The accession of six British Empire member states to the League of Nations questioned the Empire’s constitutional structure, and whether it was one entity or many. The resulting debate would form the doctrine of ‘inter se’ that attempted to rationalise the Empire’s new situation. Chapter Three delves into the frictions caused by separating the Empire’s international personality, as imperial federalists attempted to control and harmonise the foreign relations of the Empire, whilst Dominion leaders sought to use their newfound seat in Geneva to pursue their distinct foreign policies. As the Dominions began to gain full statehood, the chapter examines how the gulf between their membership at the League and that of India’s began to widen.

Before the summer of 1914, there were seemingly few indicators that British colonies would be represented on the international stage as nominally separate entities, as they would be five years later. Chapter One charts the changing patterns of British rule that constituted the ‘Third British Empire’, and how new patterns of imperial governance were beginning to emerge in the newly formed Dominion of South Africa, that would put the Empire on a trajectory towards separating its international personality. This chapter will also examine how India, a colony with comparatively fewer of the self-governing institutions of the Dominions, would also accede to the Imperial Conference alongside the Dominions, a significant step towards membership of the embryonic League. Finally, this chapter will assess to what extent the participation of colonies at international organisations and conferences was normalised, and what precedents were employed to justify the presence of colonies after the War ended.

Having secured a seat at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of the First World War, British and Dominion officials pushed for the accession of British colonies to the new League of Nations. Chapter Two probes the legal bases, as well as the political arguments employed to convince United States’ President Woodrow Wilson, why the Dominions and India should be separate member states from Britain at the League. As Britain and the Dominions pushed Wilson for colonial accession to the League, this chapter also examines political pressures, both within the United States, as well as from anti-colonial nationalists from within British colonies, who wanted their own membership of the League, separate from the one proposed by Britain. In doing so, this chapter answers whether colonial membership came about through British imperial design, or through anti-colonial pressures of the ‘Wilsonian Moment’.

This chapter examines the independence days and national commemorations of these four pseudo-states. It looks closely at the moments in which these four claimed to achieve sovereignty, and will consider the aesthetics and symbolism of the dates of their actual declarations of independence. Furthermore, it will examine how they each created national symbols and rituals, the ways in which these national days were subsequently commemorated, and how these national commemorations changed over time.

This chapter explores how these efforts at resolving the empire’s crisis began to fail and produce unintended consequences. It traces the breakdown of cooperation on naval strategy and shipbuilding among colonial governments, especially that of Wilfrid Laurier’s and Robert Borden’s naval bills in Canada. It shows that the deep involvement of colonists in the forthcoming world war was not a certain proposition between 1910 and 1914, and that the empire’s security crisis threatened to derail colonial state-building projects in India and South Africa.

Spanning the years 1907 to 1909, this chapter deals mainly with two crucial imperial conferences. The first debated the constitutional meaning of “Dominion status” for a select few British colonies, while the second looked to the empire’s geostrategic survival in light of the German naval threat. At both conferences, British and colonial representatives responded to constitutional and security crises, hoping to forge a new imperial community in which the rights of membership hinged on contribution to collective security.

Chapter 5 takes the narrative to the outbreak of the First World War, and compares the colonial response to the mobilization for South Africa at the beginning of the book. The chapter focuses mainly on conscription, the ultimate expression of state sovereignty over individuals, and the way conscription forced a reckoning with unresolved political questions across the empire. It covers the fraught attempts by the British government to resolve the racial exceptions listed in Military Service Act 1916, and the debates in Australia, New Zealand, and Canada about whether to follow in Britain’s footsteps on their own unprecedented military manpower problems.