Seychelles where, in an unfortunate coincidence, the house reserved for his arrest bore the name La Bastille.40
Unfortunately for Harding, the flaws in Britain’s response to the Cyprus revolt were laid bare by each of these measures. The depth of national sentiment shared by Greek Cypriots and their mainland brethren was mistakenly read as illicit complicity, not fellow feeling. The island’s police, reliant on Turkish Cypriot recruits, was badly placed to play arbiter and poorly equipped to penetrate Greek Cypriot society in the hunt for EOKA. Policemen living in fear of EOKA assassination and army units frustrated by the walls of community silence they encountered became increasingly thuggish. The Communists, far from being seditionist, offered the one secular, inter-ethnic alternative to Church-influenced enosis nationalism. With AKEL proscribed and Makarios removed, there were no viable interlocutors left to discuss a compromise solution. Perhaps worst of all from the perspective of global media coverage, the image of stone-throwing youths in school uniform running from heavily-armed riot squads through the back-streets of Nicosia made a mockery of Harding’s clampdown. Harding’s emergency rule as a fight solution was no solution at all.41
The conventional explanation for this clash is that it was the Cypriots’ misfortune to inhabit an island strategically pivotal to Britain’s Mediterranean and Middle Eastern presence. In this reading of events, Tory ‘Suez groupers’, service chiefs, Foreign Office staff, and others with vested Middle East interests redoubled Britain’s hold over Cyprus after the pull-out from Egypt in December 1956. The island’s bases and listening stations, in other words, rose in importance in inverse proportion to the declining viability of Britain’s grip on the Suez Canal zone.42 The neatness of this explanation is its weakness. British service chiefs discerned no such linear progression. They complained that Downing Street improvised Cyprus policy, lurching from one expedient to another because the politicians had neither the stomach for confrontation nor the wherewithal to negotiate withdrawal. Bitterly opposed to Cyprus partition, which they feared would make British military bases unworkable, in July 1957 the heads of Britain’s armed forces pleaded for clarity: either an unequivocal commitment to fight EOKA or the admission that flight was the sole option.43
In fact, efforts to break the political logjam were being pursued. The problem was that the political atmosphere in Cyprus was slow to improve. Makarios was allowed back to Athens in the spring of 1957 and a new, liberal Governor, Sir Hugh Foot (brother of Labour MP Michael Foot), took office that December. On Christmas Eve the new Governor eased curfew restrictions and ordered the release of 100 detainees, plus all women being held without trial. But Foot’s longer-term scheme to concede Cyprus independence foundered on the rocks of Turkish governmental opposition in early 1958.44 In the absence of a workable plan for British withdrawal, inter-ethnic violence spiralled out of control. EOKA killings not only targeted security-force personnel but Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriot ‘traitors’ as well. A shadowy Turkish Cypriot self-defence organization, Turk Mukavemet Teskilati, appeared on the scene. Its leader, Rauf Denktash, a future president of the Turkish Cypriot Republic, shared Grivas’ fondness for bombings and other terror tactics.45 Determined to protect themselves and distrustful of the army and police, rural communities turned to vigilantism, generating bloodier inter-communal clashes. By 1958 Cyprus was close to civil war.46
The uncomfortable parallels between the internal dynamics of the Cyprus conflict and the final, chaotic months of the British presence in Palestine caused alarm in Nicosia and London.47 Turning from fight to flight at local level was not yielding results. Two points bear emphasis here. First is that surreptitious exchanges with Makarios and even Grivas about settlements and ceasefires had gone on, albeit fitfully, for years. Second is that the Labour Party effectively endorsed Cyprus independence at its October 1957 party conference. As a result, Harding and his influential chief secretary, John Reddaway, both men identified as Tory placemen, found it impossible to negotiate for anything less with Greek and Greek Cypriot representatives.48 Reluctant to contemplate partition, the last resort of the cornered imperial politician and, in this case, a choice identifiable with Turkish preferences, Macmillan turned instead to international diplomacy.
