Clement Attlee: Apostle of Empire?

Popular accounts of Clement Attlee might all too easily leave one with the impression that the Labour grandee was an anti-imperialist visionary. Because he oversaw Britain’s withdrawal from India, the ‘jewel in the crown of the British Empire’, as well as Burma, Ceylon, Jordan, and Mandatory Palestine, many have seen fit to portray Attlee as leading the charge on decolonisation.^[1] In this view, even if he did not go all the way, he nonetheless set out the path towards independence and equal partnership in a multiracial, socialist Commonwealth. Closer inspection, however, reveals a far more interesting picture.

Imperial policy during the Labour government of 1945-51 was dominated, above all, by the legacy of the war. Although Churchill, and later Attlee, could claim a seat at the table amongst the victors at Yalta and Potsdam, Britain’s actual condition more closely resembled that of a defeated nation.

For the British war effort had been dependent on enormous loans from the United States and the liquidation of foreign investments. Moreover, as industry converted to armaments production, Britain lost the lion’s share of its export markets while its industrial machinery was steadily worn out by six years of strain. By 1945, Britain was overspending its national income by more than £2 billion a year – almost a quarter of GDP. It would continue to rely on American imports for everything from food to industrial materials and, worse still, Attlee had come to power promising a costly programme of welfare reform. The economist Lord Keynes warned of an impending ‘economic Dunkirk’.^[2]

It was in response to these circumstances that Attlee, alongside ‘Labour right’ figures such as Ernest Bevin and Stafford Cripps, spearheaded what has since been called a ‘second colonial occupation’ in Britain’s colonies.^[3] While territories like India and Palestine were cut loose, having come to be regarded above all as unprofitable and unruly, the government had every intention of consolidating control over its resource-rich colonies, particularly in Africa, and ruling them with a view to rescuing Britain’s great power status.

At the heart of this initiative was an attempt to earn dollars. Primary products such as Malayan rubber and West African cocoa already had massive American markets and were to be further exploited alongside other valuable natural resources that remained largely undeveloped. If output could be ramped up rapidly—receiving even greater impetus in the wake of the convertibility crisis of 1947—the Empire might just reduce the balance of payments deficit while also providing a cushion against inflation.^[4] In the government’s more quixotic moments (of which there were many), this new imperialism promised not only complete financial independence from the United States but Britain’s rebirth as a wealthy, powerful alternative to both American capitalism and Soviet communism.^[5]

What this meant on the ground was an unprecedented surge of personnel and bureaucratic control into the colonies. In some parts of Africa, like Malawi, the European population doubled in just five years,^[6] and all throughout the Empire, farmers who had for generations been left alone to tend their lot were suddenly subject to a cacophony of planners, ex-soldiers, and agribusiness tycoons seeking to enact massive rationalisations.^[7]

Nowhere was this more pronounced than in the so-called ‘Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme’, which sought to convert a territory of African bush roughly the size of Yorkshire into farmland in which to grow peanuts. There was a global shortage of edible fats and oils at this time, making peanuts prime candidates for earning dollars and reducing import demand at home.^[8] This venture—nowadays a byword for imperial ‘arrogance’ among left-wing scholars^[9]—would ultimately prove a disaster, smashed upon the rocks of an unreliable climate.^[10] Nevertheless, with its tens of thousands of labourers, £36 million in investment, and a new port and railway network,^[11] the scheme goes a long way to illustrate the new spirit pervading colonial affairs.

What, then, did all of this mean for Attlee’s relationship with empire more broadly?

Even if the government’s approach was dominated by economic concerns, Attlee certainly did not wish for a return to what he saw as the rapaciousness of the days of Cecil Rhodes. In his view, such men were ‘consumed with a lust for power’, whereas he aspired to a practical idealism ‘inspired by the spirit of service to the African’.^[12] As such, and given the influence of the Labour Party more generally, there was a sincere effort to bring social justice to the colonies. For example, the tactic of ‘indirect rule’—collaboration with local feudal elites—was increasingly supplanted by modern electoral systems, most notably in West Africa,^[13] while initiatives like the Tanganyika Groundnut Scheme offered unprecedentedly high wages to African labourers.^[14]

Even so, one might argue that Attlee prioritised the ‘realist’ concerns of the British Empire over lofty idealism. This was most evident in the monetary mechanisms at the core of the new imperialism. In accordance with the Sterling Area, which consisted of Britain, the Dominions (except Canada), and most of the Empire and Commonwealth, members were subject to exchange controls against non-sterling currencies and a fixed rate of conversion with sterling itself. But whereas sovereign governments, like the Dominions, could negotiate over the allocation of outside currencies (notably dollars), colonial monetary policy was largely dictated by London according to Britain’s own needs. Severe as the balance of payments crisis was, colonies were scarcely permitted to purchase the goods they wanted with the dollars earned in their own territories, or even with their own reserves of sterling, fuelling prolonged shortages and an unprecedented wave of strikes.^[15]

What’s more, Attlee’s vision of a ‘multiracial Commonwealth’ did not require transfers of sovereignty to colonial populations. If constitutional reforms were brought about in Africa and Southeast Asia, change was arguably driven as much by a desire to provide the ‘political instrument’ for economic modernisation—and therefore Britain’s Sterling Area interests—as it was by a desire to placate the demands of colonial nationalists. The feudal privileges of local elites, for instance, were seen as obstructing the development of land and resources, and it was the government’s view that only an African middle class could replace them as collaborators, at least in those territories without a substantial White minority.^[16]

