The first Labour government to enjoy a working majority, and a massive one, was also a government whose senior ministers had served in the wartime coalition, and had thus become familiar with traditional views about Britain's overseas relations. As Ernest Bevin put it:‘You will have to form a government which is at the centre of a great Empire and Commonwealth of Nations, which touches all parts of the world…. Revolutions do not change geography, and revolutions do not change geographical need.’ In this paper an attempt is made, in the light of recently released archival material, to identify the priorities of the Labour government in its Imperial policy and to see to which pressures it was willing to yield and which it resisted.

Previous interpretations have ranged from contemporary hostile verdicts from the extreme left (like those of R. Palme Dutt or George Padmore) to later judgements which were more sympathetic but which lacked the basis of archival sources (like those of David Goldsworthy and the present author). Dutt in 1949 described British Imperial policy as being subservient to the needs of the USA and explained away the concession of independence to South-Asian countries as a new means of safeguarding British interests. George Padmore, pan-Africanist, ex-Communist and a future adviser to the independent government of Ghana, conceded the reality of South-Asian independence but argued that the Labour party wanted to find new sources of profit in Africa.