rights that were equal to those of men.
Between 1929 and 1932 the international depression more than doubled an
already high rate of unemployment. In the course of three years, both the
levels of industrial activity and of prices dipped by a quarter, and
industries such as shipbuilding collapsed almost entirely. MacDonald’s
second Labour government found itself unable to cope with the depression,
and in 1931 it gave way to a national government, headed first by MacDonald
and then by Baldwin and made up mostly of Conservatives. The Labour Party
denounced MacDonald as a traitor, but the national government won an
overwhelming mandate in the general election of 1931. It took Britain off
the gold standard, restored protective tariffs, and subsidized the building
of houses. Between 1933 and 1937, the economy recovered steadily, with the
automobile, construction, and electrical industries leading the way.
Unemployment remained high, however, especially in Wales, Scotland, and
northern England. Interwar society was influenced by the radio (monopolized
by the British Broadcasting Corporation, which was begun in 1927) and the
cinema, but British life was little affected by the continental ideologies
of communism and fascism. The empire remained a fact, even though the
Statute of Westminster (1931) proclaimed the equality of Commonwealth
nations such as Canada and Australia. Religious attendance declined, but
King George V maintained the prestige of the monarchy. When his son, Edward
VIII, insisted on marrying a twice-divorced American in 1936, abdication
proved to be the only acceptable solution. Under Edward’s brother, George
VI, the monarchy again provided the model family of the land.
Britain and World War II
Memories of World War I left Britons with an overwhelming desire to avoid
another war, and the country played a leading role in the League of Nations
and at interwar disarmament conferences such as those in Washington, D.C.
in 1921 and 1922 and London in 1930 that limited naval size. Conscious that
Germany might have been unfairly treated at the 1919 peace conference, the
British government followed a policy of appeasement in dealing with Adolf
Hitler’s Germany after 1933. Germany’s decisions between 1934 and 1936 to
leave the League of Nations, rearm, and remilitarize the Rhineland in
defiance of the Treaty of Versailles were accepted. So was the German
annexation of Austria in 1938. In his efforts to keep the peace at all
costs, Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain also acquiesced to the Munich
Pact of 1938, which gave Germany the Sudetenland portion of Czechoslovakia.
Only after the German annexation of Prague in March of 1939 did Britain
make pledges to Poland and Romania.
When Hitler invaded Poland in September 1939, Britain and France declared
war, and World War II began. The
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by any other power. Although a German invasion plan was foiled by British
air supremacy, large parts of London and other cities were destroyed and
some 60,000 civilians were killed. Beginning early in 1941, the still-
neutral United States granted lend-lease aid to Britain.
The nature of the war changed with the German invasion of the Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in June 1941 and the Japanese attack on
Pearl Harbor in December 1941. Churchill then forged the “Grand Alliance”
with Soviet leader Joseph Stalin and U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt
against Germany, Italy, and Japan. In the immediate aftermath of the
Japanese intervention, much of the British Empire in Southeast Asia was
overrun, but late in 1942 the tide turned. The British contribution
included the Battle of the North Atlantic against the German submarine
menace and the campaign led by General Bernard Montgomery against the
German army in North Africa. Churchill corresponded continually and met
often with Roosevelt, and British forces joined American in the 1943
invasion of Sicily and Italy, the invasion of France in 1944, and the
ultimate defeat of the Axis powers in 1945.
The Winds of Change
The general election of 1945 gave the Labour Party for the first time a
majority of the popular vote and an overwhelming parliamentary majority.
The result was less a rebuke of Churchill’s wartime leadership than an
expression of approval of Labour’s role in the war and of hope that the
party would bring more prosperity.
