Warlords
Under scrutiny
Imperialist tendencies
Churchill |
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An arch-opponent of Indian independence before and after the war, Churchill continued to defend the British empire when all but the most diehard of his Conservative colleagues had accepted that it could not be sustained. 'Winston, 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 somewhere if they can get it,' Roosevelt told him during their meeting at Cairo in 1943. Churchill was also prepared to barter other countries' independence in pursuit of wider objectives, as he did with Stalin over the Baltic states, as freely as any imperial ruler.
