Superpower Britain: The 1945 Vision and Why it Failed

Britain emerged from the Second World War victorious yet exhausted. A powerful 'received wisdom' narrative charts national and imperial decline from this point. But looking forward in 1945, Britain's political elite—embracing the governments under Churchill and Attlee and a broad range of influential actors and opinion-shapers—did not see this coming and envisaged an entirely different future from the one that came to pass. British leaders believed that Britain would, could, and should continue to exist and to act as a great imperial power and a great world power, indeed, to be a superpower. In the 1945 moment, Churchill, in his wildest dreams, would not have imagined that all the major territories of the British Empire would be sovereign independent states by the time he was on his deathbed. In this, his views were typical, but, as time was to prove, hopelessly off beam, for when his long life ended in 1965, the British Empire was no more. This book explores this fascinating counterpoint and the fantastic expectations which existed on the conclusion of the Empire's existential struggle. By probing the gap between the expectations of 1945 and what actually happened thereafter, it explains how the elite planned to achieve their goals, and why, in the longer term, they proved to be chimerical. It contends that the historical view 'looking forward' is as important in understanding the past as the rear-view mirror perspective used by historians to make sense of it and articulate it for consumption.