By W. David McIntyre
The rapid dissolution of the European colonial empires in the middle decades of the 20th century were key formative events in the background to the contemporary global scene. As the British Empire was the greatest of the imperial structures to go, it is worth considering who signed the death warrant. I suggest there are five candidates.
The first is the Earl of Balfour, Prime Minister 1902-1905, who later penned the exquisite ‘status formula’ of 1926 to describe the relations of Britain and its self-governing white settler colonies, then known as Dominions. They were ‘equal in status’ though ‘freely co-operating’ under a single Crown. The implications were that they were as independent as they wanted to be and this was marked in the preamble to the Statute of Westminster five years later. Some visionaries at this time suggested that places like India or Nigeria might be Dominions, too, suggesting that here was an agreed exist route from empire.
India, indeed, took the route in 1947 when Clement Attlee, the second candidate, announced that the Raj would end. The jewel in the imperial crown was removed when the Raj was partitioned into the Dominions of India and Pakistan. They were followed into independence a year later by Ceylon (Sri Lanka) and Burma (Myanmar). With the ending of the Raj it was evident that empire’s days were numbered.
Harold Macmillan
, our third candidate, extended independence more widely to Africa. His celebrated ‘
Wind of Change’ speech to the South African Parliament in 1960 marked a firm foot on the decolonization accelerator pedal. Macmillan’s conservative governments, 1957-1963, granted independence to fourteen colonies (eleven in Africa).
It looked as if the process would be completed by the fourth candidate, Harold Wilson, whose ‘Withdrawal from East of Suez’ and abolition of the Colonial Office ran in parallel to Britain’s preparations to enter the European Communities. Although the conservative government of Edward Heath, 1970-1974, delayed the withdrawal for a few years, Heath announced to the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in Singapore in 1971 that the empire was ‘past history’. And, as part of his application of the baleful disciplines of business management to government, he ordered a ‘Programme Analysis and Review’ of all the remaining dependent territories. This process, conducted over 1973-74, concluded that the dependencies were liabilities rather than assets and that a policy of ‘accelerated decolonization; should be adopted in many small island countries in the Pacific, Indian Ocean, and Caribbean previously deemed too small and incapable of being sovereign states.
Although the Heath government never managed to approve this policy before it was ejected from office after the miner’s strike in 1974, the second Wilson government went ahead. It was Jim Callaghan, as Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs who signed the death warrant on 13 June 1975 in the form of a despatch to administrators suggesting that the dependencies had been ‘acquired for historical reasons that were no longer valid’. To avoid the charge of colonialism being made by the anti-imperialist majority in the United Nations, Britain adopted ‘accelerated decolonization’ in the Pacific Islands. During the late 1970s and the 1980s most of the remaining dependent territories moved rapidly to independence. An empire acquired over half-a-millennium was dissolved in less than half-a-century.
W. David McIntyre was educated at Peterhouse, Cambridge, the University of Washington, Seattle, and the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. After teaching for the Universities of Maryland, British Columbia, and Nottingham, he became Professor of History at the University of Canterbury New Zealand between 1966 and 1997. As Honorary Special Correspondent of The New Zealand International Review he reported on Commonwealth Heads of Government Meetings from 1987 to 2011. His latest book is Winding up the British Empire in the Pacific Islands.
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Image credit: Harold Macmillan. By Vivienne (Florence Mellish Entwistle) [Open Government Licence], via Wikimedia Commons
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The American Catholic Church of today is a product of many dramatic transformations, especially those that took place in the 1960s. Below is an excerpt from The American Catholic Revolution: How the Sixties Changed the Church Forever where Mark S. Massa recounts some of the practices Archbishop James Francis McIntyre instituted in Los Angeles.
James Francis McIntyre entered St. Joseph’s (Dunwoodie) Seminary in Yonkers, New York, in 1916. Dunwoodie was then considered a showplace of the American seminary system of priestly formation. In interviews with fifty priests who had passed through its doors between 1915 and 1929, Philip Murnion found that almost all felt they had completed “a superior regimen of intellectual formation.” But superiority in seminary formation, as in so much else, lies in the eye of the beholder. Michael Gannon, studying the Yonkers seminary in those very years, came to a somewhat different conclusion than the alumni. Gannon offered a bleaker picture of the intellectual world encountered by the young McIntyre: “The course work required little or no reading outside the textbooks and some notes; no papers to do; a library open to students only two hours on Sunday and Wednesday mornings; and an institutionalized four hours and forty minutes of study.”
But whatever intellectual shortchanging occurred at St. Joseph’s Seminary did not slow McIntyre’s rise into the upper reaches of the American hierarchy. Ordained as a priest in 1921 at the age of thirty-five, he was quickly appointed assistant to the chancellor of the archdiocese of New York, and was named chancellor himself in 1934. His preeminence in that position—running the vast network of parishes, schools, hospitals, and orphanages on a day-to-day basis—brought him national visibility. McIntyre managed to refinance dozens of debt-ridden parishes under his care during the Great Depression, making him indispensable to his ecclesiastical mentor, Francis Cardinal Spellman. But Chancellor McIntyre’s relations with the priests of New York, who actually ran the operation on the parish level, reflected the theological poverty that was his inheritance from the Dunwoodie Seminary. Things in the Church didn’t (or couldn’t) change, so that the duty of his underlings was to learn the correct answer, and simply apply it. Usually this meant McIntyre’s answers. Thus many of the clergy who reported to McIntyre in those years found him to be authoritarian, even harsh, in dealing with subordinates. He was respected for his business acuity and for his economic abilities, but this prominent alumnus of St. Joseph’s Seminary was also “a pragmatic man not noted for the range of his intellectual interests or sympathies.”
[…]
McIntyre carried his dismissive attitude toward liberals, and indeed toward anyone who sought to change what he took to the changeless truths of Catholicism he learned in seminary, to the other side of the continent, when he was named archbishop of Los Angeles in March 1949. The death of his predecessor, the much-respected John Cantwell, opened up what had been the See of a desert city known more for its battles over water rights that its Catholic identity. But that had changed quickly after the Great Depression. A million new parishioners had swelled the ranks of the faithful during the 1930’s and 1940’s, so that what had been a largely sleepy diocese now needed a bricks-and-mortar leader, someone who could oversee a massive expansion of parishes, schools, and Catholic social services. McIntyre’s boss, Cardinal Spellman, informed Romae that he had just the man for the job in the person of his chancellor, and (not surprisingly, given Spellman’s powerful influence at the Vatican) McIntyre got the job. He oversaw an impressive institutional expansion: the number of pari
