The history of the twentieth century only fully makes sense when viewed through the prism of Empire. We think we know the familiar stories of the two world wars and the Cold War, yet all too often the central role that Empire played in both is overlooked.
The First World War brought down some European Empires, but it left the British, French and Italians with their colonial possessions, and they soon found that the new world order based on President Wilson’s principles of national self-determination could be turned to suit their own imperial ends. The League of Nations became a new channel through which the Europeans could maintain their global imperial power. The increasingly aggressive stance of the Japanese showed that there was plenty of life in old-style imperialism, while the growth of European fascism proved easily compatible with imperialism, so that when war broke out in Europe in 1939 it was essentially a clash of two models of imperialism.
In the Second World War, Britain and France’s empires became important areas for political and military manoeuvre after the expulsion of the allies from the European continent in 1940. Both Churchill and De Gaulle had imperial considerations at the front of their minds throughout the war and the Americans found it increasingly difficult to keep the war against Germany free from entanglement in European colonial rivalries.
However, the nature of Empire was changing rapidly. The European colonial powers suffered serious reverses and defeats: the French and some of the British suffered occupation and in some cases, notably in Asia, were reduced to impotence and even slavery. It was a fatal blow for imperial regimes that depended absolutely on an image of innate racial and cultural superiority. But even as the British, Italian and French empires were broken by the war, new empires were emerging, driven by rival ideologies. Nationalism arose in Africa and Asia to challenge and bring down the old colonial rulers, but the Cold War that developed at the same time produced a new form of imperialism into which the old empires, both rulers and ruled, were drawn, whether they liked it or not.
