‗THE OLD ORDER CHANGETH‘: THE ABORTED EVOLUTION OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE, 1917-1931 A Dissertation by SEAN PATRICK KELLY Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, R.J.Q. Adams Committee Members, Troy Bickham Rebecca Hartkopf Schloss Anthony Stranges Peter Hugill Head of Department, David Vaught August 2014 Major Subject: History Copyright 2014 Sean Patrick Kelly ABSTRACT In the aftermath of the Great War (1914-18), Britons could, arguably for the first time since 1763, look to the immediate future without worrying about the rise of an anti- British coalition of European states hungry for colonial spoils. Yet the shadow cast by the apparent ease with which the United States rose to global dominance after 1940 has masked the complexity and uncertainty inherent in what turned out to be the last decades of the British Empire. Historians of British international history have long recognised that the 1920s were a period of adjustment to a new world, not simply the precursor to the disastrous (in hindsight) 1930s. As late as the eve of the Second World War, prominent colonial nationalists lamented that the end of Empire remained impossible to foresee. Britons, nevertheless, recognised that the Great War had laid bare the need to modernise the archaic, Victorian-style imperialism denounced by The Times, amongst others. Part I details the attempts to create a ‗New Way of Empire‘ before examining two congruent efforts to integrate Britain‘s self-governing Dominions into the very heart of British political life. The first occurred during the final year of the War, when the apparatus to coordinate imperial governance began to take shape. However, owing to the unexpected end of the War in 1918, little came of the Committee of Prime Ministers. More than a decade later, the Canadian-born press baron, Lord Beaverbrook, sought to make Empire Free Trade the cornerstone of British politics, but his campaign was thwarted by 1) his own missteps and 2) the broader Establishment intent on preserving ii the restored, quasi-Edwardian political order. Part II deals with constitutional changes in Greater India, using the Viceroyalty of Lord Irwin (1926-31) and events in Ceylon and the investigations of the Donoughmore Commission as case studies. These examples saw Britons trying to counteract that impossible doctrine of Wilsonian self determination, while also thwarting bourgeois, colonial nationalists intent on supplanting British rule with ‗a narrow oligarchy of clever lawyers‘. iii DEDICATION Memoria in aeterna Margaret Scott (1 April 1917 – 24 December 2004) iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT .............................................................................................................. ii DEDICATION .......................................................................................................... iv TABLE OF CONTENTS .......................................................................................... v 1. INTRODUCTION ............................................................................................... 1 2. PART I: ‘WE LIVE[D] IN AN AGE OF COMMITTEES AND CONFERENCES’, OR (CHALLENGES TO) THE CREATION OF A ‘NEW WAY OF EMPIRE’ ............................................................................................ 14 2.1 A ‘new age’ brought about by ending ‘the days of the Huns’? ............ 73 2.2 ‘The laurels were with the new second Tory party’: The Empire Free Trade crusade and the United Empire by-elections, 1929-1931 ......... 137 3. PART II: ‘WE PADDLED IN A PURÉE OF WORDS AND HOPED TO CATCH A FORMULA’: BRITAIN AND THE POLITICS OF IMPERIAL CONSTITUTIONAL REFORM ......................................................................... 213 3.1 ‘Ceylon is to provide the British Empire laboratory with yet another constitutional experiment’: The Donoughmore commission and ‘democracy with autocratic reservations’ ............................................ 216 3.2 ‘Congress must disabuse their minds of any idea that they were going to be accepted as speaking for all India’: The viceroyalty of Lord Irwin, 1926-1931 .................................................................................. 287 4. CONCLUSIONS ................................................................................................. 335 REFERENCES .......................................................................................................... 