As in Palestine a decade earlier, the chosen ‘solution’ amounted to recognition that the problem defied clear-cut answers. Macmillan confessed as much in his diary on 7 July 1957. Cyprus, he said, ‘is one of the most baffling problems which I can remember. There are objections to about every possible course.’ The lull in terrorist activity was merely temporary; the military forces needed to quell it were unaffordable. In any event, Labour, if re-elected, was sure to give Cyprus away. Meanwhile, ‘if we give in to Greece there will be a war between Greece and Turkey. If we “partition”, it is a confession of failure’ and the prelude to civil war. And yet all Britain really wanted was the military bases.49
Sensibly enough, the Prime Minister concealed his gloominess, putting on a brave face in Cyprus diplomacy. During May he proposed an ‘adventure in partnership’ with the Greek and Turkish governments. Lennox-Boyd followed up, proclaiming a ‘new course’ when the Commons debated Cyprus policy on 26 June.50 Both men were referring to what came to be known as the ‘tri-dominium’ scheme. This was a plan sketched out during lengthy sessions of an inner-Cabinet of Macmillan, Lennox-Boyd, Selwyn Lloyd, Duncan Sandys, R.A. Butler, plus senior Foreign Office and military personnel. Cabinet Secretary Norman Brook worked out the fine details in early July.51 The plan rested on power-sharing between Greek and Turkish Cypriot representatives to be jointly overseen by the Greek, Turkish, and British governments. Agreed ratios of Greek and Turkish personnel at all levels of island government were backed by strict guarantees of minority rights. Britain would retain its precious bases.
What did this actually mean? Not full independence certainly; not quite partition either, although the explicit commitment to protect minority—in other words, Turkish Cypriot—rights could be read as opening the door to the island’s division along communal lines. And while Britain was not washing its hands of Cyprus as it did Palestine, the ‘adventure in partnership’ carried an implicit threat that it might yet do so.52
In discussions over defence spending in December 1958 the chiefs of staff redoubled the pressure for a decisive political break, using the Cyprus problem to illustrate the military complications created by inadequate investment in the internal security services of individual colonies. The Army’s strategic reserve, much of it located in Kenya, was persistently depleted by calls from colonial governors for reinforcements to work alongside local police ‘in aid of the civil power’.53 Nicosia led the field in making such requests—and to what purpose? The service chiefs noted that ‘EOKA is as strong and effective as it ever has been, both in personnel and arms, and support for EOKA among the general Greek Cypriot public is stronger than ever’. Policing and intelligence gathering were so hapless that five army battalions were needed to cope with the resulting insecurity. Again, the senior soldiers identified the policy-makers as culprits: ‘the Cyprus Emergency has always been treated as one of short duration, with success always “just around the corner”.’ Investment in the island’s local security forces was therefore neglected with predictably bad consequences.54
Days later, on the night of 17 December 1958, Costas Constantinados and Yiannakis Athanassiou, the last two EOKA fighters condemned to hang, were being comforted by an Orthodox priest before facing the gallows in Nicosia’s Central Prison. Governor Foot was temperamentally inclined to clemency. But he withheld a reprieve fearing that more hard-line Cabinet ministers and army commanders would see red. Unbeknown to him, the Greek and Turkish Foreign Ministers Evangelos Averoff and Fatin Zorlu, then attending a NATO Council meeting in Paris, had just issued a joint appeal for mercy. A sign of things to come, Greece and Turkey were setting the agenda in Cyprus. That two historic antagonists should be willing to compromise made British insistence on hanging the two EOKA men seem vindictive and out of touch. A U-turn was agreed. Frantic Colonial Office efforts were made to contact Foot before the executions went ahead. The result: a Governor’s pardon with barely half an hour to spare. Traumatized, the young EOKA fighters survived. Two RAF servicemen, identified by Grivas as targets for a tit-for-tat reprisal, were less fortunate. Early on the morning of 20 December their van was bombed in EOKA’s final lethal attack on Britain’s armed forces.55
Seen from the military standpoint, implementation of the tri-dominium scheme through a new Cyprus constitution could not come fast enough. This was not, however, an outcome that Britain’s politicians could arrange. Months of complex negotiation lay ahead, much of it conducted under the aegis of the three outside players with most vested interests in the outcome: NATO, the UN, and the United States. All three welcomed the settlement agreed, not by the British, but by the Greek and Turkish governments after a week-long conference in Zurich between 6 and 11 February 1959.56 A breach between two NATO partners was averted, the communal power-sharing and rights guarantees provided benchmarks for UN monitors, and Cypriot Communism was marginalized. Even so, an agreement derived from the original tri-dominium plan contained a fatal flaw; it frustrated Greek Cypriot hopes and lent heavily towards Turkish preferences. This iniquity rendered the Cyprus Republic established on 16 August 1960 dangerously unstable. But when renewed inter-communal clashes broke out in December 1963 it was the UN that stepped in at Britain’s invitation. The spectre of Palestine partition that had hung over British official thinking was ultimately made real, first by UN peacekeepers, then by Turkish military intervention following a Greek Cypriot coup a decade later.
