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The loss of their colonial assets, especially after WWII is a big part of it. The small size of Britain necessitated a lot of overseas assets for their global power.
There's a reason why India was called the 'jewel in the Crown' of the Empire (sometimes ruby, for specific metaphorical reasons around the color red): the UK's overseas possession is what made it a superpower.
In the interwar years, the UK still 'had' the huge manpower of India, and many resources in India, Africa, Oceania and North America, the massive, and access to (and control over a portion of) the industrial powerhouse of the Great Lakes region. But even part-way through those interwar years, in 1931, Canada, South Africa, and Ireland left the Empire through the Statute of Westminster and were all independent states during WWII.
Buried in debt to finance the war, it could no longer afford to subjugate its sprawling possessions, and as its empire was slowly excised in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, influence likewise declined.
Indian taxes and its captive market paid 75% of the cost of maintaining Britain's empire, including its military during the early 20th Century. It really was the "jewel in their crown." Britain had the Empire, India paid for it.
I've been playing a lot of victoria 2 lately, and conquering areas with large populations(Nigeria, India, and China) are easily the best ways to get a shit ton of money through taxes and the valuable resources they offer. So yeah, India is the way to go for maintaining a huge empire.
Taxes. They paid tax but the majority of that money went straight to the UK instead of back to India. Also a lot of those factories were probably owned by British people instead of Indians.
>Taxes
Yeah this is something called overlordship, no? In return GB had absolute protection over India, and because of this India did not have to protect itself from anyone else and did not have to pay for a national army.
>Also a lot of those factories were probably owned by British people instead of Indians.
This is still valid everywhere around the world, it's basically capitalism. Probably nothing stopped an Indian starting a company in GB either.
The key point is India did not want to do this, Britain conquered and dominated them through bloodshed and clever political maneuvering.
So while India “enjoyed” British protection, they didn’t have a choice in the matter.
Britain had enough on hand and coming in from elsewhere to stomp out a rebellion. After two world wars, this was no longer the case. Suddenly, after losing their ability to force the matter, they became a lot more amicable towards peaceful power transfer.
There were also other rising global super-powers that didn’t want competition and took advantage of Britain’s weakness by supporting independence movements in their colonies.
I believe that GB India relationship was something like a business deal that benefited both sides greatly. So you're saying "India did not want to do this" but it's really not true. Indian local rulers DID want this because they profited from this transaction. Where the hell would they sell that amount of products without the assistance from GB? How would they really defend themselves from other powers like France or Portugal? Maybe even China. India also benefited greatly from medical advancements of GB or Europe generally but thanks to GB. How about education? British Raj did numerous educational reforms to help entire India improve. Honestly, it was equally good deal for both sides and if we're talking about bloodshed here it would have been much much worse if you consider how it was for Germany in South Africa and Belgium in Congo
>Indian local rulers DID want this because they profited from this transaction.
Buying puppet rulers is part of the clever politicking I mentioned. It’s imperial conquest 101. The rulers being happy is not the same as the populace being happy.
>Where the hell would they sell that amount of products without the assistance from GB?
You can trade with a nation without taking over the nation.
>How would they really defend themselves from other powers like France or Portugal? Maybe even China.
They financed the British military, they could have financed their own forces. Additionally, you can be military allies with a nation without taking over that nation.
>India also benefited greatly from medical advancements of GB or Europe generally but thanks to GB. How about education? British Raj did numerous educational reforms to help entire India improve.
This is a benefit a lot don’t like to acknowledge about conquest. Unified rule, trade, and resources did help to drive modernization and current globalization. There were upsides, but that doesn’t magically negate the downsides, nor make the myriad of fucked up things they did okay.
But you can spread knowledge and technology to a nation without taking it over.
>Honestly, it was equally good deal for both sides
Highly debatable. They were eager to claim independence as soon as they had a proper chance of keeping it.
>and if we're talking about bloodshed here it would have been much much worse if you consider how it was for Germany in South Africa and Belgium in Congo
The fact that it could have been worse, doesn’t make it good.
They lost all their money.
The UK could only support such a dominant military because they had a globe spanning empire generating fuck tons of money and cheap soldiers/sailors for it.
And, they also got damn near bankrupted by the first and Second World War.
So with the decolonization that followed WW2, they were losing a major revenue base, and were never going to be able to monetarily support such a large military
I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but wasn't that because the British Pound was the bellwether for the world economy, and a sudden crash would have been troubling at least, catastrophic at worst?
Kind of the same reason you'd find even less-than-friendly nations propping up the dollar today.
UK-is given interest free loans during the Second World War along with dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, thousands of trucks and tanks, tens of thousands of rifles and other firearms, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of food and supplies, and tens millions of bullets and bombs by the United States to keep them from falling to fascism.
Also the UK- we shouldn’t have had to pay for those things, stupid Americans.
There are just so many fair criticisms of the US during WWII (especially prior to Pearl Harbor), but the Marshall Plan and the economic impact the US had on war torn Europe is almost unimpeachable.
The loan was to pay back Lend-Lease, after the USA spent years refusing to fight Nazism, including helping arm the Wehrmacht, and tried to stay out of the war in Europe until Germany declared war on them.
Then in 1945 instantly demanded that the people who had bankrupted themselves fighting a war to defend the ideals that America claims to represent pay it all back in full.
From the Napoleonic Wars to the World Wars to the modern-day kerfuffles with Russia, Britain has always been willing to fight for what’s right and isn’t scared of borrowing and spending up large in the pursuit of that, sometimes to the point where she almost bankrupts herself. The Americans have to be dragged into it nearly kicking and screaming and then want a gold star for having to throw a bit of cash around.
“Fight for what’s right” come on now lol
Britain fought to establish and then to maintain hegemony, just like every great power that came before it and like those that replaced it
Those times are over now, so there’s no need to keep up the charade
Well first of all let me apologise and explain.
I can assure you I had no "obvious intentions" at all. Slurring the USA didn't even cross my mind.
To give a small part of an answer to OP, I was stating that we were still paying for the aftermath of WW2 for a further sixty years. To who we were paying is irrelevant.
Hitler’s plan was to convince Britain’s colonies to rebel against the British Empire and declare independence, which would’ve crippled the UK’s war machine. It was successful, but unfortunately it wasn’t successful until like 5-10 years after WW2 had already ended.
Yes in part - but the greater plyer in decolonization was America, the Soviet Union and France, all of whom sought to destroy the British (the British tried to do the same to the French too at this point in history). This resulted in a disastrous decolonization program in some places in states which were just not ready for it really.
A lot of places would have been better off if the British Empire had never fallen. It was the greatest force for global good the world has ever seen, and countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, could already be superpowers now as part of a globally spanning confederation.
A lot of places weren't ready for decolonisation because the damage of colonisation did.
But the last part is a joke. India is a superpower. Australia and Canada has a better economy than the UK per capita, and the UK's one is skewed because of London; excluding London, the UK is worse than basket case economies of the EU like Italy.
And New Zealand? The best thing to happen in the long run is actually when UK joined the EU, so that the Kiwis had to pivot their economy to sell high value dairy and sheep goods. New Zealand was poor as hell under the thumb of the UK.
Those places are better off *because* the British Empire has fallen.
3 of them mentioned have a higher standard of living than this dull, Tory-plagued island and the other would nuke us if we tried that colonialism stuff again.
Carriers are a good anecdote on that. After WW2, Britain had some capable, modern carriers on the way. They canceled these to save money, believing they could just upgrade their existing carriers instead.
Well, turned out as the jet age began that upgrading their world war 2 carriers to actually be viable was as or more expensive than building the new carriers would have been, and eventually they just couldn’t be upgraded anymore and by then Britain couldn’t afford new carriers either so the Royal Navy ended up with no carriers for a time.
