The Commonwealth Problem: Origins and Formation 1900–1925

Abstract

This study is concerned with what the Commonwealth relationship meant to British policy-makers, how perceptions of it changed and how it was ‘managed’. The first problem is to define at what point the diaspora of British overseas settlement solidified into a coherent political entity. Certainly in 1900 the Commonwealth did not exist. The Australian colonies were only about to be federated into a union; Ireland was subject to recurrent instability; whilst Britain was actually at war in South Africa. The mass phenomena of Empire — the Empire Shopping Weeks, the Empire Exhibitions and Empire Day celebrations — really date from the mid-1920s, and the current work is based on the assumption that it was only at this point, when the scale of Britain’s post-1918 problems became clear, that a Commonwealth ‘system’ came to exist: it was a response to weakness, not an expression of strength. It is necessary, however, to begin by briefly outlining just how the main lines of that relationship were delineated between 1900 and 1925.