The Cyprus emergency was clearly a special case that, for all its frustrations, exerted little influence over British colonial policies elsewhere. In the years before Macmillan discerned the force of African nationalist wind-power, neither the revision of plans for Nigerian self-government at the London Conference in July 1954 nor even full independence for Ghana in March 1957 convinced Ministers and colonial officials that a conveyer belt of British African decolonization was about to start moving. Indeed, Nigeria could be held up to prove exact opposites: the merits of proceeding cautiously or accelerating final withdrawal. British negotiators tried to combine the two. Broadly amicable talks continued between 1957 and 1959, first consolidating regional self-government, then agreeing terms and dates for full independence in October 1960. Underlying this negotiated flight were two factors beyond British control. One was imminent independence in neighbouring French West African states. The other was the arrangements made between Nigeria’s ethnically-based parties for the division of power. Not intrinsically unwelcome, these arrangements presumed the British were already gone.57
The combination of outward calm and ceremonial politeness on the one hand, hasty reappraisals of declining British options on the other, was equally apparent in the next wave of independence settlements agreed with eastern and southern African territories. In Julius Nyerere, leader of the Tanganyika African National Union, the British were blessed with a far-sighted interlocutor determined to follow his party’s programme of socialist development.58 Hastings Banda of Nyasaland and Kenneth Kaunda of Northern Rhodesia also tolerated Britain’s schizoid alternation between imperial jailor and glad-handing negotiator with extraordinary forbearance. In each case, the dynamic was the same. Fearing protests or civil unrest that could not be stifled without incurring international condemnation, Macmillan’s government ultimately acknowledged that the substance of imperial power was draining away.59 In this sense, preoccupation with the minutiae of electoral arrangements and the precise timing of final independence accords—December 1961 for Tanzania, July 1964 for Malawi (formerly Nyasaland), and October 1964 for Zambia (formerly Northern Rhodesia)—obscures the essential point. Attitudinally speaking, by late 1960 the key decision-makers in Macmillan’s second government had crossed the Rubicon from imperial to post-imperial mind-sets. Conserving international reputation and post-colonial influence meant letting go sooner, not later.
Does such high politics really matter or were changing British and French calculations about decolonization undergirded by economic factors? Put differently, how important were their empires to the wealth of post-war Britain and France by the late 1950s? This basic question divides the scholars who have addressed it. There are two reasons why. The first relates to measurement, the second to interpretation of the parts played by private industry and the state in colonial economies. Focusing, first, on the indicators of colonial economic importance, some statistics look unequivocal. Received wisdom suggested that the ‘sterling area’ was a cornerstone of Britain’s post-war financial position. And during the 1950s the value of sterling assets held by remaining British colonies, mainly the producers of high-value primary goods, more than doubled. In 1958 the sum touched £1.45 billion. Colonial holdings, in other words, comprised almost half of Britain’s overseas sterling reserves.60
The sterling area’s member countries not only valued their own currencies against sterling but deposited their dollar earnings in a British-managed currency pool to the immense advantage of Britain’s balance of payments. The London market remained their primary source of borrowing. Colonial Office specialists were, not surprisingly, reluctant to see Britain’s control over the issue of currency and the dominance of British banks in issuing commercial loans to colonial borrowers replaced by national banks in independent African territories.61 But whether the sterling area or the predominance of Britain’s banking sector within it could last was a moot point. The ‘convertibility problem’ dominated proceedings at a Commonwealth heads of government conference in London that stretched over a month in September–October 1952.62 Efforts to resolve it were stymied by the attendees’ greater interest in accumulating dollar reserves. It was a salutary lesson for the few British Treasury officials who claimed the London Conference was the most important imperial economic gathering since the Ottawa Conference twenty years earlier.63 The dollar was clearly the stronger benchmark currency for international trade. And the Bretton Woods agreements of July 1944, which saw the establishment of the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, were predicated on a global liberalization of free trade in which the dollar was king.64 Gold-producing South Africa led the way, eliminating its sterling reserves by 1957. Less dramatically, India, Pakistan, and Australia, once pre-eminent holders of sterling reserves, diversified their currency holdings, gradually reducing the proportion of sterling they held.65 The founding members of the European Economic Community (EEC), with France in the vanguard, meanwhile laid the foundations for a continental trade system that, it turned out, proved more accommodating to French black African territories than to Britain.66