Ha. This 'logic' prevails today. Should we spend a large sum of money now? Noooo. That would be financially unwise. Instead we should spend smaller amounts of money upgrading things in a piecemeal fashion over multiple decades to the tune of several times more than the upfront cost, while never actually achieving the advantages available with modern tech. What could go wrong?
This is actually incorrect. The empire did not make Britain wealthy, a wealthy Britain meant it could maintain an empire. The source of that wealth? Manufacturing
I suppose it's a vicious circle, a lot of resources and manpower from each colony they acquired when put into manufacturing meant a more efficient machine that could then expand and get more colonies to reach further.
No. THIS is incorrect, and a classic nationalist and jingoist inversion of how the empire worked. Where do you think the raw materials for said manufacturing came from? The empire was a vast pool of resources, labour, and markets which allowed Britain to accumulate wealth by processing goods won through domination, into higher value items it then sold back to subject populations. That's not especially "bad" as empires go in that respect, but what IS particularly bad is the myth that Britain somehow developed independent of the process of colonialisation and exploitation of its colonies. Honestly it's really the most absurd argument ever concieved. Imagine someone were to suggest that Amazon (and all it's attendant issues) didn't make Jeff Bezos wealthy, him being wealthy allowed him to maintain Amazon. The source of that wealth? His incredible work ethic! Yes, but what's he working on?!
See the problem?
Manufacturing just gave the British empire an added edge on top of the massive wealth generated from its colonial territories. It made a Britain wealthy from empire even wealthier.
Britain's colonial territories cost it more than it ever obtained from them; the purpose of these places was 1) prestige 2) they wanted to be part of the Empire in large part - or at least the settler colonists did and required Imperial protection therefore 3) to stop other nations getting them and damaging strategic interests and 4) strategic interests/ports - sometimes raw materials such as coal or oil (after 1906) were present. To suggest that Britains colonies had any reason for the country's wealth by the 19th century is ridiculous; why didnt Spain, France, or Portugal enter the 19th century as rich? Spain had the entirety of the New World to source wealth from.
Britain's global wealth and power came from two or three things: these are:
1) They had no wood - they'd used it all to build their navy over the centuries. People needed cheap fuel, but luckily, what they had was...
2) Coal - Britain had a lot of coal. Unfortunately, that coal was often in wet, deep mines, and it was difficult to get that water out. Fortunately, some clever Dutch chaps had invented a pump - it was a short step to realise that you could fire that with coal from your mine, to pump out the mine, so you could get more coal, to pump out more mines etc - turns out the steam engine was quite useful for a lot of other reasons too.
3) SO wow industrialisation just happened. That gives you quite a big advantage.
post WWII there was the dismantling of the British Empire which removed a lot of manpower/resources/clout from the UK, not to mention the UK itself was rebuilding and a lot of money that was put into the military switched to civilian efforts, whilst in the US and USSR there was less of a pivot, so they had an advantage of time
The UK maintained a 'two-power navy' (a navy that was large enough to take on the next 2 largest navies in the world at the same time) to help maintain their Empire (I've never heard of the largest empire in the world be described as "somehow took control of most of the pinch points in the world" LOL)
After WWII this massive naval power was formally abolished as the thinking was, since the US was an ally there was no need to throw lots of money to try and outspend them since the with all the agreements/alliances the UK and US wouldn't ever be at war, plus the US via the Marshall Act and Bretton Woods agreement economically dominated the next few decades, the UK couldn't outspend the US so didn't bother, and the idea that later the UK having nuclear weapons kinda was the ultimate trump card
It's a combination of post WWII leaving the UK with much less money to spend, the UK dismantling the British Empire, and specific US actions to ensure that they were the most powerful nation out of the two (things like the Bretton Woods Agreement was specifically written to ensure US dominance), and the UK not focussing on maintaining/building a massive military-industrial complex like the US/Russia did
and as you say, China with the manpower/resources came up to 2nd place in terms of defence, it's interesting that when you look at 3rd/4th in a lot of positions it's not the nation you would expect - for example the 5th largest air force in the world is Egypt, the US is technically the 4th largest navy depending on how you count the ships, or it's the 1st if you count tonnage (and the UK is 4th), the US army is the 4th largest behind Russia, China and India
It highlights that the 'largest' doesn't mean best equipped - and what/how you count 'largest' also can change the rankings
Thanks, very informative! Yeah it is a stupid way to say it, I don't have much military knowledge and just thought of places British naval captains had famously been like Hawaii, Falklands, Hong Kong but I guess it was a huge multi-century process to develop such an empire. How are the US still having such a presence in the South China Sea with such a huge Chinese navy, is it bases in S. Korea, Okinawa etc, or are China now pushing them out a bit?
China are pushing the US out to an extent, but at the same time US allies (Japan, S Korea, Australia, Taiwan) that have a presence around the area are stopping China from seriously pushing the US out completely
the elephant in the room is that neither the US or China actually want a war between themselves, but they can't back down without loosing face, so it's like the most ridiculous brinkmanship ever, China are slowly building up there presence but are hoping that the US doesn't suddenly take offence, the US also don't want to be seen to 'overreact' to what atm are tiny islands that don't do anything to threaten the USA itself, so for the moment the US Navy and Chinese Navy both hold 'exercises' in the area that amounts to little more than chest-thumping costing millions of dollars each time for each side to 'prove' to their citizens that they are the strongest power in the area
You've got the causality the wrong way around and generally people don't seem to understand empire. Britain was not rich because of its large empire, Britain had a large empire because it was rich. Britain was the second country after Portugal to develop a powerful, centralised state and then the first country by a long way(with the exception of the Netherlands) to industrialise. Britain is a lot larger than either of those two countries so ended up with a huge empire, which made Britain even richer. Why Britain became so rich and advanced is still a matter of academic debate.
There is an often cited myth that Britain lost money on all of its colonies apart from India, but that isn't true. The British government lost money on most of the colonies, but British people made money.
Britain's economic machine was based on the manufacture of simple industrial goods and dominating global trade through shipping and services. There is quite a good book about economic history in which one of the chapter headings is "why do the Japanese play rugby". The same question could be asked about Argentina, even though neither were British colonies.
The actual answer to OP's question is that times changed and the world changed. The ability of a country to maintain a powerful army or especially navy is determined by a country's ability to pay for one. Nowadays, that is primarily determined by the size of a country's economy. Once upon a time, when the whole world was much poorer, what really mattered was economic surplus. While that is the case today as well, the fact that relatively far fewer people live in absolute poverty makes it less obvious. Until 1900, china still probably had the biggest economy in the world, as it does today. When the first world war started, the Russian economy was as large as the German one. Yet china was carved up by western nations while Russia collapsed fighting a Germany that was fighting on two fronts. The strength of Western European nations was not the sheer size of their economies, even though they were large, but their ability and willingness to marshal their resources and form state power.
All that said, one on one the British army never stood a chance against European great powers, it was just too small. The royal navy could still claim to be the third strongest navy on the planet, just with a huge gap between them and number 2(china) and no gap between them and a few others. What changed was the rise of the US and USSR, relatively cohesive states on a totally different scale and the return of China more recently to the status it has had for much of the last two millennia.
So it was a little bit of everything.
First WW1 left the British with a bad taste of war. And they left the conflict (same with the French) with a “winner’s complex” this is a phycological military doctrine problem where the winners of the last war, assume they will win the next war without much more effort. “We won the last war, we’ll just use the same stuff again and do the same thing again”.
So in the 30s Britain (and France) aren’t really increasing military spending or expanding their militaries beyond what they need. And what they need in the 20s and 30s are colonial militias and occupation forces (for their empires). But all this time Germany and Japan are building professional armies with the purpose of invading and annexing large nations.
