‘The whole world is rocking’: British governments and a dysfunctional imperial system, 1918–1945

Abstract

‘Our born leaders are dead.’ Of course we cannot prove that the British empire would have been better run if so many young men had not died in the First World War, which claimed the lives of over 37,000 officers, many of whom would have gone into politics and imperial administration. What we can say is that those who fought and survived and moved into public life and the service of the empire believed themselves to be merely the runts of what had promised to be ‘a great generation’: ‘the better chaps were gone’. They were, as one Cambridge don put it, ‘most of them not meant to be our leaders at all. They are only the last and worst of our war substitutes.’ Almost all of them were marked by ‘moral and psychological shock’, haunted by memories, guilty in their survival. Almost all intelligent young men of whatever political party were active supporters of the League of Nations, and attracted by disarmament. Many turned to pacifism, or something like it. Some turned to communism. Another war was something to be avoided at all costs. They felt driven to serve, specifically ‘to strive for the creation and organisation of peace, above all things’, and to forge a better world. The war caused at least one serious defection from the colonial service.