The British Commonwealth of Nations is back in the news, thanks to decolonialist activists and slavery reparations demands from former British colonies. But what is the Commonwealth and how did it come to be? In UnHerd, Mary Harrington explains its origins after the First World War:
The patriotic view of the Commonwealth during WW2.
But what is this Commonwealth for? In one corner of my sitting room stands a tea-trolley that used to belong to my grandmother. It’s a beautiful piece of furniture, which you can convert from a two-storey conveyance into a handy fireside table by activating a hidden mechanism. But though it’s ingeniously made, it doesn’t have a role in our house, except storage. The floors are too uneven for it to be useful transporting things, and afternoon tea doesn’t happen.
The Commonwealth feels like that tea-trolley: evidence of something clearly once of social significance, whose context has disappeared. Along with that context, so too has much of the detail of how we got from there to here. And there’s a link between this fact and the ever more insistent demands that Britain atone for slavery: namely our loss of any account of British history that hasn’t been pre-filtered through a post-war internationalist perspective (which is to say, at least until recently, an American perspective).
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This entity began as a realist adaptation to changing geopolitical forces. It was conceived of in 1926 as a response to a shift in relations between Britain and important imperial holdings as a consequence of the First World War. The exigencies of imperial worldwide coordination in that conflict had forced a new degree of independence across dominions including Canada, South Africa, and New Zealand. Then, following the war, these states were understandably reluctant to relinquish this new autonomy.
Matters came to a head in 1926, when the Canadian Prime Minister demanded that the British Governor-General, Julian Byng, dissolve the government and call an election. Byng refused, triggering a dispute over who was in charge. The row prompted a conference, led by former Prime Minister Lord Arthur Balfour, which aimed to align existing imperial law with reality. The end of these discussions was the Balfour Report, which explicitly described the various British imperial dominions as not dominions at all. Rather, they were “autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by a common allegiance to the Crown, and freely associated as members of the British Commonwealth of Nations”. This definition was formalised in 1931, along with an “imperial preference” policy which set advantageous trading terms among Commonwealth nations.
This settlement didn’t last long, though — and as it evolved, it grew gradually less pragmatic, and less concrete. This was with no small thanks to the American statesman Wendell Willkie, a close advisor of Roosevelt, who was a vocal critic of British imperialism. Willkie called for leadership of the world to pass instead to America. In time, and with Willkie’s encouragement, dismantling the European empires (and their trade clubs, such as the Commonwealth’s “imperial preference”) would become an explicit aim of American foreign policy.
When the Second World War broke out, the US made it a condition of the 1941 “lend lease” agreements, by which America supplied aid to Britain, that the latter would agree to work toward ending these preferential trade arrangements. Then, after the war, US loans to an effectively bankrupt Britain were again explicitly tied to economic liberalisation, culminating in the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1949. This ended any meaningful economic role for the Commonwealth, leaving behind little save a ceremonial role, a vague do-gooding remit, and some ambivalent memories.
To be clear: it’s not exactly that the British Empire was alive and well until America dismantled it. The phrasing of the Balfour Report, all the way back in 1926, suggests that in some respects Britain had by then already begun decolonising herself in favour of a pretence of being first among equals. But decolonisation was certainly accelerated by other geopolitical factors and actors.
What emerged, then, was a self-effacing post-war Commonwealth of values and vibes, in which “British” was deliberately discarded. It always had its critics. Enoch Powell challenged it through the post-war decades, as a geopolitically incoherent bit of “make-believe”, comprising states without meaningful, real-world commonalities or obligations to one another, whose artificial agglomeration encouraged Britain to act against her own national interest while smuggling damaging alterations into Britain’s historic constitution.
But in the Commonwealth’s defence, it succeeded in one respect: it sustained some kind of continuity between the historic empire of Great Britain and the post-war state that succeeded it. Importantly, by not actually doing very much, it achieved this without challenging the anti-imperial internationalism that came to define the post-war “West”.
