Ya know, the UK is the world’s #1 supplier of Independence.
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That’s what happens when you are the biggest empire in history.
I wonder what the world would look like if WWII was never fought. I think WWI was almost inevitable, but WWII could have been avoided. Do you think Pax Britannica would still exist?
It could have wrote Peter Hitchens on what was a controversial piece about what would have happened to Britain if they would have stayed neutral during WW2. In a nutshell he says Britain would have retained its empire and its social standing instead of falling to a third rate military and that not one Jewish person was saved by Britain entering the war.
The piece is called
If we hadn’t fought World War 2, would we still have a British Empire?
Do you suppose the empire could have withstood the independence movements of the mid to late century?
I am not sure like all “what if” scenarios everything has to align perfectly for that scenario to have come to fruition.
Hitchens however thinks Britain would have been in a much stronger position to weather the independence movements if it wasn’t for WW2, not sure how I feel.
A snippet from the piece
“In that case, too, the independence movements of India and Burma, both hugely strengthened by our defeat at Singapore, would have been far less ambitious and would have settled for much less. Subhas Chandra Bose, the Indian pro-independence leader who won the support of Japan, would have been eclipsed by Gandhi and Nehru, who sought dominion status rather than full independence.
In that case, no partition of India, no Pakistan. And that would mean no scuttle from Palestine, no state of Israel, a Middle East quite different from what we see now. The Suez episode would never have happened.
South Africa might have stayed under the dominance of General Smuts and his United Party, so no Apartheid, which was the creation of the anti-British Nationalists. The rest of Africa, unswept by ‘winds of change’ would probably have remained under largely European rule. No Robert Mugabe. No Idi Amin. No Bokassa”
Fascinating.
I know it’s a fool’s game, but I love alternate histories.
If WW2 never happened, we may very well have ended up under a communist regime, of our own making.
That’s true the what’s if’s are endless. I saw one where they plugged in what would have happened if Germany never invaded Poland. They ran all the scenarios which showed that eventually Stalin comes into Poland then fights Germany regardless.
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We would look like California and their one party rule.
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If England had not entered and fought in WW II, they’d be speaking German today…period.
To give some credit to the British, they do tend to earn good relationships with the people they formerly colonized.
Like we have a good relationship with our British cousins. Much of British Africa (like Kenya) continue to have a good relationship with the British. India even has a solid relationship with the British.
I don’t think any of us former colonials ever hated the British as a whole. We tended to base our governments on the British form of government. We all liked trading with the British. We all use English as our primary language. We all have a love of the classic British enlightenment thinkers and philosophers.
We all declared independence because the British had these eras where they got too big for their britches and started to make us into second class Englishmen. That was intolerable.
To this day I think had the British gave us all proper seats in parliament and treated us as proper Englishmen I’m not sure if we would have ever left.
In a way we killed the British and French Empires.
The Suez Crisis. That was the beginning of the final end of both Empires. We sided with the Soviets and Egyptians over both the French and British.
At that point both of their governments realized that they had become so dependent on the United States after WWII that they submitted easily to our demands. I think both the French and the British recognized internally that they were no longer great empires anymore. And all of colonized Africa and the Middle East saw the weakness in them so they started making their moves.
I wonder had we sided with France and Britain in the Suez Crisis instead of the Egyptians and Soviets would the mass decolonization of the 1960s actually happened?
Once upon a time I worked for a Corporation located in Silicon Valley. One summer we entertained a group of field service guys. One of them was a proud Brit. We got to talking about the 4th of July and I asked him if they had a 4th of July in England. And he said “Certainly not”, to which I asked him “well what comes between the 3rd and the 5th?”. He got it and replied “Well I do think they have a party in London”, to which I replied “Is it a bunch of Brits jumping up and down and yelling We Lost, We Lost”.
