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Books > History > World history > From 1900 > Postwar, from 1945
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Monarchy and the End of Empire - The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Paperback)
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Monarchy and the End of Empire - The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth (Paperback)
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This unique and meticulously-researched study examines the
triangular relationship between the British government, the Palace,
and the modern Commonwealth since 1945. It has two principal areas
of focus: the monarch's role as sovereign of a series of
Commonwealth Realms, and quite separately as head of the
Commonwealth. It traces how, in the early part of the twentieth
century, the British government promoted the Crown as a
counterbalance to the centrifugal forces that were drawing the
Empire apart. Ultimately, however, with newly-independent India's
determination to become a republic in the late 1940s, Britain had
to accept that allegiance to the Crown could no longer be the
common factor binding the Commonwealth together. It therefore
devised the notion of the headship of the Commonwealth as a means
of enabling a republican India 'to continue to give the monarchy a
pivotal symbolic role and therefore to remain in the Commonwealth.'
In the years of rapid decolonization which followed 1945, it became
clear that this elaborate constitutional infrastructure posed
significant problems for British foreign policy. The system of
Commonwealth Realms was a recipe for confusion and
misunderstanding. Policy makers in the UK increasingly saw it as a
liability in terms of Britain's relations with its former colonies,
so much so that by the early 1960s they actively sought to persuade
African nationalist leaders to adopt republican constitutions on
independence. The headship of the Commonwealth also became a cause
for concern, partly because it offered opportunities for the
monarch to act without ministerial advice, and partly because it
tended to tie the British government to what many within the UK had
begun to regard as a largely redundant institution. Philip Murphy
employs a large amount of previously-unpublished documentary
evidence to argue that the monarchy's relationship with the
Commonwealth, which was initially promoted by the UK as a means of
strengthening Imperial ties, increasingly became an source of
frustration for British foreign policy makers.
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