Early EEC reservations about British admittance to their market system were hardly surprising. The British Empire–Commonwealth still accounted for fifty-one per cent of British exports and forty-five per cent of imports in the last five financial years of the 1950s. In 1960 fully sixty per cent of British capital invested overseas was tied up in Commonwealth or colonial territories. Indeed, colonies accounted for the majority of public issues on the London stock-market during the 1950s with loans typically raised to cover major infrastructure projects. The London imperial investor, a type usually identified with heady Victorian capitalism, was alive and kicking in the 1950s. Furthermore, the empire’s major raw materials producers, as well as newer client states in the oil-rich Middle East, were major holders of sterling assets by the end of the decade, replacing the money withdrawn by former Dominions. Kuwait alone, for instance, accumulated some £260 million in sterling reserves by late 1958, a sum almost equivalent to the holdings of Australia, the country that was still Britain’s biggest export market.67
Unquestionably high, these figures mask two other developing trends—one away from exporting heavy industrial products and importing primary goods, the other towards more remunerative trade with continental Europe. To the consternation of its backbenchers and much of the right-wing press, the Conservative government embraced this change. Macmillan had little time for ‘anti-marketeers’ who imagined that British national identity was bound up with empire and who insisted that Britain’s industrial and farming interests were protected by historic ties to the Commonwealth.68 It was not only pointless to set a British world ‘us’ against an encroaching European ‘them’, a tactic perfected by Lord Beaverbrook’s Daily Express, it was irresponsible, too.69 At the conclusion of a Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ conference in September 1962 Macmillan made an evening broadcast to the nation on the BBC Home Service. In his warmest avuncular tone he rejected the notion that Britain had reached an economic crossroads between the Commonwealth and Europe. Then he changed tack, telling listeners that European economic connections held greater material significance to their daily lives than the old Commonwealth ties.70 That significance would only increase as the 1960s unfolded.
Turning to the second source of historical argument—the relative importance of the government and private business in colonial economies—the issues are these. Was development state led? Or were government and business co-dependent? And did political decolonization necessarily herald economic decolonization as well? As we will see, these questions merge into one another.
Colonial budgets were usually small, the income from taxing dependent peoples limited by extensive poverty. Without investment, loans, or other stimulus packages from Britain or France, colonial states were poorly placed to lead ‘development’. Acknowledging that local governments lacked the financial wherewithal to undertake major internal spending, in November 1951 the Conservative Colonial Secretary Oliver Lyttelton confirmed that Britain’s new Colonial Development Corporation would provide start-up capital for favoured projects. These, it was hoped, would then be adopted by private industry.71 In fact, much as before the Second World War, the British Treasury would never authorize large-scale expenditure on the colonies. Currency boards also prevented colonies from spending their sterling reserves to fund development, forcing them to drive up dollar-earning export production in the service of Britain’s balance of payments.72
Lack of state capital and restrictions on the use of colonial reserves tell only part of the story, however. The Treasury could still use strategic investment, customs tariffs, and tax breaks to foster a climate favourable to home industries and, by extension, less favourable to outsiders. Government relationships with key multinational conglomerates and banks, though frequently acrimonious, were sustained by mutual recognition of a shared interest in retaining access to former colonial markets. In this sense, government, finance, and commerce remained mutually reliant. Lending in Africa and the British Caribbean by the Barclays Overseas Development Corporation, a Barclays Bank subsidiary founded in 1946, quickly supplanted government investment in development projects. And it was industry more than government that drove efforts to diversify colonial economies. British industrialists worked alongside state-run marketing boards to encourage Britain’s imperial subjects to buy additional UK manufactures from cars to domestic appliances.73
