5. Story of England: Modern Warfare
Dan Snow's History Hit
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The Importance of Popular Support for the British Empire
The question of whether those soldiers who'd been mobilized to fight Germany would continue fighting in order to win back Britain's overseas imperial possessions is a question that starts to bother the British elite from about 1943 onwards. Once India's going to be independently enough to have the Indian army to do all of that work, then that becomes much more difficult to sustain. And it raises a totally different question about who's going to do the fighting. It's not like the British totally give up on empire and even those people like Clement Adley who had been in their rhetoric strongly anti-empire even during the war,. at least hardly going to be giving away the British Empire after India's gone.
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