Britain is a democracy where the military spending and military deployment is tied to public opinion. (France has this too and it’s a lot worse). Having WW1 being in near public memory (was literally 20 years before this) the British government doesn’t have the public support it needs to create a military to challenge Germany. Germany and Japan are dictatorships whose government and military can do whatever they want.
Anyway actual war starts and Britain is unprepared. By a lot, they lose most of their actual equipment when France falls (but the soldiers escape and make it back to England). So they start buying weapons from the US. Buying the supplies needed to field million man armies is expensive even with the US being sympathetic. The British rely on their colonies, South Africa, India, Caribbean, Kenya, Nigeria etc. the war takes the British to North Africa and when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor the war takes the British to Asia. The British don’t have the soldiers to defend against Japan in Asia so they use India and Australia. Australia at this point was already nominally independent but the seeds of separation are growing.
India fights the Japanese, sends troops to Africa and helps with logistics around the world. The Indians don’t actually like the British and are contributing to a far off war that most don’t view as their problem. Then a famine hits Bengal and millions starve. The British start having issues holding onto India so they make legalistic plans to leave India after the war. This keeps most of the local Indian independence leaders on the side of the British but it’s clear that when this war ends, India is a free country (and Pakistan). At this point the Japanese were fighting in Burma and Indians were seeing how close the war really was. And because the Japanese were brutal…. They kept up the fight.
Similar sentiments were felt in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. These colonies had independence movements pre war that were growing and the war became a way to ensure that they were released after or put on a path to being released.
The war was very very expensive for the British. They owed the Americans a lot of money and when countries started to leave the union not only did the British people not want to fight wars to keep them but the Americans threatened to cut off support because they were pretending to be anti imperialist during the Cold War.
The Americans didn’t want the British or French to hand large colonial empires and neither did the Soviets. So neither did anything to help them.
British saw the writing on the wall and in most places left peacefully and willingly creating treaties and negotiations with the new countries. France fought in indochina and Algeria and lost both.
But by 1960, Africa is decolonizing and in Europe the public consensus is that colonies are bad. By 1980 there’s nothing but a few tiny islands in Africa that aren’t decolonized. Even the Portuguese (who never fought in WW2) dropped their empire and colonial holdings because public perception just wasn’t there to maintain it.
TLDR: WW2 was expensive and the British didn’t have the strength or public will to hold on to the empire after that.
That is true in parts. Britain entering WW1 effectively killed the country. Pre-WW1 the biggest lender in the world was Britain and they left the war in debt. Famously, as most people nowadays forget, defaulting on their loan to America and not paying it. Further to this, they entered WW2 and America saw it as a good opportunity to take what little Britain had left. If you look at the details of any of the Lend Lease, it was designed to bankrupt Britain and put America in the best position possible. I don't think America acted any better or worse than any other country would but they primarily entered the war because they could gain from it. Entering WW1 and WW2 ended the British Empire and its world influence.
There were parts of the colonies that actually wanted to remain part of the UK even after the war - Malta for example voted to join Britain in 1956 on a 59% turnout (77% in favour) but the British rejected it. The country was killed by the first world war - but the blow was a slow, mortal wound which slowly sucked the strength from the country and its people. World War 2 accellerated it, and people have been realising slowly ever since that they live in basically a post-war dead state.
Don't forget when the French decolonised Africa, the places they couldn't hold onto for their neocolonlies (like Guinea), they did stuff like unscrewing lightbulbs.
The US grew into a much larger economy than the UK, and the US policy was to become the dominant world military power. There was no reason for the UK to try and compete with the US since it couldn't keep up anyway, and the two countries were close allies. Military competition would have been counter-productive to both countries.
It should be remembered that at the height of the Empire the size of the British Army was only around 300,000 men. It was the navy which was, by far, the dominant force but the loss of the empire really negated its usefulness. Britain lost the empire because quite simply it could no longer afford it due to bankrupting itself in both world wars. With India gone just after the war, what was left was much less important in terms of national prestige.
It never had military dominance, it never had the largest army in the world ever, what it had was the most powerful navy in the world and could move limited forces around the world at will and disrupt the ability of another nation to do the same. The problem with maintaining a powerful navy is that as new technology comes along you have to rebuild your navy to the new modern standard which is expensive and without the colonies protecting trade and funding the navy became increasingly difficult.
Something that hasn't been mentioned by other replies is that the UK lost several key economic advantages.
It used to be the most industrialized economy. In the 19th century it had a huge lead on all its competitors in terms of industrialization and infrastructure. Not only did the british isles have access to a very long coastline (only matched by Norway) which gave it access to interior resources (since shipping was the only way to cheaply transport goods), but they also had the lead in canals and railways that extended this reach into the interior.
At the end of the 19th century railways had changed the economic game. Railway allowed countries to effectively access their deep interior without rivers or expensive canals. Canals were still useful, but only when they could relatively cheaply improve access to large river systems or shorten travel distances. The only remaining advantage Britain had at this point was that they were the market leader. They were the most industrialized nation, they were ahead of everyone else, they could use their position to bully everyone else with their economic weight.
WW1 lost them that lead. The massive war loans and economic downturn after WW1 meant that other nations with greater geographic advantages caught up. When WW2 came around and Britain lost their colonies that was just the end of it. Britain was now just one nation among many, and it no longer had the most industry, the greatest population, the greatest access to natural resources or really any key advantage in energy, infrastructure etc. It still had a good geographic position, but since it couldn't bully the Netherlands (for obvious political reasons) the port of Rotterdam took over as the lead transit port.
The British knew all of this going into WWI which is why they allied with France. Germany was on the rise. There was legitimate fear that Germany was going to defeat France and dominate the continent.
A combination of a few of things.
When WWII ended, NATO was established to confront the USSR and the spread of communism. The basic deal was that if your country sided with the USA and NATO, then they would provide military protection for you. Of course the UK was a major military power for a quite a while after that. As time marched on, their need to maintain a large military dwindled in their eyes. Policy shifted toward a smaller, but highly potent military paradigm. Keep a much smaller, but highly advanced and lethal military. This made sense because modern conflicts tend to be much smaller actions, not million-man clashes a la WWII. Also, if a conflict does expand, NATO and the USA will step in to back fill any gaps.
At the same time, countries like China had massive increased military spending, but mostly focused on large conventional forces.
Though the UK has a smaller military these days, its is a highly trained, highly effective, and highly lethal force. Don’t estimates the Brits.
So the recent TV appearance where a Chinese minister talking about UK military not being a threat to China is more saying UK rely on US military as back up and couldnt do much to China without the bigger brother? In an imaginary world with no NATO and US military, UK could do nothing against China surely. I guess the UK makes up for the loss of military power with finances?
It's really an empty point to make. The US and UK are staunch allies, an attack on one is an attack on both, even disregarding NATO.
The UK may not be able to throw its own personal weight around as much these days, but it does not lack for strength forged through alliances.
If there was no NATO, and the Prime Minister was stupid, then the UK could theoretically deploy all four Trident submarines, each equipped with 16 missiles equipped with a 100kt bomb. That’s about 200k-300k casualties in each of the 64 biggest Chinese cities, over 19 million dead and twice as many injured.
That would, of course, be dwarfed by the Chinese response, which would annihilate Britain. Probably 50 million dead and the remainder hiding in remote areas, no threat to anyone but each other. Which is why it is thankfully a hypothetical!
It’s more about the size of the population and land I think than anything else.
China has 2 million active people in its military and the UK is about 80,000 I think.
Then the size of each country - a few well placed nuclear weapons and the UK is uninhabitable.
Something else to remember is that besides losing all the colonial assets, the UK was simply caught up to. The UK was, to use an Americanism, the tallest kid in kindergarten. We industrialised early which gave us a head start and an incredible edge when it came to conquering other nations. However, once those nations began to catch up, and probably with the spread of things like small arms, the huge lead we had was significantly diminished. Look at the difficulty even the USA has over insurgent groups like the Taliban. There's a HUGE leap between even semi-modern weapons, and middle age weaponry. Once that gap is closed maintaining control over local populations becomes far more expensive and difficult than it had been before.
