Hasty exit strategy

For years after the rug was pulled from under it, the British Empire — with a quarter of the globe, the largest the world has known — seemed an unfashionable subject for historians. Did they fear political incorrectness, or was it simply that they had to wait for sufficient archival material to emerge? Whichever, there is now some very welcome sprouting in this part of the historical garden, already well-watered by the Cambridge historian Ronald Hyam, and few shoots could be more welcome than Calder Walton’s important contribution.

Walton draws on recently released MI5 files to reveal the role of intelligence in the transitions from colony to independent state. Decolonisation would have happened anyway but almost certainly not in the more or less stable and (to Britain and the West) benign way that it did without intelligence midwifery.

There is debate about when the end of empire began; some argue for Suez in 1956, others more plausibly for the second world war, yet others for Britain’s guilty reaction to the 1919 Amritsar massacre as indicative of an imperial power that had lost the will to rule. Walton sensibly doesn’t spend too much time worrying about this. Instead, he pragmatically addresses the two main periods of colonial withdrawal, 1945-48 and 1959-64. Most importantly, too, he stresses the role of the Cold War in shaping both the context and manner of withdrawal. Fearing that the Soviet Union would seek to turn the newly independent states into allies or satellites, the British sought to entrench structures and personalities that would frustrate this. They were helped, Walton points out, by the fact that the sensitive communications of the new states were often transmitted via Enigma-based machines that the British supplied, and read.

It didn’t always work, of course.