‘East of Suez’ and the ‘Indo-Pacific’ in British Politics: Some Lessons of History

The idea of a transoceanic ‘Indo-Pacific’ region has a long historical lineage in British political thought and practice, one whose roots lie in processes of imperial colonisation, conquest and trade in Asia and Australasia. Recent discourses of a return ‘East of Suez’ and the UK's ‘Indo-Pacific Tilt’ cannot be understood as mere imperial nostalgia or post-imperial over-reach, however. Instead, there are historical political imaginaries of Britain's global role which are being put to work in the contemporary politics of shaping an Indo-Pacific strategy for the UK. British policy in the Indo-Pacific has been marked by a consistent awareness of multi-polarity and strategic vulnerability, hierarchies of alliances that give a privileged place to the US and the countries of the ‘Anglosphere’, and the recurrence of maritime, ‘blue water’ conceptions of British identity and interests. These are now being tested by the war in Ukraine and other developments.

Review of Security, Defence, Development and Foreign Policy, and, of course, by Brexit-the decision to leave the EU. 7he use of the terminology "Indo-Pacific" in the 1960s UK defence review and its recent revival in debates on the UK's role in the world after Brexit are suggestive of a longer historical lineage of the idea of a transoceanic space connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans in British political thought and practice.Tracing this lineage-one whose roots lie in the processes of colonisation, conquest, and British imperial trade in Asia and Australasia in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries-can help us better to understand the particularities of the use of the "Indo-Pacific" in contemporary British politics and public policy.
For some commentators, Brexit, the return of "east of Suez," and the "Indo-Pacific tilt" represent little more than imperial nostalgia and hopelessly inflated projections of British power in a world of Thucydidean conflict between the US and China.Others have argued persuasively that post-imperial patterns of thought are not simply the preserve of "Brexiteers" but instead a "common cultural inheritance" widely shared in British politics, and that Conservative discourses of "Global Britain" represent an attempt to construct a new, anti-declinist vision of Britain's place in the world based, not on imperial greatness, but on an imagined longue durée of a maritime, freetrading, and "buccaneering" small world island. 8On this reading, there are historical political imaginaries of Britain's global role, political traditions of constructing British alliances and interests, and recurrent motifs and tropes, which are being put to work in the contemporary politics of shaping an Indo-Pacific strategy for the UK and which are not simply rehearsals of an imperial hubris.Exploring the histories of how the Indo-Pacific has been conceived and deployed in British politics can therefore shed some light on contemporary debates and substantive policy choices.
Although beyond the scope of this paper, there are wider intellectual currents and disciplinary perspectives to consider when studying the Indo-Pacific in contemporary international relations.In oceanography and earth sciences, the "Indo-Pacific" refers to the vast "warm pool" of waters stretching from the equatorial western Pacific to the eastern Indian Ocean, the world's warmest body of surface waters and one which is central to the global climate system.The relationship between the natural and the social plays a critical part in the history of the Indo-Pacific and will assume increasing importance as a consequence of accelerating climate change.The oceanic demarcation of the Indo-Pacific also has important implications for the "mental maps" of the region used by policymakers, not least in giving maritime inflections to strategic conceptions. 9Important perspectives are also supplied by the rise of oceanic histories and historiographies of particular oceans, postcolonial histories of science and the Indo-Pacific, and studies of Pacific and Indian ocean histories of trade, migration, and settlement. 10Insights from these disciplines throw new light on contemporary geopolitical discussions of the Indo-Pacific.In what follows, I also draw on studies of the "Anglosphere" and its antecedents, which are important to our understanding of the Indo-Pacific in British politics. 11 The Indo-Pacific in British political history Manjeet S. Pardesi has recently argued that "regions emerge out of the threefold interrelationship of politico-military interaction capacity, strategic perceptions of the regional states, and the perceptions and strategic behaviour of the great powers." 12or Pardesi, the Indo-Pacific is a distinct and identifiable sub-system within the international system, one which first emerged around the time of the consolidation of British imperial power in India at the beginning of the nineteenth century."Post 1800," he argues, "all of the major powers of this region-British India, Qing China, Imperial Japan, and the United States (until the end of the Second World); and Britain, India, China, and the United States (until the 1960s)-conceived this region as a singular strategic system and implemented policies accordingly." 13he idea of a transoceanic space covering and connecting the Indian and Pacific oceans in British imperial discourses and practices arguably begins with the expeditions of James Cook and the early history of British colonial exploration, mapping, and settler conquest in the Pacific and Australasia.The critical formative period came towards the end of the eighteenth century and early nineteenth century, when a penal colony was created in New South Wales, and the extension of British power in India and increasing trade with China by the East India Company led to the opening up of settlements along the Malay peninsula. 14The British took control of Singapore in 1819 and established British naval power over key trade routes and maritime passages, having taken over Dutch imperial possessions from the Cape of Good Hope to Ceylon and Malacca during the Napoleonic Wars.In the 1820s the Straits Settlements were created, and the 1824 Anglo-Dutch Treaty was signed, laying the foundations for the division of spheres of interest between the imperial powers for the rest of the century.