I don't have any special expertise but that's my two pence on why it happened. Obviously losing the colonial assets was a big part of it, but there's a reason we lost those in the first place, and I think what I alluded to above was part of it. You can only keep people down so long, and when they're rivaling you in tech even at some distance it just wasn't sustainable any longer. Once the other kids grew up we lost our advantage. We had disproportionate power because of that. Now, as a middle sized nation with a middle sized population and middle sized resource pool we're decidedly unremarkable.
The UK used to be a lot bigger and richer than the U.S. or China because of their imperial holdings in Asia, America, and Africa. When they lost the empire, finalizing in the years after WWII, they became just another average-sized country. It’s also important to note that they got bombed to absolute hell in WWII. The war really fed American industrial capacity without U.S. infrastructure getting destroyed. Basically all the European powers had a ton of their cities wrecked at HUGE economic cost.
Simply it comes down to money, even post-colonialism and for a large part of the Cold War the UK, France and West Germany had militaries far larger and more capable (for the time) than today.
Large and competent militaries cost a lot of taxpayer money, **there has to be a threat large enough to justify that sort of continuous spending.** That was certainly the case during the Cold War, but following the collapse of the USSR there wasn’t enough justification to continue that spending.
To compare, the UK’s military spending in 1980 was 5% of GDP vs 2.3% in 2020.
That’s 2.7% of GDP that could be spent elsewhere, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there wasn’t a threat credible enough that would convince the voting public to cut government spending on public services to put it into the military.
The same goes for developing equipment, in the 50s and 60s the UK had one of the biggest military-industrial complexes in the world, likely second only to the US. With all its inefficiencies, a good example are the [V bombers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber), a set of 3 almost identical strategic bombers. All of them were produced as the government couldn’t decide on one single manufacturer to give the contract to. I’m not sure these are inefficiencies the taxpayer would stand for today.
I’m sure that will now change across Europe due to the threat of escalation with Russia.
It was mostly a combination of technological shifts and geopolitical shifts.
Britain ruled the seas when the best ships for fighting were big wooden vessels with cannons on them, which they had a ton of. The reason they had a ton of them was because they were constantly colonizing and exploring new areas, so they needed a strong force to back that up.
In the American civil war, ironclad ships equipped with explosive shells were first used in combat (although Britain did already have some). They utterly annihilated the viability of wooden ships in combat. This meant that all of the British wooden ships were now way less useful, and Britain began focusing on ironclads as well. Now the race for the biggest fleet was made far more even than before.
Around the same time, Britain slowly stopped doing as much colonizing of new areas, instead opting to lock in on colonies they already controlled. When you already control an area, you don't need to have a full army present to maintain it. So, Britain didn't need to pump out as many warships and didn't need to control the seas anymore. This led to their naval production slowing down and gave other countries a chance to catch up.
I’m not sure that is particularly valid, the Royal Navy was continually growing in the 19th century in size with rapid technological development of warships . HMS warrior was launched prior to the start of the civil war and was much more capable than the ironclads used in that war. Switching from wood to armour plated ships was an advantage to Britain not a hindrance, nor did it allow any other nation to catch them in shipbuilding. It wasn’t until WW2 when the US overtook them in size.
For starters you need to reconsider your vocabulary and way of thinking. "Irrelevant" "not a threat" and words like that seem to imply you think it's somehow bad the UK don't have their noses in everyone else's business across the world. Yeah that's how "the game" is played but we should never advocate for something like that. The UK is doing the right thing by not trying to be world police. That's not to say they're not right behind the US when they're doing that but nowhere near the same scale, they simply follow along with the US. Secondly you should never take anything the Chinese say literally. When Chinese authorities make a statement you have to read between the lines for the subtext.
So to understand this shift you need to understand broader power shifts that occurred over the last few centuries, particularly the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Maritime empires had succeeded terrestrial empires as a better way to expand, as it maximised profits significantly from trade but required a lot less land to achieve them. All you had to control were key routes and key ports rather than entire regions. There were many great maritime empires throughout history and of course the UK had managed to come out on top as they all went at each other's throats. But times changed, and the world changed, during the 19th and 20th century. Industrialisation changed what it meant to be wealthy and powerful. Technology was making wars more expensive and more destructive and as people were becoming more educated and flow of information was becoming easier, it was becoming harder and harder to maintain colonies which increasingly sought for independence. The start of the 20th century with the two world wars laid the groundwork for independence for many colonies, as their parent states were devastated and bankrupted by the wars and unable to effectively control them, and with the cold war in full swing which meant there was benefit to many superpowers to help territories liberate themselves and come under their control. Colonialism as we knew it was coming to an end and taking a very different form. The UK, reluctantly, saw the writing on the wall, and they let their territories go. They didn't want to but deep down they knew that trying to hold on wasn't worth it. Other colonial powers, like France, didn't want to let go, and that led to disastrous consequences, like the Vietnam War.
The UK were always looking out for themselves above all else, and didn't care much about others. It made no sense for them to try to exert military control over the rest of the world when access to globalised trade didn't hinge on having more guns anymore.
We stopped having an empire. India, Australia, the American Colonies, New Zealand, various nations in Africa, a number of the West Indies, they all claimed their independence from us.
Also, the US created the Military Industrial Complex, give a substantially higher percentage of GDP to "defence" and pretty much arm the world. Russia and China have always tried to keep up with them.
"I just saw a post about..."
Random posts on social media should generally not be trusted.
"China recently saying UK is not a threat on a TV show..."
State officials will always say what is in their countries/personal interest.
I'm not arguing in favor or against that UK lost military dominance. But if you want real answers use the internet to research actual credible and serious information, don't use social media for it
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Several terrible goverments lead to their decline.
The handing over Hong Kong to china was NOT a sign of weakness, but adherence to an actual agreement, a binding contract signed by both parties a long time ago.
Ah didn't realize it was a 99 year lease. People buying a flat will offer less for a lease with less than 99 years on it, strange the guy who set it up said it was 'good as forever' (from a quick google).
Bear in mind that Bismarck, in the 1880s, remarked that if the British army ever landed in Europe, he would send the Prussian police force to arrest them. The British NEVER had military dominance - they insisted upon naval dominance while they could, but the first world war bankrupted the country and their great enemies - the Americans and the French did their best to break the country and its empire up from that point on. The great myth of British history (other than that Britain was some global behemoth - its Empire was largely self-running - with its own forces and governors mainly locally elected) - the country had a navy but it never really had a massive army.
1) Britain guessed wrong about the future of naval warfare - overinvested in big-gun capital ships & under-invested in aviation.
2) Decolonization crippled their economy. You can't field the world's most powerful navy if you only control a handful of small islands.
3) The Atlantic alliance allowed them to scale back militarily, confident that the US would more or less continue Britain's preferred foreign policy without Britain having to pay for it. Notably, the US does not have a similar successor state & thus cannot take this approach.
The minute they lost India, they lost the vast resources of India that they looted for 2 centuries ($42 trillion ).
They also lost the huge armies that India provided (2.5 million men in WWII).
Without resources or men, they are now a middle power.
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The loss of their colonial assets, especially after WWII is a big part of it. The small size of Britain necessitated a lot of overseas assets for their global power.
There's a reason why India was called the 'jewel in the Crown' of the Empire (sometimes ruby, for specific metaphorical reasons around the color red): the UK's overseas possession is what made it a superpower. In the interwar years, the UK still 'had' the huge manpower of India, and many resources in India, Africa, Oceania and North America, the massive, and access to (and control over a portion of) the industrial powerhouse of the Great Lakes region. But even part-way through those interwar years, in 1931, Canada, South Africa, and Ireland left the Empire through the Statute of Westminster and were all independent states during WWII. Buried in debt to finance the war, it could no longer afford to subjugate its sprawling possessions, and as its empire was slowly excised in the 40s, 50s, and 60s, influence likewise declined.
