Britain,the Old Commonwealth and the Problem of Rhodesian Independence, 1964–65

This article uses new sources from the National Archives of Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the United Kingdom to examine the consultation and cooperation between Britain and the Old Commonwealth in dealing with the problem of Rhodesian independence. It demonstrates that Canada developed a proactive approach towards the Rhodesian problem but Britain, Australia and New Zealand gave only limited encouragement to Canadian initiatives to avert Rhodesia's Unilateral Declaration of Independence (UDI). This article also argues that problems in British policy formulation – especially the weakness of its attempts to deter Rhodesia from unilateral action and its hesitant contingency planning for a UDI – strained the relationship with its Old Commonwealth partners. This is significant because it belies the impression that the problem of Rhodesian independence divided the Commonwealth simply along racial lines.     

‘This Community Which Nobody Can Define’: Meanings of Commonwealth in the Late 1940s and 1950s

Assessments of early postwar understandings of the power and potential of the Commonwealth have suggested the body either failed to shield the British public from a sense of national decline or that it comforted them that there was no need to worry about decolonisation because the organisation enabled the maintenance of British authority by other means. However, historians and political scientists who provided public comment on the present and future of the body in the late 1940s and 1950s complicate such assessments, wracked as they were by a profound uncertainty over what the Commonwealth could achieve. Their sense of uncertainty was not derived from a pessimistic reading of the tangible events and processes of the period that we might today assume blunted commentators’ faith in Commonwealth cohesion, such as Britain’s relationship with Europe, neutralism, apartheid, or even Suez. Instead, uncertainty over the Commonwealth’s capacity to realise a latent potential supposedly rooted in its members’ willingness to work together was rooted in something more elemental, namely sustained uncertainty regarding the nature of the body’s connections and functions. The body was judged an abstraction, a nascent and unparalleled experiment whose bonds were extensive yet impossible to measure. Its perceived opacity rendered it neither a cause for concern nor a salve to a wounded British morale.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

Model migrants?: Sikh activism and race relations organisations in Britain

Race relations organisations in Britain hailed Sikhs as models of peaceful integration during volatile political debates about the immigration of Commonwealth peoples during the 1960s and early 1970s. But Sikh campaigns to protect the sanctity of turban-wearing challenged this symbiotic relationship. This article explores how motorcycle helmet laws provoked a campaign to protect the Sikh turban and allowed diasporic Sikhs to articulate their concerns about British integration and race relations expertise during the mid-1970s. Sikh campaigners linked restrictions on turban-wearing to concerns about race relations legislation, equal employment policy, and their rights as British residents. In assessing the fluctuating relationship between Sikh activists and race relations authorities, it reveals the fractures in pluralist integrationist ideologies that continued to prioritise British cultural authority. The evidence here also demonstrates that this moment provided British Sikh communities with an unprecedented opportunity for national solidarity and diasporic community-building.     

坚守还是让渡——二战后英国人主权观述论

英国人对主权让渡的认识经历了较为复杂的过程:从欧洲一体化初期不愿让渡主权,到加入欧共体时出现"无关主权"、"共享主权"和"威胁主权"三种认知,之后逐渐形成主流共识:一方面,让渡部分主权、融入欧洲一体化有利于增进英国国家利益;但另一方面,无论"亲欧派"还是"疑欧派"都坚持英国的核心主权不可让渡的原则,并且不认同欧洲联邦是欧洲一体化的终结目标。英国政府采取务实主义的态度,既通过"非政治化"努力避免主权让渡成为与欧共体/欧盟合作的障碍,又坚守英国的法理主权地位,部分主权的让渡与否取决于对本国利益的权衡和国内政治的需要。英国人对主权让渡的"保守"态度是他们认知主权的一种"英国方式",但它并没有改变英国人的上述主流共识。     

Celebrating British multiculturalism,lamenting England/Britain's past

Drawing upon Littler and Naidoo's ‘white past, multicultural present’ alignment, this article examines English newspaper coverage of two ‘British’ events held in 2012 (the Diamond Jubilee and the London Olympic Games). In light of recent work on English nationalism, national identity and multiculturalism, this article argues that representations of Britain oscillated between lamentations for an English/British past – marred by decline – and a present that, while being portrayed as both confident and progressive, was beset by latent anxieties. In doing so, ‘past’ reflections of England/Britain were presented as a ‘safe’ and legitimate source of belonging that had subsequently been lost and undermined amidst the diversity of the ‘present’. As a result, feelings of discontent, anxiety and nostalgia were dialectically constructed alongside ‘traditional’ understandings of England/Britain. Indeed, this draws attention to the ways in which particular ‘versions’ of the past are engaged with and the impact that this can have on discussions related to multiculturalism and the multiethnic history of England/Britain.     