The process of British imperial expansion east from India was for the most part maritime.But the vision that the founder of British Singapore, Sir Stamford Raffles, had of a vast East Indian empire and free trade zone, rid of the "twin evils of Dutch imperialism and oriental misrule" policed by British naval force, did not come to pass. 15nstead, British interests focused on the creation of strategic ports and trading posts, while turning the Indian Ocean into a British lake.These strategic positions-later extended to Sarawak, Brunei, and Borneo, and through the South China Sea to Hong Kong after the Opium Wars-provided the political and economic infrastructure for British imperial India-China trade.The political economy of this trade is well known: opium exports from India to China balanced the deficit on imports of tea, silks, and porcelains.With the later development of "steam globalization," strategic ports became vital coaling stations. 16he second half of the nineteenth century saw new developments: direct political control of India after 1857 and the Straits Settlements from 1867, the opening of the Suez Canal, imperialist power rivalry over expansion in China and the Pacific, increased anti-colonial resistance, and the rise of the US and Japan as major Pacific economic and military powers.In late Victorian British political thought, these developments were reflected in the emergence of discourses on "world states" and strategic competition for land mass, population, and security between the great powers, of which Great Britain, the US, and Russia were considered paradigmatic. 17The historian J.R. Seeley divided the British Empire into a "Greater Britain" of the "English race" in Great Britain and the white settler colonies, whose integration into a world state was considered a geopolitical and civilizational imperative, and the imperium of the subject colonies and possessions.For high imperialists like George Curzon, viceroy of India and later foreign secretary, India was the central imperial subject, and the "Great Game" with Russia was the primary struggle, waged in buffer states of the Middle East, central Asia, and India's northwest frontiers.For Seeley, Charles Dilke, and others, primary importance was attached to the "kith and kin" of the settler colonies in Australia and New Zealand, and their security within the empire; for Curzon, it was India that guaranteed British security in the Indo-Pacific, and the Indian government and its interests were paramount.
In turn, these divisions of empire were reflected in Edwardian debates about sea versus land power, between Alfred Mahan's insistence on the primacy of naval power in world affairs and the importance of the Royal Navy in policing the maritime routes of imperial trade, and the influential teachings of Harold Mackinder on the pivotal region of the Eurasian heartland and states' control, facilitated by modern railways, over land mass (ideas which were later developed for the Indo-Pacific in Haushofer's work and in transatlantic dialogue between the US and German theorists 18 ).They were reflected, too, in Joseph Chamberlain's project for tariff reform and imperial preference, which embraced the "kith and kin" white settler colonies but excluded India.Chamberlain's "constructive imperialism" registered a key difference in imperial economics between the colonies of European settlement and elsewhere.On the one hand, the nineteenth century and early twentieth century saw massive increases in migration, capital investment, intensive agriculture, and industrial manufacturing in the Anglo world of the US and "Greater Britain"; on the other, the decline of handicraft production and shares of world manufacturing, and increases in arable farming and primary commodity production, in India and China. 19fter the First World War, British naval power went into relative decline, but rising Japanese economic and military power prompted the British to build a "Gibraltar of the East" in Singapore-a heavily defended naval base-at vast cost.Singapore, with its sheltered, deep-water harbour and key location, was an obvious choice for a British base in the Indo-Pacific, though the expenditure on its construction during the interwar economic slump was a major drain on British economic resources.It was the fall of Singapore in 1942 which first signalled the end of the Indo-Pacific British Empire and prompted Australia and New Zealand to turn to the US for their protection, signing the ANZUS pact in 1951.Both countries committed forces to the Korean War, alongside the main deployments of US and British forces.Britain continued to rely heavily on trade with the Sterling Area in southeast Asia and Australasia well into the 1960s, but it had by then long ceded Western leadership in the region to the US.

