Monarchy and the End of Empire: The House of Windsor, the British Government, and the Postwar Commonwealth

by Philip Murphy

By the early twentieth century it was becoming clear that the Empire was falling apart. The British government promoted the Crown as a counterbalance to the forces drawing the Empire apart, but when India declared their intent to become a republic in the late 1940s, Britain had to accept that allegiance to the Crown could no longer be the common factor binding the Commonwealth together. They devised the notion of the Headship of the Commonwealth, enabling India to remain in the Commonwealth while continuing to give the monarchy a pivotal symbolic role. Monarchy and the End of Empire provides a unique insight on the triangular relationship between the British government, the Palace, and the modern Commonwealth since 1945.

In the years of rapid decolonization which followed 1945 it became clear that this elaborate constitutional infrastructure posed significant problems for British foreign policy. Not only did it offer opportunities for the monarch to act without ministerial advice, it also tied the British government to what many within the UK had begun to regard as a largely redundant institution. Philip Murphy employs a large amount of previously-unpublished documentary evidence to argue that the monarchy's relationship with the Commonwealth, initially promoted by the UK as a means of strengthening Imperial ties, had increasingly become an impediment to British foreign policy.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2013

About the author

Philip Murphy is Professor of British and Commonwealth History at the University of London.

Reviews

[Gary Holtzman · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this some time ago due to a specialized interest in constitutional monarchy as a system as well as in both British history and royal history more broadly. I was inspired to read it again by the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the inevitable resulting discourse regarding the abolition of the monarchies in many of the Commonwealth Realms. I am writing this review on the eve of the late Queen's funeral. It is admittedly a pretty arcane subject, but this short monograph is a relatively easy to understand guide for anyone wishing to understand the evolution of the Commonwealth, the peculiar arrangement by which Britain and (as of this writing) 14 other independent countries share a monarch, and/or the role of Elizabeth II in decolonization.