Politically backward areas were known as Protectorates and were ruled as if they were colonies, and politically advanced areas were known as Protected States and were governed by the native rulers, advised by British officials.
Moreover, the empire had already been described in 1884 (a year before) by a British politician as the “British Commonwealth of Nations”.
It was, however, at the first colonial conference held in London in 1887, when the Prime Ministers of all self-governing colonies gathered for the celebration of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee – the fiftieth anniversary of her accession to the throne – that the future of the Empire was faced for the first time and its importance and unity emphasised.
Ten years later, when Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee was celebrated and the Prime ministers of the self-governing countries (by now named Dominions) again came to London, Joseph Chamberlain, the colonial secretary, seized the opportunity to propose the establishment of a federal empire with each dominion running its own internal affairs, but with a central federal parliament controlling defence and economic policy. Only New Zealand and Australia supported the proposal, and Canada led the opposition.
Most of the self-governing dominions disliked the idea of a federal parliament because they were so much smaller than Britain that they would inevitably been dominated by her; they were unwilling to co-operate in a centralised defence policy because, once again, Britain’s size and position in the world have entailed their subordination; and they had no wish for empire free trade because one of their main reasons for imposing tariffs was to keep out British manufactured goods, which prevented the development of their own industries.
But although the self-governing dominions were not prepared to form a federal parliament, they had a considerable sense of common interest with Britain. They rejected the idea of empire free trade but accepted to trade on preferencial terms with other countries of the Commonwealth; they wouldn’t accept control of defence, but some agreed to contribute towards the cost of the Royal Navy even because their defence depended a lot on it.
The First World War moved the empire in the same direction. Britain’s declaration of war automatically involved the dominions as well. This had been willingly accepted at the time, but some colonies later felt dissatisfied with this obvious subordination to Britain.
Participation in the war had increased their national consciousness and, by the end of the war, Canada and South Africa were demanding equality in foreign policy as much as in other matters. Therefore, in 1919 each of the Prime Ministers of the dominions attended the peace conference in his own right and signed the peace separately, and in 1920 all of them became members of the League of Nations. Six years later, at the Imperial Conference of 1926, the Canadians, South Africans and Irish demanded that the king’s representatives in their countries should represent the monarch only and not the British government, and that the dominion status should be defined.
Both demands were accepted, and Lord Balfour devised a formula which the conference accepted: that Britain and the dominions were “equal in status”, in no way subordinate to one another in any aspect of their domestic or external affairs, though united by “common allegiance to the crown”.
Canada, South Africa and the Irish Free State demanded that the declaration of 1926 should be legally abiding. So, in 1931 the Statute of Westminster was enacted but the British Parliament, abolishing all legal limitation of the dominion’s governments. The Empire was at last giving way to the Commonwealth of Nations. And when in 1952 another queen came to the throne, she was never an Empress but the “Head of Commonwealth”.