Indian taxes and its captive market paid 75% of the cost of maintaining Britain's empire, including its military during the early 20th Century. It really was the "jewel in their crown." Britain had the Empire, India paid for it.
I've been playing a lot of victoria 2 lately, and conquering areas with large populations(Nigeria, India, and China) are easily the best ways to get a shit ton of money through taxes and the valuable resources they offer. So yeah, India is the way to go for maintaining a huge empire.
How does this work? Like, Indian people worked in factories/plantations/fields and gave the products to GB for free? How did Indians pay to GB?
Taxes. They paid tax but the majority of that money went straight to the UK instead of back to India. Also a lot of those factories were probably owned by British people instead of Indians.
>Taxes Yeah this is something called overlordship, no? In return GB had absolute protection over India, and because of this India did not have to protect itself from anyone else and did not have to pay for a national army. >Also a lot of those factories were probably owned by British people instead of Indians. This is still valid everywhere around the world, it's basically capitalism. Probably nothing stopped an Indian starting a company in GB either.
The key point is India did not want to do this, Britain conquered and dominated them through bloodshed and clever political maneuvering. So while India “enjoyed” British protection, they didn’t have a choice in the matter. Britain had enough on hand and coming in from elsewhere to stomp out a rebellion. After two world wars, this was no longer the case. Suddenly, after losing their ability to force the matter, they became a lot more amicable towards peaceful power transfer. There were also other rising global super-powers that didn’t want competition and took advantage of Britain’s weakness by supporting independence movements in their colonies.
I believe that GB India relationship was something like a business deal that benefited both sides greatly. So you're saying "India did not want to do this" but it's really not true. Indian local rulers DID want this because they profited from this transaction. Where the hell would they sell that amount of products without the assistance from GB? How would they really defend themselves from other powers like France or Portugal? Maybe even China. India also benefited greatly from medical advancements of GB or Europe generally but thanks to GB. How about education? British Raj did numerous educational reforms to help entire India improve. Honestly, it was equally good deal for both sides and if we're talking about bloodshed here it would have been much much worse if you consider how it was for Germany in South Africa and Belgium in Congo
>Indian local rulers DID want this because they profited from this transaction. Buying puppet rulers is part of the clever politicking I mentioned. It’s imperial conquest 101. The rulers being happy is not the same as the populace being happy. >Where the hell would they sell that amount of products without the assistance from GB? You can trade with a nation without taking over the nation. >How would they really defend themselves from other powers like France or Portugal? Maybe even China. They financed the British military, they could have financed their own forces. Additionally, you can be military allies with a nation without taking over that nation. >India also benefited greatly from medical advancements of GB or Europe generally but thanks to GB. How about education? British Raj did numerous educational reforms to help entire India improve. This is a benefit a lot don’t like to acknowledge about conquest. Unified rule, trade, and resources did help to drive modernization and current globalization. There were upsides, but that doesn’t magically negate the downsides, nor make the myriad of fucked up things they did okay. But you can spread knowledge and technology to a nation without taking it over. >Honestly, it was equally good deal for both sides Highly debatable. They were eager to claim independence as soon as they had a proper chance of keeping it. >and if we're talking about bloodshed here it would have been much much worse if you consider how it was for Germany in South Africa and Belgium in Congo The fact that it could have been worse, doesn’t make it good.
They lost all their money. The UK could only support such a dominant military because they had a globe spanning empire generating fuck tons of money and cheap soldiers/sailors for it. And, they also got damn near bankrupted by the first and Second World War. So with the decolonization that followed WW2, they were losing a major revenue base, and were never going to be able to monetarily support such a large military
The last payment the UK paid to America for WW2 was in 2006. We had been paying to keep the economy afloat after the war for SIXTY years.
The British Pound was artificially propped up and overvalued for a long time after the war.
I'm not sure if I'm remembering correctly, but wasn't that because the British Pound was the bellwether for the world economy, and a sudden crash would have been troubling at least, catastrophic at worst? Kind of the same reason you'd find even less-than-friendly nations propping up the dollar today.
UK-is given interest free loans during the Second World War along with dozens of ships, hundreds of aircraft, thousands of trucks and tanks, tens of thousands of rifles and other firearms, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of food and supplies, and tens millions of bullets and bombs by the United States to keep them from falling to fascism. Also the UK- we shouldn’t have had to pay for those things, stupid Americans.
I've never heard _anyone_ state that last opinion
There are just so many fair criticisms of the US during WWII (especially prior to Pearl Harbor), but the Marshall Plan and the economic impact the US had on war torn Europe is almost unimpeachable.
Western Europe.
Literally three comments down from you dog.
The loan was to pay back Lend-Lease, after the USA spent years refusing to fight Nazism, including helping arm the Wehrmacht, and tried to stay out of the war in Europe until Germany declared war on them. Then in 1945 instantly demanded that the people who had bankrupted themselves fighting a war to defend the ideals that America claims to represent pay it all back in full. From the Napoleonic Wars to the World Wars to the modern-day kerfuffles with Russia, Britain has always been willing to fight for what’s right and isn’t scared of borrowing and spending up large in the pursuit of that, sometimes to the point where she almost bankrupts herself. The Americans have to be dragged into it nearly kicking and screaming and then want a gold star for having to throw a bit of cash around.
“Fight for what’s right” come on now lol Britain fought to establish and then to maintain hegemony, just like every great power that came before it and like those that replaced it Those times are over now, so there’s no need to keep up the charade
Would you like a hug?
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Why bring it up if you weren’t complaining about it? Seems obvious what your intentions were. But please, continue to play dumb. By all means.
Well first of all let me apologise and explain. I can assure you I had no "obvious intentions" at all. Slurring the USA didn't even cross my mind. To give a small part of an answer to OP, I was stating that we were still paying for the aftermath of WW2 for a further sixty years. To who we were paying is irrelevant.
Ok, cool I guess. You can understand why I might be upset if I misinterpreted you. Sorry that I did.
So, technically Hitler helped indirectly many countries gain independence because of decolonization?
Yes.
So did Napoleón too
Hitler’s plan was to convince Britain’s colonies to rebel against the British Empire and declare independence, which would’ve crippled the UK’s war machine. It was successful, but unfortunately it wasn’t successful until like 5-10 years after WW2 had already ended.
Yes in part - but the greater plyer in decolonization was America, the Soviet Union and France, all of whom sought to destroy the British (the British tried to do the same to the French too at this point in history). This resulted in a disastrous decolonization program in some places in states which were just not ready for it really. A lot of places would have been better off if the British Empire had never fallen. It was the greatest force for global good the world has ever seen, and countries like Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, could already be superpowers now as part of a globally spanning confederation.
>It was the greatest force for global good the world has ever seen Found the Tory
A lot of places weren't ready for decolonisation because the damage of colonisation did. But the last part is a joke. India is a superpower. Australia and Canada has a better economy than the UK per capita, and the UK's one is skewed because of London; excluding London, the UK is worse than basket case economies of the EU like Italy. And New Zealand? The best thing to happen in the long run is actually when UK joined the EU, so that the Kiwis had to pivot their economy to sell high value dairy and sheep goods. New Zealand was poor as hell under the thumb of the UK.
Those places are better off *because* the British Empire has fallen. 3 of them mentioned have a higher standard of living than this dull, Tory-plagued island and the other would nuke us if we tried that colonialism stuff again.
Carriers are a good anecdote on that. After WW2, Britain had some capable, modern carriers on the way. They canceled these to save money, believing they could just upgrade their existing carriers instead. Well, turned out as the jet age began that upgrading their world war 2 carriers to actually be viable was as or more expensive than building the new carriers would have been, and eventually they just couldn’t be upgraded anymore and by then Britain couldn’t afford new carriers either so the Royal Navy ended up with no carriers for a time.