The end of "east of Suez"
Coming to terms with these realities brought the Indo-Pacific back to the centre of British strategic thinking after the election of the Labour Government in 1964.Buffeted by balance-of-payments crises and pressure on the pound sterling, but committed to spending increases on education and social security, the Wilson administration sought substantial reductions in defence expenditure.It undertook a lengthy review of strategic foreign and defence commitments, military procurements, and force deployments overseas.This eventually culminated in decisions to withdraw from major British bases in Aden and Singapore, cut troop numbers in Asia, and concentrate armed forces in continental Europe-a process that was accelerated after the devaluation of sterling in 1967.Announcing the final programme of cuts and drawdowns to the House of Commons, Wilson argued that the UK would "make to the alliances of which we are members a contribution related to our economic capability while recognising that our security lies fundamentally in Europe and must be based on the North Atlantic Alliance."It was, he argued, necessary "to come to terms with our role in the world." 20ecent academic studies of these decisions have challenged the assumption that they were driven by the remorseless logic of economic necessity. 21The Labour government chose to cap defence spending, rather than restrain spending on its social policy ambitions, and within the reduced defence budget, prioritised meeting prior obligations to NATO partners to station four divisions in western Europe over its east of Suez commitments.Officials arrived at the central conclusions of the review relatively quickly in 1965, but the politics of the process were messier and more protracted-not least because Britain could not pull out of the Indo-Pacific before the confrontation with Indonesia in Malaysia was over, and was put under considerable pressure from the US, Australia, and its other allies not to quit the region.This has led some to argue that the decision to end the east-of-Suez role was "the result of a lengthy, tortuous, and muddled reappraisal even if the principle had seemed sound and realistic for several years." 22egardless, the official working papers for the defence review offer important insights into how British policymakers in the 1960s conceptualised the Indo-Pacific and British interests in the region.In a note drafted by a cross-departmental group of officials in 1965, the starting point for "Western strategy in the Indo-Pacific" was taken as "the West's crucial interest in ensuring the containment of China and preventing eastern and southern Asia from falling under Chinese Communist domination."This would be best achieved, it was argued, "not by direct confrontation or bases in the area but through the creation of a neutralised 'belt'…free from the military presence of the Chinese on the one hand, and the Americans and ourselves on the other, where local nationalism would be sufficiently strong and positive to constitute a barrier to Chinese expansion." 23This registered the appreciation of British policymakers for the balance of forces in the region and their spatial configuration, whilst making abundantly clear the UK's core strategic alliances: "We are heavily dependent on the United States… [and]…bound by strong ties of kinship and sentiment to Australia and New Zealand.""Western strategy," officials argued, "must be based on the joint determination of the United States, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand to organize resistance to the expansionist aims of China."This four-power coordination would not constitute an Indo-Pacific NATO, but it would have "NATO-type" features. 24ere were the key elements of what would become a post-imperial British approach to the Indo-Pacific: alignment with US strategy, despite Harold Wilson's resistance to committing British ground forces to the war in Vietnam; partnership with Australia and New Zealand; and containment of China, buttressed by independent regional powers.British power could no longer dominate, and its permanent military presence would be henceforth withdrawn, but the region would still be constituted in the imagination of British policymakers as one in which it had a key stakeholder role, alongside its Anglo-world allies.
