How did the British Empire Understand and Try to Combat Violent Nationalism - Literature review Example

Running Head: How did the British Empire understand and try to combat violent nationalism How did the British Empire understand and try to combat violent nationalism Authors Name Institution Name 1Introduction The presence of the profit intent serves today as an influential aid; it is true, for Indian agitators in dishonoring the sincerity of British trusteeship. To the British Raj, Mahatma Gandhi, opposes his "soul force" in a struggle none the less impressive for being typically nonviolent. For it truly means the effort of an Eastern race to shake off a Western racial and industrial authority by mastering its own Oriental diversities of race and religion and by finding a new soul in nationality (Jean Marie Allman, 1993). Dependent Africa should be ruled under the same dualism of motives: one that has established an explicit statement in the mandates from the League, where the humanitarian aim of trusteeship has been stressed as primary. It is a trusteeship under what Lord Lugard has strikingly called a "dual mandate" in colonial government (Williams, Gwyn A., 1980). For it entails not only a compulsion to develop the territory in the interests of a world economy but the fortification of the native inhabitants from the too atrocious impact of contact with extremely geared industrial civilizations. An analysis into the success of the British Empire in dealing with this most annoyed problem has astonishing interest to all colonizing powers. The consideration of the world has been focused with atypical intensity for that reason on the East Coast of Africa, now almost completely British, either through direct control or under League Mandate. There the white settlement, from which West Africa has been secure by its climate, is probable in the high uplands of Kenya, in parts of Tanganyika and Nyassaland, and perhaps on down to the Union of South Africa, on the island peaks of high plateau country such as an increase as one goes south through the Rhodesias. Over the entire area Cecil Rhodes' dream of a white African empire for England is being fought out between the Colonial Office's policy of constraint and the stubborn nationalism of the Union of South Africa. Like autocratic, independent spirit threatens to overflow into the white settlements of the Rhodesias and of Kenya, though the latter are still sparingly settled protectorates or crown colonies, in the case of Kenya without accountable government. The shibboleth that divides men about native policy in Africa is the "dominant" interest of the natives (D. C. Dorward, 1986, pp. 399-459). The concern of this African struggle and of the other troubles of an empire can only be astutely foreseen after a study of each discretely, focusing attention first on the British Commonwealth of equivalent nations and weighing centrifugal and centripetal pulls from race, religion, class, chronological ties, and economic interests. British foreign policy compounded and compromised into an incorporated system out of the pull of these various interests, with other centers of economic and political gravitation pulling at its component members from both North and South America, and Europe (Philip Foster, 1965). Nor can one overlook that Russia is potentially threatening to the structure of that capitalist world economy in which the City in London shares with New York the ruling position. As long as capitalist nations evade war the threat is slight (G. O. Olusanya, 1973). Preventing famine after 1914 The British had to overcome by using up resources in breaking local powers before they could rule, receive revenues, and as they saw it, take civilization. This Imperial vision was self-contradictory, for Britishly approximate of Africans differed. Where there was a strong 'native state', with a previously Christian ruling class and a conscientious tenantry, as in Buganda, then a guarded organizational preference for stability could merge with missionary hopes or commercial demands for change. But numerous East Africans had no chiefs, let alone kings (Imanuel Geiss, 1993). The British approved that they were uncommonly low on the evolutionary scale but diverged on how they could be 'raised'. Officials hoped councils of elders would defend organic small communities; missionaries prayed for piously audacious individuals; settler farmers favored the collective restraint of wage labor. Separated purposes permitted much room for a historical contingency in what followed; outcomes waited on local differences rather than on Imperial policy. All Britain's little invasions in East Africa had their own distinguishing character, thanks to a changeable Imperial interest in each territory, differences in African society, and the chronological accidents such as royal-succession war, cattle plague, or famine that fashioned levers of association for the British or springs of opposition (Williamson, Arthur H., 1979). Force was expensive. Colonies were destined to pay. Supplying them with limited capital, Britain had to build serene Imperial hegemonies on a shoestring (N E Phillips, 1991). They were the preceding eddies of the Victorian tide of British emigration that had constantly been more urban than rural, and that was now checked by the onset of global overproduction in moderate farming. Officials had no faith in peasant producers; they had seen too numerous Africans die of famine and smallpox. But a private family farm in Kenya's cool highlands, as different from lowland company plantations of sisal or upland coffee or tea estates, was no better bet for improving the 6m