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Thinking beyond colonialism: Britain and the Commonwealth experience
| With the traumatic experience of the American decolonisation at the end of the 18th century, the bases on which British imperialism was built were deeply shaken. During the 19th century, as her colonial empire expanded, Britain had to rethink her imperial policy, and particularly the colonialist aspect of it. The interpretation of the American decolonisation as a failure of colonialism led to a new concept of imperialism based on informal links rather than formal domination. Devised for settlement colonies such as Canada or Australia, this policy was to be extended to non settlement colonies during the inter-wars years.
Such an imperial ambition, based on the rejection of colonialism as an end in itself, paved the way to the creation of the modern Commonwealth of Nations, and helped Britain to manage the decolonisation of its empire without questioning the principles upon which its identity relied. The British policy of decolonisation was conceived as an imperial policy designed to perpetuate the empire in the first place. The object of this paper is then to enquire into the nature of British imperialism, especially in its relation to colonialism, so as to deliver a general overview of the evolution of British imperialism from the mid-19th century to the 1960s and better understand the specificity of the post-colonial international organisation the Commonwealth of Nations has become.
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