The return of "east-of-Suez" and the Indo-Pacific in contemporary British politics As Pardesi has argued, however, the systemic construction of the Indo-Pacific as a region by the major powers dissipated in the remaining decades of the Cold War, only to re-emerge in the twenty-first century.In British politics, the first references to a return of "east of Suez" appear in UK government circles in the 2010s, following the announcement in 2014 by the then foreign secretary, Rt.Hon.Philip Hammond, of a new Royal Navy base in Bahrain-a relatively minor investment that was nonetheless heralded as "a return to a permanent British presence east of Suez" and celebrated in the conservative press as a "military return to a region abandoned with the end of the British empire." 25The 2015 Strategic Defence and Security Review committed the UK to a new "Gulf Strategy" and "a permanent and more substantial UK military presence" in the region, and in 2017, agreement was reached on a naval base and logistics hub in Oman. 26The next year, following the Brexit referendum and his appointment as foreign secretary, Boris Johnson referred with characteristic bombast to the Wilson government's decision to withdraw from east of Suez as a "mistake"-a victory for the "defeatists and retreatists" that he was now seeking to reverse.Johnson framed both the UK's east of Suez withdrawal and its entry to Europe as emblematic of national declinism.Harnessing anti-declinist discourses has been an important political strategy for British Eurosceptics and central to the justification of a post-Brexit "Global Britain." In the years preceding the Brexit referendum, British Eurosceptics had also reimagined "Greater Britain," "English-speaking peoples," and the "special relationship" between the UK and US as the "Anglosphere," a global alliance of like-minded, freetrading Anglo-liberal market democracies, with the Five Eyes countries of the US, UK, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand at its core. 27The Anglosphere offered an alternative and politically potent way of imagining Britain's role in the world as a global, neoliberal economy outside of the EU, reunited with old friends and natural allies.It also helped justify a turn towards the Asia-Pacific, since this was not only a new source of global economic growth, but home to Australia and New Zealand, and the dynamic city-states of Singapore and Hong Kong.In the Eurosceptic worldview, the Anglosphere was a transoceanic political and economic space, one that had both contemporary resonance and political appeal, and a deep history, replete with maritime exploration and trade.
Alongside the centrality of the Anglosphere to the post-Brexit vision of "Global Britain," the emergence of the Indo-Pacific as a strategic concept for US policy in the region, the reconstitution of the Quad dialogue between India, Japan, Australia, and the US in 2018, and the intensification of economic and security confrontation between the US and China prompted the extension and reformulation of the UK's new "east of Suez" posture beyond the Gulf towards Asia and the Pacific.The Indo-Pacific would subsequently become an organizing concept for the UK too, accompanied by a sharp tilt in the UK's relationship with China away from the "golden era" promised during Xi Jinping's 2015 state visit to the UK and the commitment to building a deeper partnership announced in the 2015 strategic review.This shift in focus and strategy was supported by reports from the Whitehall and Westminster penumbra of think tanks, notably the conservative Policy Exchange, which set up an Indo-Pacific Commission chaired by former Canadian prime minister Stephen Harper. 28Rising interest in the Indo-Pacific coincided with the formation of the Conservative MPs' Sino-sceptic China Research Group and other Conservative backbench groupings seeking to steer the UK's relationship with China towards alignment with the US posture.Yet although the momentum behind Indo-Pacific thinking has come from the conservative movement and its think tanks, house magazines, and political groupings, there is nonetheless broad cross-party support for the strategy, and particularly the shift towards a more confrontational stance with China.Political divisions with the Labour Party largely focus on the implications of the Indo-Pacific "tilt" for the UK's defence commitments to NATO in the Euro-Atlantic and the priority of guaranteeing allied security in Europe.
The 2021 Integrated Review formally announced this strategic reorientation and Indo-Pacific "tilt."The rationale for the tilt is that by 2030, the world will have moved further towards multi-polarity and its geopolitical centre of gravity shifted eastward to the Indo-Pacific.The economic growth of the Indo-Pacific and its burgeoning trade opportunities present opportunities; but the importance of maritime choke points in key supply routes, and the consequences of climate change in the region, present risks; while the rise of China and the "systemic competition" it poses is now considered an "epoch-defining" challenge to UK interests and values.The Integrated Review struck an uneasy balance between on the one hand, trade and diplomatic engagement on climate change with China, and on the other, incremental decoupling and systemic competition.
