Making Headlines in a State of Emergency: The Case of the Times of Cyprus, 1955–1960

The final years of British rule in Cyprus were marked by the colonial government’s use of authoritarian measures to impose control over the local press. The most problematic publication during the 1955–60 period was the Times of Cyprus, an English-language newspaper edited and owned by experienced British journalist Charles Foley. This article examines the fraught relationship between Foley’s newspaper and the colonial government against a backdrop of social instability and political violence. In particular, it focuses on the role the newspaper played as a conduit of information between Cyprus and Britain, conveying the experience of colonial rule to influential readers in London and reporting British support for self-determination to a Cypriot reading public. This ability to undermine official control over the flow of intelligence between the colonial periphery and its metropolitan centre unsettled the British administration, leading to repeated but ultimately unsuccessful efforts to proscribe the newspaper.     

From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia

This article re-examines the drivers of post-war Australian foreign policy in South-East Asia. The central argument is that the motive of Commonwealth responsibility has not been given sufficient explanatory weight in interpreting Australia's post-war engagement with South-East Asia under both Australian Labor Party and Liberal-Country Party (Coalition) governments. The responsibility expressed by Australian policy-makers for the decolonisation of the Straits Settlements, Malayan Peninsula and British Borneo Territories cannot be adequately understood within a cold war ideological framework of anti-communism. Nor can it be explained by the instrumental logic of forward defence. The concept of responsibility is theorised as a motivation in foreign policy analysis and applied to Australian involvement with British decolonisation in South-East Asia between 1944 and 1971. The article finds that in its approach to decolonisation, Australia was driven as much by normative sentiments of responsibility to the Commonwealth as it was by instrumental calculations of cold war strategic interest. This diminished with the end of Indonesia's ‘Confrontation’ of Malaysia in 1966 and subsequent British commitment to withdraw from East of Suez. Australia's policy discourse becomes more narrowly interest-based after this, especially evident in Australia's negotiations with Malaysia and Singapore over the Five Power Defence Arrangements from 1968 to 1971.     

America's Role in the Five Power Defence Arrangements: Anglo-American Power Transition in South-East Asia, 1967–1971

Prior to 1971, Britain played a key role in the security of Malaysia and Singapore, especially during the Malayan Emergency (1948–1960) and Konfrontasi (1963–1966). Britain's military withdrawal from the east of Suez beginning from 1968 not only became a catalyst for post-colonial development of Malaysia and Singapore, but also pushed them towards America's security umbrella. Negotiations to replace the Anglo-Malaysian Defence Agreement with a new defence arrangement were fraught with pussyfooting on the part of British, Australian and New Zealand leaders. The Malaysian and Singapore defence ministers were divided and contributed to further foot dragging. By the time the Five Power Defence Arrangements (FPDA) were signed by the five nations in November 1971, collective defence among the signatories had devolved to mere consultation. By analysing the obstacles encountered during the negotiations and American influence on the shape of the FPDA, this paper demonstrates that a power transition that had been set in motion after Second World War was completed by 1971 when British strategic influence in South-East Asia gave way to American dominance.     

Brown Britain: post‐colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually‐existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post‐colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post‐colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.     

Getting Out of Belize: Britain’s Intractable Military Exit from Central America

With scant material interests at stake, and protection exacting a toll on military resources, Britain wanted out of Belize, its sole dependency in Central America. This desire became more pronounced by the 1970s as successive British governments sought to eliminate residual out-of-Europe political and military commitments. Exiting Belize, however, proved a three-decade challenge for Britain. Exploiting recently declassified British government documents, this article explains why leaving proved so intractable. The article explains how Guatemala’s territorial claim—and its threat to realise this claim by means of force—proved the main obstacle to Britain’s military exit. Repeated attempts in the 1970s towards a negotiated settlement with Guatemala failed. Instead the decade was marked by moments of acute tension. Unable to discount the possibility of a Guatemalan attack, Britain felt compelled to reinforce its military presence in the country at a time when it was trying to exit. Moreover, Britain had to offer continued protection as a necessary condition for Belize to proceed to independence in 1981. This post-independence defence guarantee was intended as a short-term measure, and Britain remained committed to ending its Belize commitment at the earliest opportunity. Yet British protection ended only in 1994. This article unpacks the political and military factors that best account for this protracted withdrawal.     