If this suggests that the private sector predominated in post-war empire economics, it does not quite convey the mounting pessimism among British and French business communities about their long-term prospects as colonial insecurity increased in the 1950s. Such anxiety registered in the phenomenon of ‘flight capital’ as investors, sometimes industries too, withdrew from one colonial territory only to reappear more strongly in another. Gloomy corporate predictions about their prospects in post-colonial societies also refracted persistent disagreements over certain ‘red rag’ issues between politicians and businessmen (white collar colonial business was still overwhelmingly male). The legalization of trade unions and collective bargaining, exclusive licences to prospect for minerals or sell particular goods, and differential rates of corporation tax in various dependent territories were guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of stockholders and company boards. More basically, company personnel increasingly found themselves in the firing-line of violent decolonization. Plantation managers and mining engineers in Malaya and Indochina, oil-workers in the Middle East and North Africa, even bank managers in Cyprus and Algeria became targets for anti-colonial violence or extortion. Little wonder that, behind the closed doors of company boardrooms, there was rarely much enthusiasm for accelerated pull-outs and military draw-downs. Yet the ultimate irony lay elsewhere. Having worried for years about seditious trade unions, nationalist firebrands, and the menace of nationalization thought to be lurking behind most independence settlements, British corporations lost most ground, not to nationalizing regimes but to US commercial rivals. In the business of decolonization, as in its politics, the trend towards Americanization was irresistible.74
In one area British business acclimatized quickly to impending decolonization. Overseas arms sales to Commonwealth partners and client states rose steadily in the late 1950s. This was particularly so in the Middle East where the provision of tanks and aircraft supplanted boots on the ground as evidence of British influence. In this context, preceding withdrawals not only reduced Britain’s over-extended strategic commitments but presented a feast of commercial opportunity. In October 1954 the Minister of Defence Earl Alexander accepted Whitehall recommendations that ‘older’—for which, read ‘white’—Commonwealth countries should retain the privilege to purchase British military equipment through government-to-government transactions, rather than paying private manufacturers’ market prices. Other branches of government seized on this recommendation and, over the next two years, sought to extend it. The Foreign Office and Air Ministry wanted to include Iraq and Jordan among the favoured clients allowed to buy arms direct from Her Majesty’s Government. The Commonwealth Relations Office petitioned for the Central African Federation to do so. Against these Departments’ political and strategic arguments, the Treasury and Ministry of Supply raised financial objections. The resulting compromise, agreed on 8 June 1956, extended the range of favoured imperial clients for British arms, but expected those included to pay ‘fair commercial prices’.75 Its linkage with government policy clarified, in certain regions Britain’s empire arms-dealing took off.
Still reeling from its Egyptian humiliation, in mid November 1956 the Conservative government authorized arms exports licences to its favoured Middle East clients: Iraq, Jordan, Libya, the Persian Gulf Emirates, and newly independent Sudan.76 Britain also played on American caution about selling weaponry to Israel’s Arab neighbours and the concomitant desire in Washington to ensure that Arab states did not follow Egypt and Syria in seeking Soviet supplies instead.77 Hard on the heels of a Board of Trade mission to five Middle Eastern countries in April 1959, the year’s largest single British arms deal, for instance, saw sixty Centurion tanks sold to Israel and another forty-two to neighbouring Jordan. Highly lucrative, the anti-Egyptian thrust of these deliveries was also obvious.78
The Middle East was not Britain’s sole arms export market of course, but it was the most strategically sensitive. While orders would keep rolling in, after the July 1958 overthrow of the pro-British monarchical regime in Iraq, Whitehall defence planners recognized that British influence in the Middle East’s eastern Mediterranean arc was diminished. Again, the criticisms of past imperial policy voiced by the military men were remarkably forthright. Government, they suggested, had been duped by supposedly ‘moderate’ nationalists. Ministers were too willing to believe that supporting development and keeping fast friends supplied with weapons would nurture democratic, pro-Western regimes. Their options shrank inexorably meanwhile. Thanks to Suez, high-risk military intervention was political suicide. And the pro-Soviet turn in Arab strategic thinking from Algeria to Yemen suggested that western influence might only be conserved in black Africa.79 The chiefs of staff’s advisers on a specially-appointed ‘Africa committee’ conceded, in other words, that Attlee had been right when he argued back in 1947 that Britain was better advised to draw its strategic line south of the Saharan sand, not to its north.80