Domesticating the Frontier: Gender,Empire and Adventure Landscapes in British Cinema, 1945–59

Before 1945, films of the empire genre, produced in Hollywood as well as Britain, celebrated the masculinity of the British adventure hero, and promoted an imperial world view. This article explores the significance of the incorporation of white women into empire films in the late 1940s and 1950s, focusing on three films from different moments in the period. What are the range of meanings assigned to white femininity in these films, and their significance to the politics of race and gender? How is the white woman represented in relation to colonised women and men? In addressing these questions the article considers shifts in the gendering of the empire genre as part of an attempt to address a range of anxieties – about the transition from empire to Commonwealth, the rise of American power, and the collapse of boundaries between colonisers and colonised.     

The British Parliamentary Labour Party and the Government of Ireland Act 1920

Immediately after the First World War the British Labour Party was forced to reconsider its relationship with an increasingly militant Irish nationalism. This reassessment occurred at the same time as it was becoming a major political and electoral force in post‐war Britain. The political imperative from the party's perspective was to portray itself as a responsible, moderate and patriotic alternative governing party. Thus it was fearful of the potential negative impact of too close an association with, and perceived sympathy for, extreme Irish nationalism. This explains the party's often bewildering changes in policy on Ireland at various party conferences in 1919 and 1920, ranging from support for home rule to federalism throughout the United Kingdom to ‘dominion home rule’ as part of a wider evolving British Commonwealth to adopting outright ‘ self‐determination’ for a completely independent Ireland outside both United Kingdom and empire. On one aspect of its Irish policy, however, the party was adamant and united – its opposition to the partition of Ireland, which was the fundamental principle of Lloyd George's Government of Ireland Bill of 1920 which established Northern Ireland. Curiously, that aspect of Labour's Irish policy was never discussed in the party at large. All the running was made by the Parliamentary Labour Party (PLP) in the house of commons in 1920. The PLP's outright opposition to the bill acted as balm throughout the wider party, binding together the confusing, and often contradictory, positions promulgated on the long‐term constitutional future of Ireland and its relationship with Britain.     

‘This is Staffordshire not Alabama’: Racial Geographies of Commonwealth Immigration in Early 1960s Britain

In the 1964 general election, the English town of Smethwick outside Birmingham became infamous for the unprecedented way in which issues of immigration, race and racism entered British national politics. Conservative candidate Peter Griffiths captured the Smethwick seat in Parliament from long-standing Labour MP Patrick Gordon Walker, aided by the slogan ‘If you want a nigger neighbour, vote Liberal or Labour’—a watershed episode soon overshadowed by the rise of Powellism in the late 1960s. Debates between Griffiths, his supporters and his opponents in the early to mid-1960s about the local and national implications of ‘coloured’ immigration (particularly of Indian Sikhs) from the Commonwealth and the legacy of empire drew upon a densely entangled set of global reference points that went beyond a ‘multi-racial’ Britain being reshaped by its ‘multi-racial’, postcolonial Commonwealth. Racist rhetoric, as well as an increasingly assertive anti-racist activism by the Indian Workers' Association and other groups, turned to analogies ranging from Nazi Germany to apartheid South Africa and racial segregation in the United States, as well as to protest techniques inspired by Gandhi in colonial India and African Americans in the civil rights movement. In Smethwick c. 1964, the global met the local, illuminating transnational flows of people and ideas about race and cultural diversity nonetheless contingent upon their time and place.     

Subjects or Citizens? India,Pakistan and the 1948 British Nationality Act

Independence in the case of British India occurred at relatively short notice in August 1947, but tying up the loose ends of empire stretched over years. Under these circumstances, the realignment of subjecthood and citizenship necessitated by decolonisation was protracted, and raised complex questions about identity in both the new states of India and Pakistan and the former imperial power itself. This article thus takes as its focus the drawn-out process of disengagement that followed formal independence in relation to one case study: the various ways in which Britain sought to square the working of its 1948 Nationality Act with Indian and Pakistani citizenship legislation that took shape in the 1950s. India and Pakistan faced the common challenge of establishing who now belonged within their new borders. Britain likewise was forced to recalibrate its ideas about nationality and think afresh about the rights of its subjects in view of the new sets of relationships that now linked colonies, old dominions and the ‘mother country’ within the Commonwealth. In practice, applying the 1948 Act's provisions in relation to India and Pakistan became infused with anxieties about ‘race’, which surfaced repeatedly as British officials in London, Delhi, Karachi and consulates around the world sought to manage its operation to suit British interests.     

