W. David McIntyre - The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48.

The Britannic Vision: Historians and the Making of the British Commonwealth of Nations, 1907-48.

It is a principle of scientific research that the observer should never intrude upon the experiment. The issue rarely arises for historians since we usually study past events and completed episodes. However, the evolution, disintegration or prestidigitation (take your terminological pick) of the British Empire into the Commonwealth of Nations constitutes an exception, since there was a substantial scholarly input into the on-going process. Indeed, it might be argued that historians in the first half of the twentieth century were more involved in speculating about the future of the Empire than their successors have proved to be in unravelling its past. The liquidation of the British Empire was much less painful and definitely less messy than it might have been because force was wrapped in formulae and power politics clothed in the proclamation of principles ─ and if that sounds too flowery, compare British decolonisation with Japanese hegemony in east Asia or Portuguese rule in southern Africa. The input of intellectuals, or at least of intellectualism, was vital to this humane narrative. For W. David McIntyre, the magic fluid is called the 'Britannic Vision'. From dreaming spires and ivory towers came the finest minds of the English-speaking world, and the upshot was a discourse that focused around that most theological of all constitutional issues: how many Dominions could dance on the preamble to the Statute of Westminster?

Thus the decision by one of the most experienced and authoritative of Commonwealth historians, W. David McIntyre, to examine the contribution of the historians can only be welcome.

The seventeen personalities to whom he introduces us are a mixed bag, although masculinity and Oxford notably recur. Some were academics who strayed into the public sphere, others were politicians who had done time in universities and a few combined university life with bureaucracy, a form of multi-tasking that would make them ideal for the modern degree factory. Broadly, they divide into centralisers, who dreamed of imperial federation, and autonomists, who yearned for independence or sought to strip the Commonwealth illusion of its figleaf of fantasy. First comes Arthur Berriedale Keith, Colonial Office enfant terrible, Reader (not professor) of Sanskrit at Edinburgh and champion of Dominion self-assertion. There follows Oscar D. Skelton, history professor turned Canadian civil servant and suspicious foe of the perfidious British. Confronting them is Lionel Curtis, the prophet of organic imperial union. Drawing his inspiration from ancient Athens, Alfred Zimmern challenged Britain to reconcile democracy and the founding of daughter states. H. Duncan Hall was an Australian who dodged the extreme alternatives and talked of free co-operation. He would eventually publish a doorstopper of a tome that lovingly chronicled all the declarations and incantations which shaped the evolution of dominion status. Leo Amery was primarily a politician ─ sorry, statesman ─ but he tapped into the academic discourse through his fellowship at All Souls, an Oxford college so elevated that not even Inspector Morse ever managed to nab one of its inmates. Sidney Low came up with the striking formula that the Statute of Westminster turned George V into 'Seven Kings in One' (p. 37), an intriguing phrase which combines a hint of blasphemy with the image of a railway station on the Liverpool Street line. Reginald Coupland was a formidable scholar of Empire who foresaw African dominions and advised governments on the future of Burma, Palestine and, most notably, India. Kenneth Wheare was an Australian who conquered Oxford and monitored the tweaking of dominion status from grown-up colonial to unfettered nation state. W.K. Hancock embodied the concept of global Britishness, moving as effortlessly and brilliantly between his native Australia and England's major universities as he did through the histories of the Commonwealth and its component countries. H.V. Hodson moved from All Souls to become editor of the Round Table: need we say more of his wisdom and influence? Nicholas Mansergh was an Irish gentleman (and, as a fervent admirer, I triple-underline that old-fashioned noun) who was equally at home and influential in both Irish and Indian affairs and, even more remarkably, moved seamlessly from Oxford and to a Cambridge chair and college mastership. Yet another Oxford don, Patrick Gordon Walker was the Commonwealth Relations Secretary who helped find the formula that kept republican India in the Commonwealth. This did not please Enoch Powell, whose passionate patriotism mourned the abandonment of Empire and scorned the embracing of Commonwealth. Powell's presence in the team may surprise those who forget his early posting as professor of Greek at the University of Sydney. In a splendidly chivalric gesture, he flew home in September 1939 to enlist in the war against Hitler. (Years later, I found one of his colleagues from Sydney's tiny classics department still grumbling because he had inherited the marking Enoch's abandoned examination scripts.) Next comes the little-known John Coatman, an LSE economics professor who shared Powell's distaste for evasive metaphysics. The cavalcade rounds off with two mighty Oxford figures, Vincent Harlow and Margery Perham. Harlow was a formidable scholar whose theory that there were two British Empires, one before 1776 and the other after 1783, left open the door to a third manifestation of equal import under the guise of Commonwealth. Perham is not included as the token woman, for she penned twenty books on the dependent Empire from Africa to Samoa, although the focus of her work placed her on the periphery of those who speculated about the evolution of the overall association.

Seventeen luminous personalities, and they peer and frown at us from a section of black-and-white photographs. What does McIntyre tell us of their cumulative contribution to the continuing redefinition of the Empire-Commonwealth? Overall, less than perhaps we might expect. Any book by W. David McIntyre will do what it says on the can, and his nominated historians duly appear at unofficial conferences and key moments. The problem is that it is necessary once again to tell the story of the transformation of Empire to Commonwealth in order to embed the role of the academics. It is a tale McIntyre has magisterially recounted in the past, yet he can still find fresh quotations and new twists of insight as he escorts us along that familiar path. It is perhaps the very efficiency of his narrative that limits our opportunities to get to grips with the detailed ideas of the historians: even the towering Hancock appears only fleetingly. I had never heard of Coatman, but the introduction made him sound an intriguing character blessed with a tactless ability to offer sartorial comment on naked emperors. Alas, he is barely mentioned in the subsequent account. There is no extended attempt to review the contribution made by academics, or even to return to the original rugby squad to assess which of them should be regarded as scholarly commentators and which must be redefined as polemical activists. Reviewers should avoid being obtusely unhelpful, but it does seem that McIntyre either chose too many historians or too few. The study might have gone back into the nineteenth century and anchored two rival camps to Goldwin Smith, the shallow Oxford separatist, and the inevitable J.R. Seeley, the Cambridge imperial federationist. Conversely, the work might have homed in on a smaller number, say Harlow, Perham, Hancock and Mansergh, looking in more detail both at their published writings and their policy-shaping memoranda. As it stands, this book represents another impressive statement of McIntyre's scholarship on the evolution of the Commonwealth, while representing an intriguing reconnaissance of a subject that merits further study.

Ged Martin

National University of Ireland, Galway