Disguised anti-colonialism: Protest against the White Australia Policy in Malaya and Singapore, 1947–1962

A manifestation of the anti-colonialist sentiment in Malaya and Singapore during the post-war period of decolonisation was the vociferous protest against the White Australia Policy. Australia's restrictive immigration policy was seen as an offensive colour bar, similar to the various racial restrictions that British authorities placed on their colonial subjects, which symbolised white dominance. By protesting against the White Australia Policy, the colonial subjects of the British in Malaya and Singapore were indirectly attacking white colonial rule in Southeast Asia. Antagonism towards the White Australia Policy became less vocal as Malaya and Singapore proceeded towards self-government and independence, when many of the colonial colour bars were removed. However, low-key resentment against what was seen as a symbol of white colonialism still persisted in relations with Australia.     

Britain,Empire and the Origins of the Cold War Youth Race

The Soviet politicization of international youth during the inter-war and wartime years was identified by British policy-makers as a most serious threat to British imperial power. Asserting the significance of and interplay between colonial youth and imperial ideology in the politics of the cultural Cold War, this article thus examines how the British conceptualized and sought to compete in the Cold War ‘youth race’ between 1945 and 1949. While funding was the most obvious disadvantage, this article argues that Britain’s fatal weakness was its inability to escape the consequences of colonialism, including the tendency to rely on repressive legislation.     

Defending Empire at the United Nations: The Politics of International Colonial Oversight in the Era of Decolonisation

This article argues that, although anti-colonial delegations to the 1945 San Francisco Conference did not succeed in bringing all colonial territories under the umbrella of international trusteeship, the threat of expanding international oversight shaped the relationship between colonial governments and international organisations in powerful ways. By focusing on how the UN Special Committee on Non-Self-Governing Territories evolved as a de facto supervisory system for dependent territories, this article considers the ways that representatives at the United Nations defined dependency and self-government and explores the crusade that colonial governments led to justify imperialism in the post-war world. Through a consideration of the diplomatic actions of France, Great Britain and Belgium, this article explores the ways that colonial empires jointly mobilised to defend colonialism at the level of the United Nations. In the face of evolving supervisory mechanisms at the United Nations, the French, British and Belgian delegations joined forces in an attempt to expose some of the inherent contradictions in UN policy towards dependent populations, and to make the case that subject populations living in independent territories often endured worse conditions than those living in formal overseas empires.     

The construction of a "population problem" in colonial India, 1919-1947

This article examines the construction of a "population problem" among public health officials in India during the inter-war period. British colonial officials came to focus on India's population through their concern with high Indian infant and maternal mortality rates. They raised the problem of population as one way in which to highlight the importance of dealing with public health at an all-India basis, in a context of constitutional devolution of power to Indians where they feared such matters would be relegated to relative local unimportance. While they failed to significantly shape government policy, their arguments in support of India's 'population problem' nevertheless found a receptive audience in the colonial public sphere among Indian intellectuals, economists, eugenicists, women social reformers and birth controllers. The article contributes to the history of population control by situating its pre-history in British colonial public health and development policy and outside the logic of USA's Cold War strategic planning for Asia.     

Averting ‘Irresponsible Nationalism’

ABSTRACT

Historians of politics in colonial Fiji highlight the contrast between Indian leaders' challenge to European dominance and Fijian chiefs' alignment with European political leaders in defence of colonial rule and against a perceived ‘Indian threat’. While this was the major political divide, its emphasis has neglected a moment of disaffection on the part of the leading chiefs that perhaps had the potential to provoke a challenge to the colonial order. The upset of the established pattern of political relations between Fijian leaders and the colonial government on the eve of the Pacific War, involving some unity with Indian leaders in the Legislative Council, influenced a Fijian policy change that shaped the development of Indigenous Fijian leadership and its quest for state power as British rule drew to an end. This paper suggests that Ratu Sukuna's Fijian Administration, established at the end of the war, be understood not simply as the last, and paradoxically the strongest, stage of colonial indirect rule, but more significantly as both an institutionalised expression and containment of a Fijian nationalist potential, initially energised by a tension in government – Fijian relations that, in part, reflected a white racialism in both official and unofficial attitudes and practices.     

