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Y320: From Colonialism to Independence: The British Empire 1857–1965

The British Empire and its impact on international relations: mandates, dominions, world war and decline

  • 2 things to know
  • Unit group 3

Overview

Recall questions on the mandates, the dominions between the wars, the Empire in the Second World War, the United Nations, the United States, Suez, the Cold War, the Commonwealth, the Wind of Change and Europe.

What you need to know

Answer each one before you reveal it.

Your recallNot started
Key term

Why was Suez in 1956 a turning point?

Numbers

How did the Cold War affect the Empire?

Questions from this subtopic

Each one with the model answer underneath.

  1. 1

    Define the League of Nations mandate system and state which mandates Britain received.

    Model answer

    Article 22 of the Covenant declared the well-being of the peoples of the former German and Ottoman territories a sacred trust of civilisation and assigned them to victor powers to administer under supervision by a Permanent Mandates Commission; Britain took Palestine, Transjordan and Iraq as class A mandates and Tanganyika and parts of Togoland and the Cameroons as class B.

  2. 2

    How did relations with the dominions change between the wars?

    Model answer

    The refusal of Canada and others to back Britain at Chanak in 1922 showed that the dominions would not be committed automatically to imperial policy; the Balfour definition of 1926 recognised them as autonomous and equal in status, and the Statute of Westminster in 1931 gave that legal form, turning the Empire in that quarter into an association of independent states.

  3. 3

    What did the Empire contribute in the Second World War, and where did it fail?

    Model answer

    India raised the largest volunteer army in history at about two and a half million men, imperial bases and manpower sustained the campaigns in North Africa and Burma, and dominion forces fought on every front; but the fall of Singapore in 1942 destroyed Britain's prestige in Asia, Japanese occupation encouraged local nationalism, and Britain accumulated enormous sterling debts to the colonies whose resources it had used.

  4. 4

    How did the Second World War alter Britain's international standing?

    Model answer

    It ended the war victorious but effectively bankrupt, owing several billion pounds in sterling balances and dependent on an American loan in 1946, while the two new superpowers were both, for different reasons, hostile to European colonial empires, and the Atlantic Charter's endorsement of self-determination had raised expectations Churchill's reservations could not contain.

  5. 5

    How did the United Nations affect British colonial policy?

    Model answer

    The Charter obliged administering powers to report on non-self-governing territories and placed the former mandates under a Trusteeship Council, while the growing Afro-Asian bloc in the General Assembly turned colonialism into a standing item of criticism, culminating in the 1960 declaration on the granting of independence to colonial peoples, which Britain did not support but could not ignore.

  6. 6

    How did the Empire shape Britain's relationship with the United States?

    Model answer

    American governments combined a wish to keep Britain strong with a settled hostility to imperial preference and colonial rule, pressing for non-discriminatory trade in return for wartime aid and for movement on India; the tension broke into the open at Suez, and after 1956 Britain resolved never to act against Washington's wishes, buying Polaris at Nassau in 1962 and framing decolonisation to fit American Cold War priorities.

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