From Empire to Commonwealth

In the immediate postwar period Britain still thought of itself as an imperial nation. At its height the British Empire was the largest empire the world has ever known, comprising territories in North America, the Carribean, the South Atlantic, West Africa, Southern Africa, East Africa, South Asia, South-East Asia, parts of China, and most of Oceania. After 1919, parts of the Middle-East were also ruled by Britain under mandate from the League of Nations.

Each of these territories had its own status and method of government, varying according to how it had become part of the British Empire, pre-existing customs (as the British understood them), the strength and cohesion of native elites, and other local or regional conditions. The five most important parts of the Empire were Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa (sometimes called the "four pillars" of the Empire) and India. Queen Victoria’s two most important titles were Queen of Great Britain and Empress of India. Victoria’s successors also bore the title Emperor of India until renouncing it in 1948, the year after India became independent. The only 20th century British monarch never to have been emperor or empress of India was Elizabeth II.

Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa were settler colonies: large numbers of British and Irish (and other European) settlers emigrated to these territories. These were the first colonies to attain significant measures of self-government: Canada from 1867, Australia from 1901, New Zealand from 1907, and the Union of South Africa from 1910. They remained tied to Britain in various ways, for instance supplying troops during the two world wars, recognising the British monarch as Head of State, and (until 1967) often holding their currency reserves in Sterling.

As more and more imperial territories became self-governing, the Empire was transformed into a free international association, the Commonwealth of Nations. This is an international organisation, currently of 53 states (listed here), all of which (with the exception of Mozambique) were once part of the British Empire.

Elizabeth II is not only the head of the Commonwealth, she is also head of state in 16 of the states that are members of the Commonwealth: the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, Barbados, the Bahamas, Grenada, Papua New Guinea, the Solomon Islands, Tuvalu, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Antigua and Barbuda, Belize, and Saint Kitts and Nevis (listed in order of independence). She is also Lord of Man, and titular Queen of Fiji.

Commonwealth countries are often proud to have legal systems, armies, educational institutions, and structures of government and administration modeled on British examples, although they are equally proud of the fact that the British are no longer running them.

The Commonwealth also provides sporting exchanges in the Commonwealth Games (a sort of mini-Olympics), and part of the legacy of Empire is the way that the games cricket and rugby are played across the globe, primarily in Commonwealth countries (unlike Association Football, which has been adopted by many countries that were never part of the British Empire).

One of the legacies of the Empire is the existence of a collection of nations around the world in which the English language is widely spoken in everyday life and is used as a literary language, not simply a lingua franca for negotiation and exchange. Even the U.S.A., the main English-speaking country outside the Commonwealth, was originally a collection of British colonies in North America. The Nobel Prize for Literature has been awarded to the Nigerian novelist Wole Soyinka (1986), the West-Indian poet Derek Walcott (1992), the Irish poet Seamus Heaney (1995), the Indo-Trinidadian travel writer V.S. Naipaul (2001), and the Southern African novelists Nadine Gordimer (1991), J.M. Coetzee (2003), and Doris Lessing (2007). All these, and many others who have not received the same accolade, write in English for a world-wide readership, and contribute to an international literary culture that cannot be described by any model that simply puts Britain at its "centre".

Imperial and Commonwealth history is also important in determining post-war patterns of mass migration into the British Isles, creating a much more multiracial and multicultural society there, as well as earlier patterns of migration in other parts of the world (such as from India to the West Indies and to East Africa).

National pastimes

Alongside the National Health Service and National Coal Board, the Labour government of 1945-1951 created National Parks and a National Theatre. An Arts Council of Great Britain was founded, to subsidise the visual and performing arts and make them accessible to all (in 1994 separated into distinct bodies for England, Scotland, and Wales).

In 1946 the BBC launched its "Third Programme" - now Radio 3 - to present classical music and cultural programming (alongside the talk-based and informative Home Service - now Radio 4 - and the Light Programme - now Radio 2 - that provided light music). Through the Third Programme the BBC commissioned new musical compositions, plays, poems and documentaries. Dylan Thomas, for instance, originally wrote Under Milk Wood for performance on the Third Programme. It was taken for granted by the government, the Arts Council and the BBC that wide access to "high culture" was desirable and desired, even though conservatives in the 1940s and radicals in the 1960s insisted that only a narrow elite could derive benefit from it.

New Towns were built with recreational zones of parkland (that pictured here the Fairlands Valley Park in Stevenage), new schools were expected to have not just a yard to play in but some sort of sports field, and council estates had playgrounds for children.

Lewis Silkin, Minister for Town and Country Planning in Attlee's government, went so far as to refer to the National Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949 (which created the National Parks and guaranteed recreational access to the countryside) as "the most exciting Act of the post-war Parliament."

The National Trust was a non-governmental organisation founded in 1895 to preserve vanishing aspects of British rural life (countryside, coastline, old buildings). From 1935 it ran a programme of "Country House Rescue", the country house (and the country house garden) being typically British cultural achievements, many no longer economically viable. In 1946 the Labour Chancellor of the Exchequer, Hugh Dalton, set up the National Land Fund: as a memorial to the war dead, country estates would be bought up with funds from the sale of surplus military stores, and turned over to the National Trust (still an independent charity) to maintain public access. Unique ensembles of architecture, furniture and landscape that would otherwise have been broken up and sold piecemeal were kept whole and opened to the general public. This was sometimes described as "a form of land nationalisation acceptable to the owners".

Since 1908 local authorities have been obliged to set some land aside to be made available as "allotments" to people who wanted to grow their own fruit and vegetables. This obligation was reinforced and clarified by the Allotments Act 1950, passed at a time when rationing was winding down and building land was at a premium, making it harder for local councils to take back allotments and use the land for building.

Throughout the United Kingdom, an infrastructure was created, partly by central government and partly by local authorities, that was intended to make healthy and stimulating recreation available to all.