Abstract
In late November 1943, in a hotel near Cairo, Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt discussed the future of Indochina. Churchill expressed concern that China might look to annex the French colony after the defeat of Japan. Roosevelt, an enthusiastic supporter of increased Chinese responsibilities in Southeast Asia, dismissed the Prime Minister’s worries out of hand: ‘Winston, this is something you are just not able to understand. You have 400 years of acquisitive instinct in your blood and you just don’t understand how a country might not want to acquire land if they can get it. A new period has opened in the world’s history, and you will have to adjust to it.’1
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Notes
Cited in Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 66.
See Phillip Darby, Three Faces of Imperialism: British and American Approaches to Asia and Africa, 1870–1970 (New Haven and London, 1987), p. 174.
For the distinction between ‘formal’ and ‘informal’ empire, see David Reynolds, ‘Roosevelt, Churchill, and the Wartime Anglo-American Alliance, 1939–45: Towards a New Synthesis’ in WmRoger Louis and Hedley Bull (eds), The ‘ Special Relationship’: Anglo-American Relations since 1945 (Oxford, 1986), p. 27.
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: the Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (London, 1988), p. 38.
John Charmley, Churchill’s Grand Alliance: the Anglo-American Special Relationship, 1940–57 (London, 1995), p. 52.
Warren Kimball, The Juggler: Franklin Roosevelt as Wartime Statesman (Princeton, NJ, 1991), p. 128.
See, for example, Charles A. Madison, Leaders and Liberals in 20th Centwy America (New York, 1961), pp. 313–14;
Willard Range, Franklin D. Roosevelt’s World Order (Athens, Georgia, 1959);
Rexford G. Tugwell, The Democratic Roosevelt: a Biography of Franklin D. Roosevelt (Garden City, New York, 1957), pp. 591–2.
Richard Hofstadter wrote of ‘the quick sympathy with oppressed colonials, the ideal of liberation and welfare, and yet the calculating interest in American [commercial] advantage’ that defined FDR’s thinking about colonialism. See Richard Hofstadter, The American Political Tradition (New York, 1954), p. 350.
William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York, 1959).
Lloyd Gardner, Economic Aspects of New Deal Diplomacy (Boston, 1971 edition);
Gabriel Kolko, The Politics of War: the World and United States Foreign Policy, 1943–45 (New York, 1968).
Wm Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 1941–45: the United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford, 1977);
Christopher Thorne, Allies of a Kind: the United States, Britain and the War against Japan, 1941–45, (Oxford, 1978);
Walter LaFeber, ‘Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina, 1942–45’, American Historical Review, 80 (1975), pp. 1277–95.
For a general survey, see Gary Hess, America Encounters India, 1941–47 (Baltimore, 1971).
LaFeber MUI, ‘Roosevelt, Churchill and Indochina’; Christopher Thorne, ‘Indochina and Anglo-American Relations, 1942–45’, Pacific Historical Review, 45 (1976), pp. 73–96.
Fiona Venn, Franklin D. Roosevelt, pp. 11–12; Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932–45 (Oxford, 1979), pp. 8–9.
Significantly, however, after the war he seemed to support proactive, even imperialist, American policies in relation to the Western Hemisphere. See Frank Freidel, Franklin D. Roosevelt: the Ordeal (Boston, 1954), pp. 135–7.
Edgar B. Nixon, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Foreign Affairs, January 1933— January 1937, Volume III (Cambridge, Mass., 1969), pp. 377–84.
Kimball, The Juggler, p. 109; William R. Keylor, The Twentieth Centwy World: an International History (New York, 1984), p. 220.
For a useful official summary of the dispute see memorandum by Hohler, ‘Conflicting Anglo-United States claims to sovereignty over certain islands in the Western Pacific’, 11 June 1943, in Public Record office, Kew [hereinafter PRO]: FO 461/2 (part 7). See also minute by Balfour, 5 May 1939, PRO: FO 371/22792 (A3385/21/45); and memorandum, ‘Notes on the islands administered by New Zealand claimed by the United States’, New Zealand National Archives, Wellington [hereinafter NZNA]: AAEG 950/112b. Historians have sketched the outlines of the story to the outbreak of war in Europe. See Ruth Megaw, ‘The Scramble for the Pacific: Anglo-United States Rivalry in the 1930s’, Historical Studies, 17 (1975), pp. 458–73; and
W. D. McIntyre, New Zealand Prepares for War: Defence Policy, 1919–39 (Christchurch, 1988), pp. 195–200. The first comprehensive survey of American—Commonwealth rivalry concerning the South Pacific islands during the Second World War appears in
Paul Orders, ‘Britain, Australia, New Zealand and the Expansion of American Power in the SouthWest Pacific, 1941–46’, unpublished University of Cambridge PhD (1997).
