election of December 1918, won all but four seats
outside Ulster, and met in Dublin – those
members not in prison – in a self-constituted Irish
parliament which promptly declared the whole of
Ireland an independent republic. Bloodshed,
guerrilla war and the breakdown of law and order
followed. The ‘Troubles’ began in 1919. Allied
with Sinn Féin was the Irish Republican Army
(IRA) which attacked the armed police (Royal
Irish Constabulary) and the British volunteer
troops known as the Black and Tans. The IRA
attempted to force the British government in
London to recognise Irish independence. It was
the worst sort of violent conflict – civil war,
without battle lines, carried on by ambush, assas-
sination and murder on both sides.
Two problems stood in the way of a solution:
Lloyd George’s refusal to grant total independ-
ence without any link with Britain, and the atti-
tude of the six counties of Ulster, where a
majority of Protestants fiercely defended union,
refusing to be merged with the predominantly
Catholic south. An attempted British solution
of December 1920 did not satisfy the south.
Atrocities on both sides multiplied. But an appeal
by the king in June 1921 led to a truce and a
negotiated settlement that December. The Irish
Free State became a Dominion and so remained
within the British Empire, and the six counties of
Ulster were granted the right to vote themselves
out of independent Ireland and so remain a part
of the United Kingdom. But the Irish leaders in
London, in accepting partition, brought about a
new civil war in Ireland in 1922 with those who
rejected the treaty. Not until the spring of 1923
was Ireland at peace, with partition a fact. Yet the
seeds of conflict tragically remained.
Dominion status in practice meant independ-
ence. The other British Dominions were inde-
pendent, though the personal links between
Dominion leaders and the British political leaders
remained close and every Dominion except the
Irish Free State independently joined Britain in
declaring war on Germany in September 1939. As
significant as this insistence of the right of the
‘white Dominions’ to exercise independence was
Britain’s declared intention to extend Dominion
status to the ‘brown empire’. During the war, in
1917, the British government had declared that
its aim was ‘responsible government’ for India.
Fourteen years later, in 1931, a viceroy of India
had advanced this to ‘Dominion status’ for India
eventually. No one in Britain believed this would
come about for a generation or two. But the
major Indian independence party, the Congress
Party, agitated for independence to be conceded
quickly.
During the 1930s Mahatma (‘great-souled’)
Gandhi had launched his remarkable movement
of non-violent passive resistance to the British–
Indian authorities. He served notice to the Raj
that India could not be ruled in the long run
without the consent of the Indian masses. And
these masses of the poor of India were respond-
ing to a Western-educated lawyer, now turned
into a holy man and skilled politician all in one,
walking the length and breadth of India wearing
a loincloth and carrying a stick. The emaciated
figure of Gandhi was as powerful a symbol for
change as the strutting militaristic dictators of
Europe. His teaching of how the poor and pow-
erless could force the hand of the powerful
and armed proved to be one of the most potent
influences in the world of the twentieth century.
Violence in Ireland and mass protest move-
ments in India did not complete Britain’s diffi-
culties. Nearer home British governments from
1920 down to the present day became preoccu-
pied with Britain’s relative industrial decline, the
threat of falling living standards and, most of all,
the miseries of unemployment. Britain was not a
happy land between the wars. The problem was
deep-seated and arose from a combination of
changes. Britain had increasingly derived earnings
from trading as well as manufacture to offset the
cost of importing food and raw materials. After a
short post-war boom world trade contracted, par-
ticularly in the 1930s, and the earnings from
carrying the world’s trade fell correspondingly.
There was no demand for more ships, and the
shipyards of Scotland and north-east England
became symbols of the deepest depression and
unemployment.
World patterns of trade were also changing.
Britain’s traditional trade in textiles and other
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