Moreover, if ‘self-government’ was understood as a desirable possibility, it was envisaged as both far removed from the foreseeable future and, as far as ‘sovereignty’ was concerned, assuming a hollowed-out form that would not be injurious to British interests. No African colony would attain independence under Attlee, for instance, in no small part due to the government’s profound scepticism over whether even moderate colonial nationalists could be trusted with the ‘responsibilities’ that the Sterling Area entailed.^[17]

This tightly managed approach was nowhere more clear than in East Africa, the region on which the greatest hopes for long-term settlement and development were placed. Here, London sought to entrench, and govern through, the political privileges of the White settler minority. In Kenya, for instance, communal rolls and a powerful executive branch ensured that Whites retained control over the colony (at one point envisaged as the future core of an ‘East African Federation’ that would also encompass Tanganyika and Uganda). The constitutional timetables for any semblance of African-led government ‘trailed off as far as the eye can see’. Indeed, we must remember that the term ‘multiracial’ itself—as opposed to ‘self-governing’—at this time denoted political arrangements in which Whites remained firmly in the driving seat.^[18]

What the government’s approach truly embodied, then, was less the moralism of socialist radicals than the emergence of a particular patriotic dream: imperialist ideologues such as John Seeley, Joseph Chamberlain, and Leopold Amery had long lamented that the British Empire was something of a mirage. From their perspective, Britain’s ruling elites had primarily treated the Empire as a moral endeavour rather than a tool of realpolitik. Its resources were either underdeveloped or sold elsewhere, and the mechanisms for imperial cooperation scarcely existed. Cognisant of rising challengers like Germany and the United States, they hoped that the Empire could be transformed into a self-sustaining strategic unit, rich in both population and resources and with a vast internal market for British goods.^[19] Even if it was now proceeding from a significantly weaker position in the wake of two world wars, it would not be unreasonable to view the Attlee government’s imperial policy—with its preoccupation with material interests (in Sterling) and its willingness to pursue them from the top down—as the fullest realisation of this vision in the Empire’s history.

Attlee’s colonial philosophy must therefore be seen in a rather different light from how it is so often portrayed today. Where successors like Harold Macmillan were quick to capitulate to the ‘Wind of Change’, Attlee instead sought a new basis for the Empire as a foundation of Britain’s national interests. If his policy ultimately proved misguided, owing to a peculiar combination of concession and retrenchment, development and exploitation, we should not see it as having intentionally paved the way for the decolonisation that followed. We might, however, regard the disappearance of this mode of thinking as a significant loss for both the British left and the country as a whole.

Notes

1. For instance, Attlee’s Wikipedia entry states that ‘his foreign policy focused on decolonisation efforts’, while David Reynolds’s BBC documentary ‘The Improbable Mr Attlee’ asserts that Attlee regarded Empire as an ‘irrelevance in the nuclear age’. ‘Clement Attlee’, Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clement_Attlee; David Reynolds (dir.), The Improbable Mr Attlee (BBC, 2005), https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m002g80v. ↩
2. Nicholas J. White, Decolonisation: The British Experience Since 1945 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 5; Correlli Barnett, The Audit of War: The Illusion and Reality of Britain as a Great Nation (London: Macmillan London Limited, 1986), 51, 241. ↩
3. John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 559. ↩
4. White, Decolonisation, 7-8. ↩
5. Ibid., 11, 108-9. ↩
6. John D. Hargreaves, Decolonization in Africa (London and New York: Longman, 1988), 78. ↩
7. Tom Mitchell (curator), ‘Reluctance’, Hidden Voices of Empire, King’s College London, https://kingscollections.org/exhibitions/specialcollections/hidden-voices-of-empire/negative-views/reluctance; Nicholas Westcott, Imperialism & Development: The East African Groundnut Scheme and Its Legacy (Suffolk: James Currey, 2009), 81; Matteo Rizzo, ‘What Was Left of the Groundnut Scheme? Development Disaster and Labour Market in Southern Tanganyika 1946–1952’, Journal of Agrarian Change, 6, 2 (April 2006), 207-213. ↩
8. White, Decolonisation, 9. ↩
9. Alex Sutton, ‘Primitive Accumulation in the East Africa Groundnut Scheme’, Diplomacy & Statecraft, 35, 2 (2024), 338. ↩
10. Nicholas Westcott, Imperialism & Development, 78-133. ↩
11. Ibid., 177, 199. ↩
12. Clement Attlee, ‘Two Sides of Colonialism’, The Spectator, 27 September 1956. ↩
13. White, Decolonisation, 10, 15-8. ↩
14. The Groundnut Scheme: A Colonial Failure, The Museum of English Rural Life (MERL), University of Reading, https://merl.reading.ac.uk/explore/online-exhibitions/colonial-failure/. ↩
15. White, Decolonisation, 7-8, 48-9. ↩
16. Ronald Hyam, ‘Africa and the Labour Government, 1945–51’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 16, 3 (1988), 150; White, Decolonisation, 15. ↩
17. Ibid., 8. ↩
18. R. F. Holland, The Pursuit of Greatness: Britain and the World Role, 1900–1970 (London: Fontana Press, 1991), ↩
19. Liane Hewitt, ‘The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-internationalism, 1903–1947’, Journal of Global History, 18, 2 (2023). ↩