Breaking the Bad News: Plans for the Announcement to the Empire of the Death of Elizabeth II and the Proclamation of Her Successor, 1952–67

This article uses recently released official papers to examine British planning for the announcement of the death of Elizabeth II to the Empire/Commonwealth, and for the involvement of Commonwealth representatives in the proclamation of her successor. The planning process was complicated by the complex and varied nature of the relationship between the Crown and different parts of both the colonial Empire and the independent Commonwealth. While the debates generated by this process tended to revolve around relatively minor issues of protocol, they were informed by a much more serious concern: the extent to which the institution of the British monarchy should adapt to meet the needs of the ‘new’ Commonwealth. Those advocating flexibility saw this as essential if the Crown was to continue to have a unifying role within the Commonwealth. Traditionalists, however, feared that reform would weaken the value of the monarchy as the focus of a specifically British national identity.     

Tracing British cultural policy domains: contexts,collaborations and constituencies

This paper draws on a larger research project that investigates the networks and institutions shaping cultural policy across national, international and supranational contexts. Taking Britain as its touchstone, it identifies and maps some of the operational relations between culture, governance and nation shaping the development and orientation of contemporary cultural policy. It thus highlights key formal and informal domestic relationships and contexts within which Britain's local, regional and national cultural policy initiatives are situated. The British context – in which England figures strongly for historical, political and demographic reasons, and so draws a corresponding resistance across other constituents of nation – is shown to be both internally differentiated along various lines, and also embedded in the larger sphere of the European Union that redraws the boundaries of cultural policy and governance. In tracing the contours and interrogating the constitutive elements of Britain's domains of cultural policy, we seek to provide a foundation for understanding the intersections and influences that exist between fields of cultural governance, and their interdependence and fluidity.     

英国退出印度的官方心态调整

英国财政困境与殖民统治问题是英国从印度退却的现实背景,然而,英国政府错误地认为自己仍然是印度独立进程的主导者,维持印度统一并把印度羁留在英联邦正是英国在此心态影响下制定的双重战略。内阁使团失败表明印度主要矛盾已经从殖民者与民族主义者对立转变为印度国大党与穆斯林联盟之间的利益斗争。随着印度局势恶化,英国政府的主导者心态转变为焦虑与无奈。蒙巴顿在形势压力下放弃统一印度的主张,承认了印巴分治的事实。英国政府在印度独立进程中的心态调整表明英国主动权非常有限,印度政治局势才是理解非殖民化的关键。     

从英国史研究到世界现代化进程研究--访钱乘旦教授

钱乘旦教授在蒋孟引先生的引导下从事英国史研究,首先探讨了改革在英国历史发展中的作用。以英国史研究为切入点,进一步比较了英国、法国、德国等国家近代历史发展的异同,从而深入到发达国家现代化的研究领域。他又从英国现代化的研究扩展到整个英联邦国家的现代化研究,进而探讨了世界上不同国家的现代化的历史进程,并且反思了这一进程中出现的诸多问题。     

Economic Tensions and Conflict in the Commonwealth, 1945-c.1951

In the immediate aftermath of the Second World War, economicrelations between Britain and the Commonwealth were very close,and the Empire was of greater economic importance to Britainthan at any previous time. International economic conditionswere dominated by the dollar shortage, and especially afterthe sterling crisis of 1947 most of the sterling area membersof the Commonwealth were drawn into even closer interdependence.But, in contrast to the expectations of many policy makers,the world economy after the war was characterized by buoyantdemand and limited supply. In particular, the demands placedon British production and finance highlighted the limitationsof capacity. Development in both the independent and ColonialCommonwealth was frustrated. The inadequacies of the closedsystem revealed in the late 1940s encouraged Commonwealth countriesto push for the restoration of currency convertibility and ofmultilateralism in the 1950s.     

