Free The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin Page B

China. But, to much seasoned opinion, this was simply hysterical, the over-reaction of old men in a hurry. An impressive array of authorities rejected the view that the fundamentals had changed. Milner and Curzon, MacDonald and Baldwin, Simon and Halifax, Hailey and Lampson, among many others, acknowledged that the old methods of imperial command could no longer be used. But they insisted that Britain still enjoyed the ability to manage what mattered: those aspects of politics that affected the stability of its system as a whole. To their nationalist opponents before the Second World War, this machiavellian capacity seemed frustratingly real.
    This confident view now looks strangely myopic. But there was much to encourage it. Despite economic hard times, Britain was not obviously weaker in the inter-war years than before 1914. The British had paid out the premium for more strategic insurance in the ex-Ottoman Middle East: a ‘great glacis of desert and Arabs’ (in Attlee's later phrase 3 ) to protect their imperial communications by both sea and air. They had appeased Indian nationalism, but also divided it by Byzantine manoeuvres, leaving themselves free to command India's most vital resource – its military manpower. The white dominions acknowledged, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, that their British connection lay at the centre of their external relations, and, in three of the five, that their British identity was the cardinal fact of their national existence. Of the trade and monetary blocs into which the world was divided after 1931, the combined sterling bloc and imperial preference system seemed the best placed to restore its members’ prosperity and escape economic disaster. If British power was constrained, so was that of other great states. Indeed, the deep mutual suspicions that divided all the other great powers seemed to suggest that, in relative terms, the British system still enjoyed considerable room for manoeuvre. In a fragmenting world, drifting towards autarky, the rapid implosion of the British world-system was among the least likely scenarios.
    In fact, a total collapse was only barely averted between 1938 and 1942. The economic, political and ideological revolutions set off by the war and supercharged by depression convulsed much of Eurasia after 1930. To an extent that many contemporaries found hard to discern, they created a vortex of geopolitical change and destroyed almost all means of arresting its progress. At both ends of Eurasia, the local power balances on which the British relied broke down almost completely amid bitter mutual mistrust. Anglo-American friendship, which might have taken their place (and to which some British looked), survived in the circles of naval officers and financiers. But its formal (and effective) expression as a diplomatic alignment was blocked by disputes over debts, and the antipathy of important American interests towards the British world-system. The ethos of empire and its protectionist practice (through the Ottawa duties and the cooperation of sterling economies) were bound to stick in their craw. As a result, the status quo in world politics was defended inadequately by two reluctant associates, the British and the French, each of which doubted the other's good faith and military means. This proved no real protection against a violent geopolitical storm whose lightning assaults and sudden change of direction baffled most onlookers. With France's sudden collapse in June 1940, the central assumption of British grand strategy – that the line against Germany would be held on the mainland of Europe – disappeared like a dream. Perhaps only the failure of their three main assailants to combine more effectively (a function in part of their mutual suspicions) gave the British the time to rally American help, and for that help to arrive before it was too late.
    The British system survived. But the cost of staying alive was enormous and the collateral damage