The review was also blunt in its aspiration that, post-Brexit, the UK seeks preeminence amongst European nations in the Indo-Pacific.It claimed that among European nations, the UK has "uniquely global interests, partnerships, and capabilities" and will aim to establish "a greater and more persistent presence than any other European country."This was chiefly aimed at France and its Indo-Pacific strategy, a diplomatic tension that burst into the open with the announcement of the AUKUS defence and security pact.Boris Johnson, by then the UK prime minister, claimed that AUKUS "makes visible and incarnates the Indo-Pacific tilt" in UK strategy. 29n policy and operational terms, the Indo-Pacific plays out along several dimensions.In defence, the UK has committed to longer and more consistent military deployments in the region, which began with the inaugural deployment of the Carrier Strike Group in 2021, and will continue with increased maritime presence through offshore patrol vessels, the Littoral Response Group, and Type 31 frigates.The integrated review reaffirmed the commitment to the Five Eyes ("Our partnerships with Canada, Australia, and New Zealand will be at the heart of our tilt to the Indo-Pacific as we work to support them to tackle the security challenges in the region") and to the Five Power Defence Agreements.On trade, the UK has conducted accession negotiations for the Common and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP), and has signed free trade agreements with Australia and New Zealand, as well as rollover deals from leaving the EU with Japan and the Republic of Korea.In addition to the AUKUS San Diego agreement on SSN nuclear-powered submarines, the UK is pursuing defence agreements and industry partnerships with Japan and the Republic of Korea, including the trilateral UK-Italy-Japan Global 29.Boris Johnson, House of Commons debates, 16/09/2021, col.1119.
Combat Air Programme. 30Throughout the Integrated Review and associated strategy documents, there is an emphasis on engagement with a range of allies in the Indo-Pacific.For fiscal, military, and diplomatic reasons, the UK is seeking to deepen its Indo-Pacific alliances.

Lessons of history
What lessons can we draw from this historical survey of British political thinking on the Indo-Pacific?First, although there is occasionally deliberate historical bombast and neo-colonialism in recent discussion about "east of Suez," the "Indo-Pacific," and "Global Britain," the history of British political thought and practice in Asia and the Pacific is marked by a consistent awareness of the reality of multipolarity, of contested and shared spaces, whether that is with other imperial powers, new and old, or with China, Japan, and other Asian and Pacific peoples and regimes.There is perhaps an historical memory amongst British policymakers of the contingency and frailty of British imperial power in Asia and the Pacific-even at its height-of "weak empires," as J.C. Sharman has put it, or insecure "bridgeheads" during periods of territorial expansion, and the ignominy of defeat and drawdown. 31he insistence by contemporary theorists that the Indo-Pacific is not simply a construct for bi-polar rivalry between the US and China, but a multi-polar region with an important role for "middle players" also reflects this history. 32In the 1960s defence review, Britain construed the containment of China as a major objective of Indo-Pacific strategy, and elements of that perspective have returned to the fore in recent years, in tandem with rising tensions in the South China Sea and the looming threat of conflict over Taiwan.The Indo-Pacific shift in US geopolitical strategy has presaged a turn away from British cooperation and deepening economic ties with China towards systemic competition.But today, the UK's relatively diminished power prompts it to seek a broader range of allies and defence partners in the region, while geopolitical realities have been reshaped by decades of economic growth across south and east Asia that have not only underpinned the rise of China, but also of India, the ASEAN states, Taiwan, Japan, and the Republic of Korea.Awareness of these multiple interests, the realities of the balance of forces, and the implicit appreciation of the limits of British political and military capabilities arguably inform the UK's attempts to construct new defence partnerships in the region, while necessitating interoperability and joint deployment of naval forces.The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 states that "a free and open Indo-Pacific is one where a regional balance of power ensures no single power dominates, and where a rich tapestry of institutions and partnerships shape a stable but adaptable regional order."It notes that as "the UK has less overall resource and geographic presence than in the Euro-Atlantic, [it] will prioritize working through partners and institutions, and building deep relationships anchored in decades-long economic, technological, and security ties." 33espite, then, its rhetorical pretentions to global leadership, and the claims of unique reach and range that are liberally sprinkled across UK policy papers, there are more measured, realistic strands of thinking in British policy-making which can be traced back through the 1960s defence review and beyond.These do not negate the very real challenges posed by the Indo-Pacific deployments-of spreading assets too thinly and relying on allies to deploy them, while exposing Britain to entanglement in conflict over Taiwan and its forces to hostile action-but they counsel caution that the Indo-Pacific tilt can be interpreted simply in the familiar terms of post-imperial overreach.