The Survival, Revival and Decline of British Economic Influence in Malaysia, 1957-70

Independence for Malaya in 1957 (and the enlargement of thefederation to form Malaysia in 1963) did not have an immediatelyadverse effect upon British economic interests there. Indeed,Britain retained, and even revived, its huge commercial, industrial,and financial presence in Commonwealth Southeast Asia well intothe 1960s. From the middle of that decade, however, Britisheconomic influence in Malaysia declined quite rapidly. The mainfocus of this article is to examine three possible causes ofthis downturn: declining competitiveness on the part of Britishmanufactures; UK government policy towards private investmentand public expenditure overseas; and entrepreneurial weaknessesamong the British agency houses in Malaysia.     

The British Commonwealth Air Training Plan and the Shaping of National Identities in the Second World War

This article explores the British Commonwealth Air Training Plan (BCATP), the RAF's major scheme for training airmen during the Second World War. Through this training programme, the dominions of Canada, Australia and New Zealand provided an indispensable contribution to the generation of British air power, a necessary condition for eventual victory. The article first considers the precise ways in which the BCATP extended British air strength, through an analysis of the output of graduates in the UK and the dominions. This is followed by an examination of how the governments of Australia and Canada attempted to ensure the continued national identification of their personnel once these airmen were serving within the RAF, reflecting the increasing political independent-mindedness of the dominions. Although Canada pursued a bolder and more successful policy of ‘Canadianization’, the mixed reception that this initiative received from airmen demonstrated the fact that the importance of national identification to Canadian airmen in Europe varied widely depending on individual experiences; indeed, national political currents were moving ahead of any broad consensus among servicemen.     

From London to Lashkar Gah: British Counter Narcotics Policies in Afghanistan (2001–2003)

In October 2001, the prime minister of Britain, Tony Blair, identified the destruction of the narcotics industry as a subsidiary but nevertheless major objective during the intervention in Afghanistan. Within 18 months of the intervention, the UK had launched a policy to compensate farmers for destroying their opium crops, assumed the role of G8 lead nation for counter narcotics and set an ambitious target to destroy opium cultivation within 10 years. However, other than the rather dismal results of British counter narcotics policy, very little is known about the decision-making processes that underpinned them. This article provides unique insight into British counter narcotics policy-making during 2001–2003, with a focus on the interdepartmental discussions regarding policy formulation. It reveals that Whitehall was divided over involvement in such a complex task, with officials close to the prime minister arguing that this was an achievable task and those within the Foreign and Commonwealth Office arguing that the policies adopted were doomed to failure. This article demonstrates just how and why the failure predicted by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office actually came about.     

'A Matter of Regret': Britain, the 1983 Grendada Crisis, and the Special Relationship

When the USA launched a military intervention in Grenada inOctober 1983 it was against the wishes of its closest ally,Britain, who felt deliberately misled as to Washington's intentions.As a former British colony and member of the Commonwealth, withthe Queen as Head of State, Grenada remained of interest toBritain. This article will provide a detailed analysis of Anglo-Grenadianrelations and the events and contacts between the USA and Britainduring and after the 1983 crisis and assess the role of the‘special relationship’ in shaping Britain's reactionto the intervention. I conclude that the conventional wisdomthat Britain was ‘in the dark’ about what was happeningis not entirely accurate. ^*The views expressed in this article represent those of theauthor alone.     

The politics of donating technological artifacts: techno-nationalism and the donations of the world’s first jet engines

The Smithsonian Institution’s aviation collection includes two early jet engines, both of which were given to the museum by foreign donors. The first, a prototype of Britain’s first jet engine, which flew during World War II, was donated by the British state in 1949. The second, a replica of Germany’s first jet engine, which flew in late August 1939, was donated by Germany’s leading museum, the Deutsches Museum, in 1980. The two are today presented as equivalent artifacts, yet the paths followed by the two objects to the American museum were anything but equivalent. Recovering the political and historical contexts that informed each of these two donations shows how what was apparently the same action fulfilled two very different agendas. Unlike the British donation, which was calculated to support Britain’s (at that time solitary) claim to having invented the jet engine, the German donation supported a narrative of dual invention, which had become the internationally agreed standard story between 1949 and 1980. This dual-inventor narrative allowed the German museum to forward a more subtle goal than promoting a national inventor; that of depoliticizing and normalizing Germany’s aerospace tradition internationally despite the fact that German aviation had been a locus for German nationalism and National Socialist largess. Reflecting on these two donations raises questions about how technology – particular historical claims about technology made in museums – have contributed to the construction of national identities.