This portrayal of receding strategic reach proved overly pessimistic. Otherwise disunited Baghdad Pact powers still conserved their anti-Communism. And as the Chiefs of Staff commented wryly, concern over oil supplies was bound to sustain British preoccupation with the Arab world’s strategic alignments.81 Their point was borne out by the earlier decision, taken in December 1957, to keep British garrison forces in Libya indefinitely rather than to withdraw them in 1959 as previously envisaged.82 Britain was also in the throes of expanding—not contracting—its influence in the Persian Gulf, and in Kuwait and Aden especially. Each became hubs for its regional power in the 1960s.83 While British military intervention in Kuwait in 1961 was somewhat reticent, its actions in South Arabia were anything but. In a bid to secure some payback for the humiliations of Suez, the Conservative hardliners—the Minister for Aviation Julian Amery, the Colonial Secretary Duncan Sandys, the Minister of Defence Peter Thorneycroft, and their backbench confidant Colonel Neil McLean—exploited the involvement of Nasser’s Egypt in Yemen’s developing civil war by secretly backing his Yemeni opponents.84 None of this erased the legacies of Britain’s earlier Suez misadventure. The army planners were surely right that, after 1956, Britain was ‘unable to accept the odium of military domination’ and denied ‘the initiative of political action’.85 Whatever the compensatory work elsewhere, Suez put paid to Britain’s Middle Eastern ‘moment’.86
So was Britain still an imperial colossus as it entered the 1960s? Few colonies remained in which withdrawal was neither an accomplished fact nor an imminent possibility, least of all in Africa. Social attitudes were changing irrevocably, popular culture becoming more irreverent about supposed imperial greatness.87 Occasionally, this combination of apathy and mockery left politicians reeling but more frequently, if imperceptibly, these cultural markers encouraged government to accelerate flight schemes that were already in prospect. The politics of letting go was, in this sense, an intellectual journey towards an acceptance of irreversible change that the British public seemed refreshingly willing to take.
On 21 June 1960 Mountbatten, then Chief of Defence Staff, and his deputy Sir Francis Festing, still bearing the title Chief of Imperial General Staff, submitted their findings from a wide-ranging strategic review. It focused on the most likely conventional (i.e. non-nuclear) conflicts to confront British forces in the decade ahead. Their assessment was, at best, post-colonial, at worst, neo-colonial in its conclusions. Britain’s priorities in the Middle East should be ‘economic co-operation, non-interference with inter-Arab affairs and, as far as possible, disengagement from the Palestine problem’. Working with the United States was essential.88 Mountbatten and his colleagues counselled ‘benevolence towards Arab ideals’, just as they recommended ‘inter-dependence’ with Far Eastern allies like Malaysia in their continuing struggle against communism. As for Africa, the adverse consequences at the United Nations of any use of force in British colonial territory should be at the forefront of decision-making. No stranger to the requirements of hasty, even chaotic decolonization, Mountbatten’s imprint was clearly visible in the service chiefs’ Africa recommendations. Retaining the goodwill of newly-independent states was everything. Flexibility, the essence of any successful flight strategy, demanded that long-cherished privileges and slower timetables for reform be sacrificed.89
Six months later, in January 1961, Macmillan’s private secretary Philip de Zulueta advised him that Britain’s major problem in Africa was how to guarantee the rights of European minorities once former colonies achieved independence. The underlying issue here was not race, but wealth: despite their loss of privileged status, settlers and company staffs would still be the dominant economic force in numerous territories. The Foreign Secretary Lord Home agreed. Referring explicitly to Ghana under Nkrumah, he noted that safeguards agreed at independence for British-owned businesses, bank deposits, and property rights were easily circumvented.90 There was talk in Macmillan’s Private Office about a combined Anglo-French approach to protecting African settler rights. But the idea was rejected because of France’s deepening unpopularity throughout Africa.91
It is tempting to represent the quickening pace of late 1950s decolonization as a steepening curve, but its contingencies defy reduction to a linear model. As Frederick Cooper, a leading historian of African decolonization has it, ‘What gets lost in narrating history as the triumph of freedom followed by failure to use that freedom is a sense of process. If we can, from our present-day vantage point, put ourselves in the position of different historical actors, in 1958—or 1945, 1966 or 1994—we see moments of divergent possibilities, or different configurations of power, that open up and shut down.’92 For many contemporaries, decolonization in its many regional variants was less something inevitable than a question of difficult choices: either a transient opportunity to be seized and negotiated, or a looming threat to be contested and fought.