349 v 1. INTRODUCTION To many scholars, particularly younger ones, ‘the only point of studying European imperialism is to unmask the derogatory racial stereotypes encoded in the modernizing myths of the Enlightenment’. Yet, said another doyen, ‘the empire happened. A small island state off the northwest shores of Europe ran a quarter of the globe for hundreds of years. This was no small thing. And it demands close study.’1 The question is: how. Almost an entire generation of scholars were preoccupied with the “holy trinity”: race, class and gender. ‘Discourse’, ‘representations’ and ‘imagined’ communities being the overwhelmingly preferred framework of choice, often with dubious results. In the case of gender and empire, Anthony Hopkins concludes, for example, ‘a good deal of it is disappointingly predictable and repetitive ....’ The older ‘nationalist’ approach is not much better.2 Only recently has the pendulum swung back towards proper imperial history, that is to say the practice and pursuit of (imperial) power and/or trans-national studies.3 The latter is particularly important, being a corrective to the tendency towards regional specialisation which followed the end(s) of 1 A. Hopkins, ‘Back to the Future: From National History to Imperial History’, Past and Present, clxiv (1999), pp. 198-9; P. Kennedy, ‘The Imperial Mind’, The Atlantic, Jan./Feb. 2008. 2 A. Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past: Inaugural Lecture Delivered 12 March, 1997 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 26 n. 43 and 24 n. 40; J. Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World- System, 1830-1970 (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 6-7. 3 See, for example, J. Burbank and F. Cooper, Empires in World History: Power and the Politics of Difference (Princeton, 2010), J. Belich, Replenishing the Earth: The Settler Revolution and the Rise of the Anglo-World, 1783-1939 (Oxford, 2009), J. Pocock, ‘The Neo-Britains and the Three Empires’, in J. Pocock, ed., The Discovery of Islands, Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005) and C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, ‘Mapping the British World’, in C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich, eds., The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (London, 2003). 1 empire: a development that was by no means preordained.4 Imperial historians should not, therefore, lapse into the assumption that because empires disappeared, it was a foregone conclusion that they were ‗always doomed to destruction by the forces of history‘. Such are the pitfalls of the ‗tyranny of hindsight‘.5 Historians of early twentieth-century Britain can perhaps be excused for lapsing into such thinking, given their subjects‘ widespread anxieties, bordering almost on neurosis. ‗Will England Last the Century‘, wondered one writer. Or will Germany (peacefully) supersede Britain? This was no idle speculation. Ever since the Renaissance, so went the argument, a new century had meant the ‗transfer of political supremacy‘. Whether the ‗natural repetition of history‘ would continue would remain (for another two decades, at most) an open question. But if Britons failed to take heed, warned ‗Calchas‘, they would not only lose the Empire, but risked a ‗dispeoplement like that of Ireland [only] upon a greater scale‘.6 Juxtaposed against Elgar‘s Pomp and Circumstance March No. 1, commonly known as Land of Hope and Glory, was a steady stream of deeply pessimistic literature, only partly explained by the Second Boer War (1899-1902).7 Not even the centennial of Nelson‘s victory at Trafalgar escaped this 4 Hopkins, The Future of the Imperial Past, p. 40; J. Darwin, ‗Diplomacy and Decolonization‘, Journal of Imperial & Commonwealth History, xxviii (2000), pp. 5 and 10-21. Also see P. Buckner, ‗Whatever Happened to the British Empire‘, Journal of the Canadian Historical Association, iv (1993), pp. 3-32. 5 I. Copland, The Princes of India in the Endgame of Empire, 1917-1947 (Cambridge, 1997), pp. 13-14. 6 'Calchas', ‗Will England Last the Century?‘, Fortnightly Review, lxxv (1901), pp. 20-28 and 34. The article‘s author was J.L. Garvin, future editor of The Observer. G. Searle, A New England?: Peace and War, 1886-1918 (Oxford, 2005), p. 302. 7 In addition to the lively debates over imperial preference/federalisation, see, for example, Rudyard Kipling‘s The Lesson (1901), M. Bodkin, ‗Why Ireland is Disloyal‘, Fortnightly Review, lxxii (1902), pp. 1019-27 and E. Mill, alias 'For the Good of the Race', The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, a Brief Account of Those Causes Which Resulted in the Destruction of Our Late Ally, Together with a Comparison between the British and Roman Empires; Appointed for Use in the National Schools of Japan, 2 solemn mood of ‗national self-examination‘. Inspired by the examples of Oliver Cromwell and Cecil Rhodes, employing ‗methods ... weaker man would have feared to use,‘ the solution—if not entirely new by 1905—was obvious, the ‗old colonial era‘ needed to give way to a Greater Britain.8 Such sentiments were not universal, but there was a growing realisation amongst