the post-imperial commonwealth

As this is written the Commonwealth is about 100 years old. At all events, it was in conjunction with Queen Victoria's Golden Jubilee in 1887 that a conference of representatives of the British colonies was first held in London. It was a relatively large gathering of 121 delegates, by no means confined to heads of government. A second such conference took place in 1894 in Ottawa at the invitation of the Canadian government. A more significant conference for the future was then held in London in 1897 at the time of Victoria's Diamond Jubilee. This was confined to a number of British ministers and the premiers and prime ministers of Dominions and Colonies, and that set the pattern for the further Colonial and then Imperial Conferences (as they came to be called) of 1902, 1907, 1909 and 1911. As during the first decade of the twentieth century the original Dominion of Canada came to be joined by the three new dominions of Australia, New Zealand and South Africa, these meetings began to take on the intimate quality that persisted through to the early 1960s, being presided over by the British prime minister, meeting in 10 Downing Street, and organised by the British cabinet secretary.

What did these conferences discuss? Their records are replete with debates about imperial defence (the contributions of ships and men by the outlying Empire to add to or serve alongside the Royal Navy; commitments to provide colonial troops in British wars; local colonial defence arrangements, and so on).