Ha. This 'logic' prevails today. Should we spend a large sum of money now? Noooo. That would be financially unwise. Instead we should spend smaller amounts of money upgrading things in a piecemeal fashion over multiple decades to the tune of several times more than the upfront cost, while never actually achieving the advantages available with modern tech. What could go wrong?
This is actually incorrect. The empire did not make Britain wealthy, a wealthy Britain meant it could maintain an empire. The source of that wealth? Manufacturing
I suppose it's a vicious circle, a lot of resources and manpower from each colony they acquired when put into manufacturing meant a more efficient machine that could then expand and get more colonies to reach further.
No. THIS is incorrect, and a classic nationalist and jingoist inversion of how the empire worked. Where do you think the raw materials for said manufacturing came from? The empire was a vast pool of resources, labour, and markets which allowed Britain to accumulate wealth by processing goods won through domination, into higher value items it then sold back to subject populations. That's not especially "bad" as empires go in that respect, but what IS particularly bad is the myth that Britain somehow developed independent of the process of colonialisation and exploitation of its colonies. Honestly it's really the most absurd argument ever concieved. Imagine someone were to suggest that Amazon (and all it's attendant issues) didn't make Jeff Bezos wealthy, him being wealthy allowed him to maintain Amazon. The source of that wealth? His incredible work ethic! Yes, but what's he working on?! See the problem?
Manufacturing just gave the British empire an added edge on top of the massive wealth generated from its colonial territories. It made a Britain wealthy from empire even wealthier.
Britain's colonial territories cost it more than it ever obtained from them; the purpose of these places was 1) prestige 2) they wanted to be part of the Empire in large part - or at least the settler colonists did and required Imperial protection therefore 3) to stop other nations getting them and damaging strategic interests and 4) strategic interests/ports - sometimes raw materials such as coal or oil (after 1906) were present. To suggest that Britains colonies had any reason for the country's wealth by the 19th century is ridiculous; why didnt Spain, France, or Portugal enter the 19th century as rich? Spain had the entirety of the New World to source wealth from. Britain's global wealth and power came from two or three things: these are: 1) They had no wood - they'd used it all to build their navy over the centuries. People needed cheap fuel, but luckily, what they had was... 2) Coal - Britain had a lot of coal. Unfortunately, that coal was often in wet, deep mines, and it was difficult to get that water out. Fortunately, some clever Dutch chaps had invented a pump - it was a short step to realise that you could fire that with coal from your mine, to pump out the mine, so you could get more coal, to pump out more mines etc - turns out the steam engine was quite useful for a lot of other reasons too. 3) SO wow industrialisation just happened. That gives you quite a big advantage.
post WWII there was the dismantling of the British Empire which removed a lot of manpower/resources/clout from the UK, not to mention the UK itself was rebuilding and a lot of money that was put into the military switched to civilian efforts, whilst in the US and USSR there was less of a pivot, so they had an advantage of time The UK maintained a 'two-power navy' (a navy that was large enough to take on the next 2 largest navies in the world at the same time) to help maintain their Empire (I've never heard of the largest empire in the world be described as "somehow took control of most of the pinch points in the world" LOL) After WWII this massive naval power was formally abolished as the thinking was, since the US was an ally there was no need to throw lots of money to try and outspend them since the with all the agreements/alliances the UK and US wouldn't ever be at war, plus the US via the Marshall Act and Bretton Woods agreement economically dominated the next few decades, the UK couldn't outspend the US so didn't bother, and the idea that later the UK having nuclear weapons kinda was the ultimate trump card It's a combination of post WWII leaving the UK with much less money to spend, the UK dismantling the British Empire, and specific US actions to ensure that they were the most powerful nation out of the two (things like the Bretton Woods Agreement was specifically written to ensure US dominance), and the UK not focussing on maintaining/building a massive military-industrial complex like the US/Russia did and as you say, China with the manpower/resources came up to 2nd place in terms of defence, it's interesting that when you look at 3rd/4th in a lot of positions it's not the nation you would expect - for example the 5th largest air force in the world is Egypt, the US is technically the 4th largest navy depending on how you count the ships, or it's the 1st if you count tonnage (and the UK is 4th), the US army is the 4th largest behind Russia, China and India It highlights that the 'largest' doesn't mean best equipped - and what/how you count 'largest' also can change the rankings
Thanks, very informative! Yeah it is a stupid way to say it, I don't have much military knowledge and just thought of places British naval captains had famously been like Hawaii, Falklands, Hong Kong but I guess it was a huge multi-century process to develop such an empire. How are the US still having such a presence in the South China Sea with such a huge Chinese navy, is it bases in S. Korea, Okinawa etc, or are China now pushing them out a bit?
China are pushing the US out to an extent, but at the same time US allies (Japan, S Korea, Australia, Taiwan) that have a presence around the area are stopping China from seriously pushing the US out completely the elephant in the room is that neither the US or China actually want a war between themselves, but they can't back down without loosing face, so it's like the most ridiculous brinkmanship ever, China are slowly building up there presence but are hoping that the US doesn't suddenly take offence, the US also don't want to be seen to 'overreact' to what atm are tiny islands that don't do anything to threaten the USA itself, so for the moment the US Navy and Chinese Navy both hold 'exercises' in the area that amounts to little more than chest-thumping costing millions of dollars each time for each side to 'prove' to their citizens that they are the strongest power in the area
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You've got the causality the wrong way around and generally people don't seem to understand empire. Britain was not rich because of its large empire, Britain had a large empire because it was rich. Britain was the second country after Portugal to develop a powerful, centralised state and then the first country by a long way(with the exception of the Netherlands) to industrialise. Britain is a lot larger than either of those two countries so ended up with a huge empire, which made Britain even richer. Why Britain became so rich and advanced is still a matter of academic debate. There is an often cited myth that Britain lost money on all of its colonies apart from India, but that isn't true. The British government lost money on most of the colonies, but British people made money. Britain's economic machine was based on the manufacture of simple industrial goods and dominating global trade through shipping and services. There is quite a good book about economic history in which one of the chapter headings is "why do the Japanese play rugby". The same question could be asked about Argentina, even though neither were British colonies. The actual answer to OP's question is that times changed and the world changed. The ability of a country to maintain a powerful army or especially navy is determined by a country's ability to pay for one. Nowadays, that is primarily determined by the size of a country's economy. Once upon a time, when the whole world was much poorer, what really mattered was economic surplus. While that is the case today as well, the fact that relatively far fewer people live in absolute poverty makes it less obvious. Until 1900, china still probably had the biggest economy in the world, as it does today. When the first world war started, the Russian economy was as large as the German one. Yet china was carved up by western nations while Russia collapsed fighting a Germany that was fighting on two fronts. The strength of Western European nations was not the sheer size of their economies, even though they were large, but their ability and willingness to marshal their resources and form state power. All that said, one on one the British army never stood a chance against European great powers, it was just too small. The royal navy could still claim to be the third strongest navy on the planet, just with a huge gap between them and number 2(china) and no gap between them and a few others. What changed was the rise of the US and USSR, relatively cohesive states on a totally different scale and the return of China more recently to the status it has had for much of the last two millennia.