Clement Attlee’s Ministry (1945-1951)
During the years that followed, Labour, led by Clement Attlee, sought to
build a socialist Britain, while surviving postwar austerity, dismantling
the empire, and adjusting to a cold war with the USSR. The two measures
that established a welfare state in Britain, the National Insurance Act of
1946 (a consolidation of benefit laws involving maternity, unemployment,
disability, old age, and death) and the National Health Service, set up in
1948, were widely popular. Both drew on the wartime reports of Sir William
Beveridge, a Liberal. The nationalization of the Bank of England, the coal
industry, gas and electricity, the railroads, and most airlines proved
relatively noncontroversial, but the Conservatives vigorously if vainly
opposed the nationalization of the trucking and the iron and steel
industries. In 1948 Labour eliminated the last remnants of plural voting
(that is, voting in more than one constituency) and reduced the delaying
powers of the House of Lords from two years to one. These changes were
instituted in the midst of a postwar era of austerity. The national debt
had tripled, and for the first time since the 18th century Britain had
become a debtor nation. With the end of U.S. lend-lease aid in 1945, the
British import bill had risen abruptly long before military demobilization
and reconversion to peacetime industry had been accomplished. Wartime
regulations, therefore, had been kept; food rationing in 1946 and 1947 was
more restrictive than during the war.
Postwar Germany was divided into occupation zones among the USSR, the
United States, Britain, and France, but efforts to reach agreement on a
peace treaty with Germany broke down as it became clear that the USSR was
converting all of Eastern Europe into a Soviet sphere. Britain, assisted by
the U.S.-sponsored Marshall Plan (1948-1952), joined other Western powers
and the United States in the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in
1949 in order to counter the Soviet threat. The British government felt
less able, however, to play an independent role in the Middle East, and in
1948 it gave up its Palestinian mandate, which led to the establishment of
Israel and the first Arab-Israeli War. Aware of Britain’s depleted coffers
and sympathetic toward their nationalist causes, the Labour government
granted independence to India and Pakistan in 1947 and to Burma (now known
as Myanmar) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka) in 1948.
Conservative Rule (1951-1964)
Its program of social reform apparently accomplished, the Labour
government’s parliamentary majority was sharply reduced in the general
election of 1950, and the election of 1951 enabled the Conservatives under
Winston Churchill to slip back into power. Except for denationalizing iron
and steel, the Conservatives made no attempt to reverse the legislation or
the welfare-state program enacted by Labour, and the early 1950s brought
steady economic recovery. As income tax rates were reduced and the
framework of wartime and postwar regulation largely dismantled, housing
construction boomed and international trade flourished. With a veteran
world statesman heading Britain’s government, the accession of a young
queen drew the attention of the world to London for the coronation of
Elizabeth II in June 1953. During these years Britain perfected its own
atomic and hydrogen bombs and pioneered in the generation of electricity by
nuclear power. Churchill’s hopes for another diplomatic summit meeting were
disappointed, but Stalin’s death in 1953 led to an easing of the Cold War.
Eden and Macmillan
Churchill’s successor, Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden, led his party to a
second election victory in the spring of 1955. In the same year he helped
negotiate an Austrian peace treaty and participated in a summit conference
at Geneva.
Eden’s tenure as prime minister, however, was cut short by the crisis that
followed Egypt’s nationalization of the Suez Canal in 1956. British forces
had been withdrawn from the canal only a year earlier, and an Anglo-French
reoccupation in 1956 was halted by Soviet-U.S. pressure. The episode led
both to the loss of much of Britain’s remaining influence in the Middle
East and to Eden’s resignation. His successor, Harold Macmillan, presided
over a period of renewed consumer affluence. In 1959 he led the
Conservatives to their third successive election victory—the fourth time in
a row that the party gained parliamentary seats.
Decolonization
In Africa, Macmillan’s government followed a deliberate policy of
decolonization. The Sudan had already become independent in 1956, and
during the next seven years Ghana, Nigeria, Somalia, Tanzania, Sierra
Leone, Uganda, and Kenya followed suit. Most of these states remained
members of a highly decentralized multiracial Commonwealth, but the Union
of South Africa, dominated by a white minority of Boer descent, left the
Commonwealth in 1961 and declared itself a republic. Independence was also