At its best, British colonial policy in the last days of African empire was both principled and pragmatic. Even in some places where ministers, officials, generals, and others initially resisted decolonization, determination to cling on eventually crumbled under the weight of hostile external scrutiny, the greater economic pull of European trade, and lack of public enthusiasm for costly colonial fights. Few among the new cohort of Conservative MPs elected to Westminster in the October 1959 election displayed the imperialist reflexes of their predecessors. Most backed Iain MacLeod’s reformism, aware that diehard colonialism was no vote winner.93 It was not all political calculation. Africa, New Year 1960, a pamphlet produced on the eve of Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ tour by the young Conservative progressives of the Bow Group, concluded starkly that Britain’s primary African obligation was ‘to govern justly or to get out’.94 The heat once intrinsic to cross-party exchanges on empire questions would also diminish over coming years.
On the other side of Britain’s party political divide, Barbara Castle, a tireless critic of Britain’s colonial abuses, respected the view that, when accomplished peacefully and without rancour, formal transfers of power were curative procedures, exuberant and dignified at the same time. Invited to attend Kenya’s independence ceremony on 11 December 1963 in recognition of her work on behalf of Mau Mau detainees, she found herself affirming her own ideas of British decency:
Just before 6pm an African military band beautifully turned out marched with perfect precision up the central lawn to the steps of the terrace of State House to which the Duke [of Edinburgh], Jomo [Kenyatta], the Governor-General [Malcolm MacDonald] and Duncan Sandys had returned from their tour among the crowd. After some spirited playing and marching about the band came to rest in front of the terrace, played “Abide with Me” and then the British national anthem as the Union Jack was hauled down above State House for the last time. Frankly I felt my eyes pricking with tears at the symbolism of this moment: the peaceful abdication of rule by an imperialist power. Then, to crown the emotion of the moment, the band marched off to the tune of Auld Lang Syne and we all broke up.95
The festivities continued into the evening when Kenyan dances gave way to a ‘magnificent’ King’s African Rifles parade that culminated in handing over their battalion colours to the units now rebranded as the Kenya Army. Then, just before midnight, Jomo and Malcolm MacDonald walked into the centre of the huge parade ground facing two flag-poles on the far sides, one flying the Union Jack (Rumour had it that the Duke turned to Jomo at this point and said: ‘Want to reconsider? There’s still time.’) Dead on midnight the National Anthem was played and slowly the Union Jack was hauled down. The Kenyans tactfully extinguished the floodlight so that the act of capitulation took place undetected in the darkness. Then the lights were triumphantly switched on again to reveal the ascent of the independent Kenya’s flag.96
So frequent did ceremonies of this type become in the first half of the 1960s that it is at least questionable whether the British public took much notice. Empire-mindedness survived, not just on the hard right or among those with family or career attachments to former dependencies, but in a dogged belief—still remarkably resistant to countervailing historical proofs—that British colonialism, whatever its mistakes, was rooted in fairness and ‘play the game’ spirit. The staunchest advocates of Britain’s imperial connections struggled to square the circle between the post-war reinvention of empire as something inclusive, progressive, and developmental and the proliferation of anti-colonial protests and rebellions requiring military intervention. Andrew Thompson captures the dilemma: ‘even for those politicians and officials steeped in notions of racial superiority, the human cost of suppressing dissent could easily give rise to a feeling of distaste … Stripped of much of its romance, invincibility, and moral validity, the imperial relationship during the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s offered significantly more scope for disappointment.’97 The stories of colonial fight or flight from the late 1950s to the early 1960s confirm that letting go made more sense than clinging on.98