Second, there is a clear hierarchy of commitment in the Integrated Review and other British discussions of the Indo-Pacific that reflects older racial and political hierarchies.At the top are the US and the Anglosphere, the Five Eyes within which AUKUS is "nested," despite Canada and New Zealand's absence.There then follow regional allies and "middle powers," with priority given to former colonies, and Japan and the Republic of Korea.India is framed through the seemingly eternal post-colonial search for "transformation" in cooperation.These policy hierarchies mirror those of early Victorian racial hierarchies, of "Greater Britain" versus the rest of the Empire, or the "New and Old Commonwealth" in the twentieth century.Such ways of thinking about Britain, and her relationship to powers in the Indo-Pacific, have long historical lineages, but cannot be reduced to mere imperial nostalgia.Instead, they have been utilised within an array of political discourses and projects, from advocacy of the Imperial Federation in the late Victorian era and tariff reform in the early 1900s, through to Churchill's "three circles" attempt to shore up Britain's power after World War Two, and the more recent Eurosceptic invocation of the Anglosphere.The framing of the Indo-Pacific and the AUKUS pact in contemporary British politics carries unmistakeable traces of these lineages.
Third, the Integrated Review and other documents focused on the Indo-Pacific are replete with historical motifs and tropes of Britain as a "maritime trading nation" and a "global champion of free and fair trade," prioritising "freedom of navigation" and unhindered commerce.The Indo-Pacific and the Brexit turn away from the EU have facilitated a return to "blue water," naval and global imaginaries of British identity and interest, and away from continental, European postures and gravity models of trade. 34This is reflected in the central role of the Royal Navy in the UK's Indo-Pacific strategy.
The issue for the UK-as for other European powers-is whether Russia's invasion of Ukraine upends these imaginaries and forces a rethink of the Indo-Pacific strategy, and even a complete policy return to the Euro-Atlantic, as some on the British Left are arguing should be the basis of the foreign policy of an incoming Labour government. 35he Indo-Pacific tilt implies a relatively benign environment for defence spending, which is belied by Britain's precarious fiscal position, and just as in the 1960s, commitments "east of Suez" now also compete with the costs of arming Ukraine and UK obligations to NATO on the European landmass.Nor do British economic interests necessitate maritime naval commitments in the Indo-Pacific; geography trumps history when it comes to trade, and Europe remains a far more important market for the UK's largely service economy than east Asia.
The Integrated Review Refresh 2023 registers the transformation in the UK's position wrought by Russia's war in Ukraine, stating that the security of the Euro-Atlantic is a "core priority" and the "primary theatre" to which the UK will commit the majority of its defence capabilities.Meanwhile, the rhetoric of "Global Britain" has been quietly dropped. 36If not Makinder's revenge, it represents a tilt for Britain back towards Europe and the land domain of warfare.
Yet even if this course correction is eventually pursued, it remains noteworthy that the Indo-Pacific has been continually interpreted and constructed by British political elites as a region in which the UK has key interests and a core stakeholder role.It demonstrates that the meanings of the Indo-Pacific are more malleable, and the political projects in which it has been deployed more varied, than recent commentary suggests.It is also perhaps an illustration of the importance of political imaginaries to the framing of state strategies and the limitations of purely realist interpretations of Britain's framing of its role in the world.

Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.