spent on railway and invasion. Additionally, Kenya's invasion was patchy. Whites owned three-quarters of South Africa and half Rhodesia, but simply one-fifth of Kenya's useable land. African agriculture as distinct from pastoralism, the Masai, suffered enormous land losses was left largely in place. As in other place in Africa, peasants entered markets faster than settlers and before 1914 sold further exports. The profound politics of consent in British rule, as well as its high finance, rested willy-nilly on their income. Playing on racial harmony, settlers disturbed for more African land, taxes, and labor specifically because officials could never completely satisfy these calls. The paired act of British 'trusteeship' for African interests was a material associate with peasant production before it became Imperial principles. It was satirical that this noticeably British mediation between the races spawning Royal Commissions, Episcopal petition, and parliamentary debate was persistent by British Indians. Their commercial insight was the spur to peasant export competition with settlers (Wood, Neal, 1994). Colonial counterinsurgency after the Second World War The performance of counterinsurgency operations developed from the operational art of the twenties and thirties to a full military doctrine by the late fifties and sixties. In colonial campaigns, four advances in technology supported security forces: troop-carrying aircraft which could convey units in a matter of hours; the helicopter, with its capability to fly in troops as rapid feedback to a rebellious attack or to prepare an ambush, and also to offer logistical support; advances in electronic warfare technology, in particular radar observation of movements and signals interception; and the navy's wisecrack to the RAF, commando aircraft carriers, from which Marines could be raised by helicopter. In the British army the Special Air Service regiment and the Intelligence Corps were developed to play ever more considerable roles. In the majority colonies, also, police Special Branches (political surveillance) were developed, in some of which a British Security Service official was stationed. Police forces had to be extended to give for mobile force units for fast deployment in areas of unrest. Particularly effective in Kenya and Cyprus also were 'counter-gangs' whose members were drawn from loyalists or 'turned' rebels. The price of this air and naval equipment, of the Aden campaign, of the garrisons in South-East Asia and of the Rhine army, and of a second generation of nuclear deterrent weapons became unbearable by the early sixties. Left-wing figures in the Labor Party, some of Cabinet rank, pressed for radical reductions. Though as late as 1966 Labors' Prime Minister, Harold Wilson, was still declaring that Britain's frontier was on the Himalayas, the reality, that Britain's economic decline was structural and not just the consequences of the costly world war and successive misfortunes, was now inevitably clear and was to be highlighted by the excellent crisis in the autumn of 1964. The United States remained explicitly, and more prominently covertly, helpful. In spite of the distance and logistical difficulties, the Falklands were rapidly evoked by a task-force of British warships and troops. Anti-colonial nationalism as a factor to the fall of the British Empire The Second World War eased the decolonization process in individual countries. However, some work has been done on Ghana, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Zambia. In "Soldiers, Ex-Servicemen, and Politics in the Gold Coast," the notion that veterans developed a new political responsiveness that played a considerable role in the decolonization process. Instead, ex-servicemen executed a limited role in nationalist politics all through the 1945-1950 periods (Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, 1997). Zagorin, Perez (1954) asserted that there is no association between the employment of Africans into British forces and the emergence of post-1945 nationalist movements. Part of the calculation after the strategy of yielding a colonial self-government had been to merge and expand the global role of sterling. Even when British dependencies attained freedom, however, they did not all submissively rush to the support of the Sterling Area. As the lately independent states' income from the progression of imperial Development as marked, for instance, in British Colonial and Development Act fell away, so they turned ever more to other development agencies and to other currencies for investment and support. The consequent detachment and disillusionment with sterling were one of the major causative factors in the currency's rapid decline as a foremost means of international exchange. Once political freedom had been approved to colonial territories, Britain had thrown away one of the main cards it could have participated in order to keep reliant territories tied to it in a close and supportive commercial arrangement. The ex-colonies still, certainly, needed aid and investment, but increasingly they required it from sources other than Britain and the Sterling Area (Wilson, Kathleen, 1995). By the era the Labor government under Harold Wilson came to power in October 1964, there seemed moderately little that could be retrieved from the wrack of imperial decline and closure (Wilson, Kathleen, 1988, Winch, Peter, 1990). Globalization as the new imperialism While downsizing, wage cutting, moving factories to low-wage and environmentally slack countries, maximum wages are maximized, minimum wages are kept to a least and other chaotic changes are all measured to