Memorandum by McEwen MUI, ‘United States’ Claims to Certain Pacific Islands’, 26 March 1940, Australian Archives, Canberra [hereinafter AA]: A6006 1940/03/29.
Cablegram, Roosevelt to Churchill, 13 August 1940, in Warren Kimball (ed.), Churchill and Roosevelt: the Complete Correspondence: Volume I: Alliance Emerging (London, 1984), pp. 58–9.
F. L. W. Wood, The New Zealand People at War: Political and External Affairs (Wellington, 1958), pp. 202–3.
Theodore A. Wilson, The First Summit: Roosevelt and Churchill at Placentia Bay, 1941 (Lawrence, Kansas, revised edition, 1991), p. 108; Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 121–2.
Mario Rossi, Roosevelt and the French (Westport, CT, 1993), p. 143.
Martin Gilbert, Finest Hour: Winston Churchill, 1939–41, (1983), p. 1163.
‘Our whole Eastern Empire has gone’, mourned one British MP, ‘Australia is as good as gone. Poor little England.’ Nicolson diary entry, 30 March 1942 in Nigel Nicolson (ed.), Harold Nicolson: Diaries and Letters, 1939–45 (London, 1967), p. 207. See also Winston S. Churchill, The Second World War, Volume 4: The Hinge of Fate (London, 1951), p. 81.
Anita Inder Singh, The Limits of British Influence: South Asia and the Anglo-American Relationship, 1947–1956 (London, 1993), p. 5.
Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 155; Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt, p. 342; Robert Sherwood, The White House Papers of Harry L. Hopkins, Volume H: January 1942—July 1945 (London, 1948), pp. 577–8.
David Dimbleby and David Reynolds, An Ocean Apart: the Relationship between Britain and America in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1989), p. 158.
Lloyd Gardner, Approaching Vietnam: from World War II through Dienbienphu, 1941–1954 (New York, 1988), p. 40.
Alan K. Henrikson, ‘The Map as an “Idea”: the Role of Cartographic Imagery during the Second World War’, The American Cartographer, 2 (1975), pp. 21–2.
Michael Sherry, Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Post-War Defense, 1941–45 (New Haven, 1977), p. 4;
W. D. McIntyre, Background to the Anzus Pact: Policy-Making, Strategy and Diplomacy, 1945–55 (Basingstoke, 1995), pp. 66–7.
Cablegram, Chargé d’Affaires, New Zealand Legation, Washington, to Fraser, 31 March 1943, doc. 32, in Robin Kay (ed.), Documents on New Zealand External Relations, Volume 1 [hereinafter DNZER, Vol. 1] (Wellington, 1972), pp. 41–3. On another occasion Roosevelt asserted that ‘French interests in the Pacific should be transferred to other people.’ See cablegram, Nash to Fraser, 12 January 1944, doc.41, DNZER, Vol. 1, pp. 54–6. See also cablegram, Chargé d’Affaires, New Zealand Legation (Washington) to New Zealand Minister for External Affairs, 11 August 1943, doc. 33, ibid., pp. 43–5; Pacific War Council meeting, 12 January 1944, Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York: Roosevelt papers, map room files, box 168, folder 2.
Cablegram, Chargé d’Affaires, New Zealand Legation, Washington, to Fraser, 31 March 1943, op. cit. Nash pointed the finger at the influx into Western Samoa of American troops. See draft memorandum by Nash, April 1943, NZNA: EA 2 1945/6a.
Gary Hess, The United States’ Emergence as Southeast Asian Power, 1940–50 (New York, 1987), p. 368.
See John Sbrega, Anglo-American Relations and Colonialism in East Asia, 1941–45 (New York, 1985), p. 149.
Thorne, Allies of a Kind, pp. 456–7, 464, 596–600; Hess, The United States’ Emergence as Southeast Asian Power, p. 369; John Sbrega, Anglo-American Relations and Colonialism in East Asia, 1941–45 (New York, 1983), pp. 133–5; Louis, Imperialism at Bay, p. 567;
Robert Hathaway, Ambiguous Partnership: Britain and America, 1944–47 (New York, 1981), p. 46;
Melvyn Leffler, A Preponderance of Power: National Security, the Truman Administration and the Cold War (Stanford, Calif., 1992), p. 16. See also State Department policy paper, ‘A brief estimate of situation of the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand in the South Pacific on the conclusion of the war in the Far East’, n.d., USNA: RG 59, lot 54D224, box 2.
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© 2000 Victor Pungong
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Orders, P. (2000). ‘Adjusting to a New Period in World History’: Franklin Roosevelt and European Colonialism. In: Ryan, D., Pungong, V. (eds) The United States and Decolonization. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333977958_4
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