The Fall of the Empire State

At almost any time between 1763 and 1918, the greatest threats to British world power came not from rebellion in the imperial backlands but from an anti-British coalition of European states hungry for colonial spoils. A variant of this threat – perhaps its most likely form – was the collapse of the European balance of power into a single continental empire with the means to break British independence by invasion or attrition. Of course, there was always the risk that some disaster at the imperial frontier would trigger a hostile great power combination: during the Boer War British leaders were periodically mesmerized by this threat. But in general, they could treat the defense of empire as a function of their grand strategy in Europe and the Mediterranean. Even after 1918, despite the visible rise of American and Japanese naval power, this older Eurocentric logic of imperial diplomacy held good – until the diplomatic, economic, and strategic revolution of the early 1930s

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• Of Once and Future Kings

  Th W Bottelier•The International History Review•2017

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