Traces efforts to establish an imperial defense strategy encompassing Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the Cape Colony in the years leading to World War I. The burden fell on Britain’s naval leaders, as the sea is not divisible, and while Churchill and Haldane made late efforts to establish political consensus, the matter was never solved: the British ultimately withdrew so as to defend the North Sea against Germany.
From 1850, Lord Grey championed relieving the British taxpayer, who shouldered 90 percent of defense costs. The Mills committee of 1862 commenced a decade-long withdrawal of military (army) postings to the dominions, paradoxically making imperialism a safe political cause. Britain thought the maturing colonies should progress from self-sufficiency to enlightened interest in the empire but the colonials wrangled over autonomy and the size of naval-subsidy payments to London. 1878’s Russian war scare carried the debate to more comprehensive review of imperial defense; in the following decade, the colonies were asked to participate in London’s councils.
Whether the empire ought to be a zollverein or kriegsverein remained unanswered: imperial federation were dead by the turn of the century, and as political imperialism waned, the Colonial Office’s Colonial Defense Committee (which morphed into the Committee for Imperial Defense) made the running. Yet the dominions were ‘patriotically’ responsive to the Boer War demands. Though the 1902 Colonial Conference produced no real advances in defense doctrine. Fisher’s appointment to the Admiralty and the initiation of two parliamentary committees in fact brought technical matters to a new phase. In this decade, the Canadians were pleased to acquire and staff two bases; the Aussies basked in the visit of America’s White Fleet, proof of a second partner against Japan.
The dreadnought crisis of 1909 opened the way to Canadian- and Australian-controlled navies, since Britain needed to husband cash to stave off the German buildup. Aussies welcomed Deakin’s efforts, while the Canadians contested Laurier’s for it cut across Anglo-French rivalries. (The New Zealanders, neither worried about the United States nor evidencing latent distrust of Irish immigrants, were typically content to sit close by the UK.) Thought the navy’s ‘blue water’ doctrine masked the degree to which the UK was retreating, the metropole knew the fight would be in Europe.