be victories for democracy. And when such values are elated to numerous countries that have very little democratic tradition and very reasonably divided societies, there is a major dilemma. The difficulty is aggravated by the facts that there are no rules, regulations or authorities that will balance globalization. Unrestrained, globalization will make things much worse. It will be hard to call escalating capitalism fair. It is retained that global capitalism (or globalization) cannot linger free if it is not fair. When the Mongolians pirated the riches of China that was not fair. While Hitler took all the riches of Europe by force that was not fair. As globalization plays great favoritism toward the rich around the world, this is not fair either. What is desired is a globalization process that is sustainable. Clearly, sustainable globalization is particularly desirable if it is based on fairness. It will have to allocate its benefits amongst all participants (Ghauri, Pervez N. 2001). Presently, the way globalization is working at the present time is more of a global imperialism of the dollar than a fair economic commotion that will benefit all participants. The benefits of globalization and become full recipients of the globalization movement, then there will be no cause to think of pirates adjoining the extreme rich or sheep dogs or tanks attacking the electronic herd. Sustainable globalization is a main goal that we should aim at and work for persistently. Though in its present form globalization may not be doing much good for several in the world, it is the only prospect for the poor nations to enter the world's mainstream economic progress. It is through globalization that poor countries will learn to make economic riches for their populations (Anderson, Shirley C. 2000). It is obvious that efficiently well-off countries through globalization are treating the world's economic riches as a zero-sum game in that someone should lose so they get rich. Consequently, at the start of the twenty first century, we do not have evil empires or dictatorships of implication, but we do have a fast-growing capitalist imperialism. The power of the dollar is petrifying many poor countries, and globalization is emphasizing this problem. In short, global capitalism at this time is not autonomous enough. It cannot be persistent in a pleasing manner (Atkinson, Glen 1999). Globalization is permitted to continue as a rich country's game while spreading global imperialism, there will be a deteriorating gap between the have-nothings (a very large group) and have-mores (a comparatively small group). Prolonged participation in globalization is useful to the whole world. Amongst other things, it will make it less probable for future world terrorists to materialize. It has been said that to assuage the poverty of hundreds of millions of people in the developing world, globalization must be looked at as a remedy (Anthony, Robert 2000). Globalization forms cultural exchanges which inexorably lead to cultural change. Traditionalists in numerous cultures are contrasting with such changes. However, cultural exchanges can give new ways of thinking and new solutions to old problems. This is a significant area that needs to be exploring further. References: Jean Marie Allman, The Quills of the Porcupine: Asante Nationalism in an Emergent Ghana (Madison, 1993). Williams, Gwyn A., Welsh Wizard and British Empire: Dr. John Dee and Welsh Identity (Cardiff, 1980). D. C. Dorward, 'British West Africa and Liberia', in A. D. Roberts. ed., The Cambridge History of Africa, Vol. VII, 1905-1940 (Cambridge, 1986), pp. 399-459. Philip Foster, Education and Social Change in Ghana (Chicago, 1965). Imanuel Geiss, The Pan-African Movement, trans. Ann Keep (London, 1974). Paul E. Lovejoy and Jan S. Hogendorn, Slow Death for Slavery: The Course of Abolition in Northern Nigeria, 1897-1936 (Cambridge, 1993). G. O. Olusanya, The Second World War and Politics in Nigeria, 1939-1953 (London, 1973). Williamson, Arthur H., Scottish National Consciousness in the Age of James VI (Edinburgh, 1979). N E Phillips, The Enigma of Colonialism: British Policy in West Africa (London, 1989). J. Brown and W. Roger Louis (eds.), Oxford History of the British Empire Vol. IV: The Twentieth Century (OUP, Oxford, 1999) Filmer, Sir Robert, Filmer: Patriarcha and Other Writings, ed. Johann P. Sommerville (Cambridge, 1991). Wood, Neal, Foundations of Political Economy: Some Early Tudor Views on State and Society (Berkeley, 1994). Fletcher of Saltoun, Andrew, Andrew Fletcher: Political Works, ed. John Robertson (Cambridge, 1997). Zagorin, Perez, A History of Political Thought in the English Revolution (London, 1954). Wilson, Kathleen, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995). Wilson, Kathleen, 'Empire, Trade and Popular Politics in Mid-Hanoverian Britain: The Case of Admiral Vernon', Past and Present, 121 (Nov. 1988), 74-109. Winch, Peter, The Idea of a Social Science and its Relation to Philosophy, 2nd edn (London, 1990). Ghauri, Pervez N. (2001). "Using Cooperative Strategies to Compete in a Changing World," in C. P. Rao (ed.), Globalization and Its Managerial Implications. Westport, CT: Quorum Books. Anderson, Shirley C. (2000). "The Globally Competitive Firm: Functional Integration Value Chain Logistics, Global Marketing and Business College Strategic Support," Competitiveness Review, March 33-45. Anthony, Robert (2000). "The Digital Divide Network," Black Enterprise, June, 11, 80. Atkinson, Glen (1999). "Developing Global Institutions: Lessons to be Learned from Regional Integration Experience," Journal of Economic Issues, June, 335-342. Read More