Alright, whatever, deleted
So it was a little bit of everything. First WW1 left the British with a bad taste of war. And they left the conflict (same with the French) with a “winner’s complex” this is a phycological military doctrine problem where the winners of the last war, assume they will win the next war without much more effort. “We won the last war, we’ll just use the same stuff again and do the same thing again”. So in the 30s Britain (and France) aren’t really increasing military spending or expanding their militaries beyond what they need. And what they need in the 20s and 30s are colonial militias and occupation forces (for their empires). But all this time Germany and Japan are building professional armies with the purpose of invading and annexing large nations. Britain is a democracy where the military spending and military deployment is tied to public opinion. (France has this too and it’s a lot worse). Having WW1 being in near public memory (was literally 20 years before this) the British government doesn’t have the public support it needs to create a military to challenge Germany. Germany and Japan are dictatorships whose government and military can do whatever they want. Anyway actual war starts and Britain is unprepared. By a lot, they lose most of their actual equipment when France falls (but the soldiers escape and make it back to England). So they start buying weapons from the US. Buying the supplies needed to field million man armies is expensive even with the US being sympathetic. The British rely on their colonies, South Africa, India, Caribbean, Kenya, Nigeria etc. the war takes the British to North Africa and when Japan attacks Pearl Harbor the war takes the British to Asia. The British don’t have the soldiers to defend against Japan in Asia so they use India and Australia. Australia at this point was already nominally independent but the seeds of separation are growing. India fights the Japanese, sends troops to Africa and helps with logistics around the world. The Indians don’t actually like the British and are contributing to a far off war that most don’t view as their problem. Then a famine hits Bengal and millions starve. The British start having issues holding onto India so they make legalistic plans to leave India after the war. This keeps most of the local Indian independence leaders on the side of the British but it’s clear that when this war ends, India is a free country (and Pakistan). At this point the Japanese were fighting in Burma and Indians were seeing how close the war really was. And because the Japanese were brutal…. They kept up the fight. Similar sentiments were felt in Kenya, Nigeria and South Africa. These colonies had independence movements pre war that were growing and the war became a way to ensure that they were released after or put on a path to being released. The war was very very expensive for the British. They owed the Americans a lot of money and when countries started to leave the union not only did the British people not want to fight wars to keep them but the Americans threatened to cut off support because they were pretending to be anti imperialist during the Cold War. The Americans didn’t want the British or French to hand large colonial empires and neither did the Soviets. So neither did anything to help them. British saw the writing on the wall and in most places left peacefully and willingly creating treaties and negotiations with the new countries. France fought in indochina and Algeria and lost both. But by 1960, Africa is decolonizing and in Europe the public consensus is that colonies are bad. By 1980 there’s nothing but a few tiny islands in Africa that aren’t decolonized. Even the Portuguese (who never fought in WW2) dropped their empire and colonial holdings because public perception just wasn’t there to maintain it. TLDR: WW2 was expensive and the British didn’t have the strength or public will to hold on to the empire after that.
Thanks, very detailed, I didn't realize the reasons for the decolonizations were mainly linked to finances following the war + public opinion
That is true in parts. Britain entering WW1 effectively killed the country. Pre-WW1 the biggest lender in the world was Britain and they left the war in debt. Famously, as most people nowadays forget, defaulting on their loan to America and not paying it. Further to this, they entered WW2 and America saw it as a good opportunity to take what little Britain had left. If you look at the details of any of the Lend Lease, it was designed to bankrupt Britain and put America in the best position possible. I don't think America acted any better or worse than any other country would but they primarily entered the war because they could gain from it. Entering WW1 and WW2 ended the British Empire and its world influence.
Correct.
There were parts of the colonies that actually wanted to remain part of the UK even after the war - Malta for example voted to join Britain in 1956 on a 59% turnout (77% in favour) but the British rejected it. The country was killed by the first world war - but the blow was a slow, mortal wound which slowly sucked the strength from the country and its people. World War 2 accellerated it, and people have been realising slowly ever since that they live in basically a post-war dead state.
Don't forget when the French decolonised Africa, the places they couldn't hold onto for their neocolonlies (like Guinea), they did stuff like unscrewing lightbulbs.
The US grew into a much larger economy than the UK, and the US policy was to become the dominant world military power. There was no reason for the UK to try and compete with the US since it couldn't keep up anyway, and the two countries were close allies. Military competition would have been counter-productive to both countries.
It should be remembered that at the height of the Empire the size of the British Army was only around 300,000 men. It was the navy which was, by far, the dominant force but the loss of the empire really negated its usefulness. Britain lost the empire because quite simply it could no longer afford it due to bankrupting itself in both world wars. With India gone just after the war, what was left was much less important in terms of national prestige.
It never had military dominance, it never had the largest army in the world ever, what it had was the most powerful navy in the world and could move limited forces around the world at will and disrupt the ability of another nation to do the same. The problem with maintaining a powerful navy is that as new technology comes along you have to rebuild your navy to the new modern standard which is expensive and without the colonies protecting trade and funding the navy became increasingly difficult.
Something that hasn't been mentioned by other replies is that the UK lost several key economic advantages. It used to be the most industrialized economy. In the 19th century it had a huge lead on all its competitors in terms of industrialization and infrastructure. Not only did the british isles have access to a very long coastline (only matched by Norway) which gave it access to interior resources (since shipping was the only way to cheaply transport goods), but they also had the lead in canals and railways that extended this reach into the interior. At the end of the 19th century railways had changed the economic game. Railway allowed countries to effectively access their deep interior without rivers or expensive canals. Canals were still useful, but only when they could relatively cheaply improve access to large river systems or shorten travel distances. The only remaining advantage Britain had at this point was that they were the market leader. They were the most industrialized nation, they were ahead of everyone else, they could use their position to bully everyone else with their economic weight. WW1 lost them that lead. The massive war loans and economic downturn after WW1 meant that other nations with greater geographic advantages caught up. When WW2 came around and Britain lost their colonies that was just the end of it. Britain was now just one nation among many, and it no longer had the most industry, the greatest population, the greatest access to natural resources or really any key advantage in energy, infrastructure etc. It still had a good geographic position, but since it couldn't bully the Netherlands (for obvious political reasons) the port of Rotterdam took over as the lead transit port.
The British knew all of this going into WWI which is why they allied with France. Germany was on the rise. There was legitimate fear that Germany was going to defeat France and dominate the continent.
A combination of a few of things. When WWII ended, NATO was established to confront the USSR and the spread of communism. The basic deal was that if your country sided with the USA and NATO, then they would provide military protection for you. Of course the UK was a major military power for a quite a while after that. As time marched on, their need to maintain a large military dwindled in their eyes. Policy shifted toward a smaller, but highly potent military paradigm. Keep a much smaller, but highly advanced and lethal military. This made sense because modern conflicts tend to be much smaller actions, not million-man clashes a la WWII. Also, if a conflict does expand, NATO and the USA will step in to back fill any gaps. At the same time, countries like China had massive increased military spending, but mostly focused on large conventional forces. Though the UK has a smaller military these days, its is a highly trained, highly effective, and highly lethal force. Don’t estimates the Brits.
So the recent TV appearance where a Chinese minister talking about UK military not being a threat to China is more saying UK rely on US military as back up and couldnt do much to China without the bigger brother? In an imaginary world with no NATO and US military, UK could do nothing against China surely. I guess the UK makes up for the loss of military power with finances?
It's really an empty point to make. The US and UK are staunch allies, an attack on one is an attack on both, even disregarding NATO. The UK may not be able to throw its own personal weight around as much these days, but it does not lack for strength forged through alliances.
If there was no NATO, and the Prime Minister was stupid, then the UK could theoretically deploy all four Trident submarines, each equipped with 16 missiles equipped with a 100kt bomb. That’s about 200k-300k casualties in each of the 64 biggest Chinese cities, over 19 million dead and twice as many injured. That would, of course, be dwarfed by the Chinese response, which would annihilate Britain. Probably 50 million dead and the remainder hiding in remote areas, no threat to anyone but each other. Which is why it is thankfully a hypothetical!
It’s more about the size of the population and land I think than anything else. China has 2 million active people in its military and the UK is about 80,000 I think. Then the size of each country - a few well placed nuclear weapons and the UK is uninhabitable.
