21/09/2005 3:27:27 pm
From Niall Ferguson′s "Empire - How Britain Made the Modern World" (Penguin):

"The end of the empire is portrayed as a victory for ′freedom fighters′, who took up arms from Dublin to Delhi to rid their peoples from the yoke of colonial rule. This is misleading. Throughout the twentieth century, the principal threats - and the most plausible alternatives - to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires. ...

The alternative empires were far harsher in their treatment of subject peoples than Britain. ... By the time Winston Churchill became Prime Minister in 1940, the most likely alternatives to British rule were Hirohito′s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Hitler′s Thousand Year Reich and Mussolini′s New Rome. Nor could the threat posed by Stalin′s Soviet Union be discounted, though until after the Second World War, most of his energies were devoted to terrorising his own subjects.

It was the staggering cost of fighting these imperial rivals that ultimately ruined the British Empire. In other words, the Empire was dismantled not because it had oppressed subject peoples for centuries, but because it took up arms for just a few years against far more oppressive empires. It did the right thing, regardless of the cost. ...

At the outbreak of war, the man who would become India′s most famous political and spiritual leader told his fellow countrymen: ′We are, above all, British citizens of the Great British Empire. Fighting as the British are at present in a righteous cause for the good and glory of human dignity and civilisation ... our duty is clear: to do our best to support the British, to fight with our life and property.′ Many thousands of Indians shared Gandhi′s sentiments. In the autumn of 1914, around a third of British forces in France were from India; by the end of the war more than a million Indians had served overseas..."