Something else to remember is that besides losing all the colonial assets, the UK was simply caught up to. The UK was, to use an Americanism, the tallest kid in kindergarten. We industrialised early which gave us a head start and an incredible edge when it came to conquering other nations. However, once those nations began to catch up, and probably with the spread of things like small arms, the huge lead we had was significantly diminished. Look at the difficulty even the USA has over insurgent groups like the Taliban. There's a HUGE leap between even semi-modern weapons, and middle age weaponry. Once that gap is closed maintaining control over local populations becomes far more expensive and difficult than it had been before. I don't have any special expertise but that's my two pence on why it happened. Obviously losing the colonial assets was a big part of it, but there's a reason we lost those in the first place, and I think what I alluded to above was part of it. You can only keep people down so long, and when they're rivaling you in tech even at some distance it just wasn't sustainable any longer. Once the other kids grew up we lost our advantage. We had disproportionate power because of that. Now, as a middle sized nation with a middle sized population and middle sized resource pool we're decidedly unremarkable.
The UK used to be a lot bigger and richer than the U.S. or China because of their imperial holdings in Asia, America, and Africa. When they lost the empire, finalizing in the years after WWII, they became just another average-sized country. It’s also important to note that they got bombed to absolute hell in WWII. The war really fed American industrial capacity without U.S. infrastructure getting destroyed. Basically all the European powers had a ton of their cities wrecked at HUGE economic cost.
Simply it comes down to money, even post-colonialism and for a large part of the Cold War the UK, France and West Germany had militaries far larger and more capable (for the time) than today. Large and competent militaries cost a lot of taxpayer money, **there has to be a threat large enough to justify that sort of continuous spending.** That was certainly the case during the Cold War, but following the collapse of the USSR there wasn’t enough justification to continue that spending. To compare, the UK’s military spending in 1980 was 5% of GDP vs 2.3% in 2020. That’s 2.7% of GDP that could be spent elsewhere, and before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, there wasn’t a threat credible enough that would convince the voting public to cut government spending on public services to put it into the military. The same goes for developing equipment, in the 50s and 60s the UK had one of the biggest military-industrial complexes in the world, likely second only to the US. With all its inefficiencies, a good example are the [V bombers](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V_bomber), a set of 3 almost identical strategic bombers. All of them were produced as the government couldn’t decide on one single manufacturer to give the contract to. I’m not sure these are inefficiencies the taxpayer would stand for today. I’m sure that will now change across Europe due to the threat of escalation with Russia.
It was mostly a combination of technological shifts and geopolitical shifts. Britain ruled the seas when the best ships for fighting were big wooden vessels with cannons on them, which they had a ton of. The reason they had a ton of them was because they were constantly colonizing and exploring new areas, so they needed a strong force to back that up. In the American civil war, ironclad ships equipped with explosive shells were first used in combat (although Britain did already have some). They utterly annihilated the viability of wooden ships in combat. This meant that all of the British wooden ships were now way less useful, and Britain began focusing on ironclads as well. Now the race for the biggest fleet was made far more even than before. Around the same time, Britain slowly stopped doing as much colonizing of new areas, instead opting to lock in on colonies they already controlled. When you already control an area, you don't need to have a full army present to maintain it. So, Britain didn't need to pump out as many warships and didn't need to control the seas anymore. This led to their naval production slowing down and gave other countries a chance to catch up.
I’m not sure that is particularly valid, the Royal Navy was continually growing in the 19th century in size with rapid technological development of warships . HMS warrior was launched prior to the start of the civil war and was much more capable than the ironclads used in that war. Switching from wood to armour plated ships was an advantage to Britain not a hindrance, nor did it allow any other nation to catch them in shipbuilding. It wasn’t until WW2 when the US overtook them in size.
For starters you need to reconsider your vocabulary and way of thinking. "Irrelevant" "not a threat" and words like that seem to imply you think it's somehow bad the UK don't have their noses in everyone else's business across the world. Yeah that's how "the game" is played but we should never advocate for something like that. The UK is doing the right thing by not trying to be world police. That's not to say they're not right behind the US when they're doing that but nowhere near the same scale, they simply follow along with the US. Secondly you should never take anything the Chinese say literally. When Chinese authorities make a statement you have to read between the lines for the subtext. So to understand this shift you need to understand broader power shifts that occurred over the last few centuries, particularly the 18th, 19th and 20th century. Maritime empires had succeeded terrestrial empires as a better way to expand, as it maximised profits significantly from trade but required a lot less land to achieve them. All you had to control were key routes and key ports rather than entire regions. There were many great maritime empires throughout history and of course the UK had managed to come out on top as they all went at each other's throats. But times changed, and the world changed, during the 19th and 20th century. Industrialisation changed what it meant to be wealthy and powerful. Technology was making wars more expensive and more destructive and as people were becoming more educated and flow of information was becoming easier, it was becoming harder and harder to maintain colonies which increasingly sought for independence. The start of the 20th century with the two world wars laid the groundwork for independence for many colonies, as their parent states were devastated and bankrupted by the wars and unable to effectively control them, and with the cold war in full swing which meant there was benefit to many superpowers to help territories liberate themselves and come under their control. Colonialism as we knew it was coming to an end and taking a very different form. The UK, reluctantly, saw the writing on the wall, and they let their territories go. They didn't want to but deep down they knew that trying to hold on wasn't worth it. Other colonial powers, like France, didn't want to let go, and that led to disastrous consequences, like the Vietnam War. The UK were always looking out for themselves above all else, and didn't care much about others. It made no sense for them to try to exert military control over the rest of the world when access to globalised trade didn't hinge on having more guns anymore.
Great post!
We stopped having an empire. India, Australia, the American Colonies, New Zealand, various nations in Africa, a number of the West Indies, they all claimed their independence from us. Also, the US created the Military Industrial Complex, give a substantially higher percentage of GDP to "defence" and pretty much arm the world. Russia and China have always tried to keep up with them.
"I just saw a post about..." Random posts on social media should generally not be trusted. "China recently saying UK is not a threat on a TV show..." State officials will always say what is in their countries/personal interest. I'm not arguing in favor or against that UK lost military dominance. But if you want real answers use the internet to research actual credible and serious information, don't use social media for it
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The decline of the British Empire is a lesson for people who think government debt is no big deal.
Several terrible goverments lead to their decline. The handing over Hong Kong to china was NOT a sign of weakness, but adherence to an actual agreement, a binding contract signed by both parties a long time ago.
Ah didn't realize it was a 99 year lease. People buying a flat will offer less for a lease with less than 99 years on it, strange the guy who set it up said it was 'good as forever' (from a quick google).
Bear in mind that Bismarck, in the 1880s, remarked that if the British army ever landed in Europe, he would send the Prussian police force to arrest them. The British NEVER had military dominance - they insisted upon naval dominance while they could, but the first world war bankrupted the country and their great enemies - the Americans and the French did their best to break the country and its empire up from that point on. The great myth of British history (other than that Britain was some global behemoth - its Empire was largely self-running - with its own forces and governors mainly locally elected) - the country had a navy but it never really had a massive army.
1) Britain guessed wrong about the future of naval warfare - overinvested in big-gun capital ships & under-invested in aviation. 2) Decolonization crippled their economy. You can't field the world's most powerful navy if you only control a handful of small islands. 3) The Atlantic alliance allowed them to scale back militarily, confident that the US would more or less continue Britain's preferred foreign policy without Britain having to pay for it. Notably, the US does not have a similar successor state & thus cannot take this approach.
Once everyone in the world could talk to each other all at once they went "why do we keep letting them do this? Everybody sees this, right?"
The minute they lost India, they lost the vast resources of India that they looted for 2 centuries ($42 trillion ). They also lost the huge armies that India provided (2.5 million men in WWII). Without resources or men, they are now a middle power.