Colonial Rule,Cultural Relations and the British Council in Cyprus, 1935–55

ABSTRACT

This article offers an examination of the British Council’s early stages of expansion in Cyprus under British rule, from 1935 to 1955, before the start of the Greek Cypriot anti-colonial struggle (1955–59). It argues that the British Council’s development and quality of activities in the British colony were affected by various factors such as the peculiar political difficulties encountered in the island due to the rise of Greek nationalism and the growing influence of the Church of Cyprus over the local public; the mismanagement of the local British Institutes by some of the Council’s representatives; and the financial stringencies hindering the Council’s ambitions. Through the investigation of primary material, accessed at the Cyprus State Archive in Nicosia (Cyprus) and at the National Archives in London (UK), the article traces and critically analyses for the first time the Council’s early steps in colonial cultural policy-making, using Cyprus as a case study. During the 20-year period under examination, British experiments in culture attempted to attract the Cypriots’ interest and convince them of the importance of the British connection. The British and colonial governments envisaged that through cultural influence they could safeguard the consent of the governed. In this way, British presence in Cyprus could be retained and Britain would be able to protect its strategic, political and economic interests in the region. However, research reveals that the Council’s efforts in the colony were more often than not misguided, its activities proving ineffective, its hopes misplaced. Although the aspiration was that the British Council should be a powerful instrument of Britain’s foreign policy in the colonies, this article shows that in Cyprus it had a tumultuous childhood. Caught up in the realities of the Second World War, the rise of nationalism, the thread of communism, and amid the climate of Cold War, the British Empire was coming at an end, while the British Council was fighting to survive.     

The Sultan's Domain: British Cyprus' Role in the Redefinition of Property Regimes in the Post-Ottoman Levant

This article argues that property law is the main means through which Britain built its imperial sovereignty on Cyprus and in the post-Ottoman Levant. It charts the development of an official British expertise in Ottoman land legislation following the so-called affair of the Sultan's claims to properties in Cyprus. To settle this matter in the island which they had obtained to ‘occupy’ and ‘administer’ through a treaty with the Sublime Porte, colonial authorities were compelled to become conversant with the 1858 Ottoman Land Code. Hence, the article argues that because of its ambiguous status – a province occupied and administered by Britain but under the nominal suzerainty of the Sultan from 1878 to 1914 – Cyprus, as the first Ottoman territory to pass under direct Western rule, played a decisive role in the elaboration of a colonial knowledge in Ottoman land laws. And this, despite long-standing economic and political ties between Britain and the Ottoman Empire and exposure to other settings where layered land tenure systems prevailed. Published in treatises authored by British administrators of Cyprus, the legal expertise in Ottoman land law thus acquired was then transposed to other territories which passed under British rule, such as Palestine.     

‘L’île des bannis’: Jersey,Britain and the French Emigration 1789–1815

ABSTRACT

The case of the Channel Island of Jersey is an important yet understudied part of the British Empire’s response to the French Emigration 1789–1815. During its high point in 1792–3, the émigré population in and around Jersey’s main town of St Helier was as large as that in London and one of the European centres of political migration. This article explores the complicated relationship between Jersey’s political institutions, the British military authorities in London, the British government and the émigré community. It shows how a brewing humanitarian crisis in the island prompted the British government to sanction subsistence payments in Jersey and enlist Royalist émigrés months before these policies were adopted in Britain. But British support was intimately bound up with the émigrés’ anti-Revolutionary military activities, as much as humanitarian concerns. The forced expulsion of most émigrés to Britain in summer 1796 resulted not from concerns about the wellbeing of the émigré community in face of imminent French invasion, but concerns about the Royalists’ military loyalties. During the Napoleonic Wars, British policy towards the émigrés lacked coherence and was not categorized by overriding humanitarian goals, though such concerns did compete with strategic ones.     

Catholic Relief and the Political Awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia, 1780–1830

Over the course of the eighteenth and early-to-mid-nineteenth centuries the Irish, who moved throughout the British Empire, helped to build the social, political and economic structures that would enable the success of countless colonial settlements. They were merchants, traders, fishers and labourers, and a significant proportion of them were Catholic. While many would go on to play pivotal roles in the development of Catholicism in the colonies, the Irish were not alone and often joined or were joined by other Catholic groups such as the French, Spanish and Scottish Highlanders. That the Irish achieved greater political and economic success, though, had a knock-on effect for the other Catholic groups could then use the foundation that the Irish established for their own progress and development. This article considers the place of Catholics on Britain’s expanding colonial landscapes by examining the political awakening of Irish Catholics in Nova Scotia and Cape Breton Island, two of Britain’s north Atlantic colonies, between 1780 and 1830. These two colonies, like many others, witnessed the growth of an Irish Catholic laity that was ambitious, pragmatic and adept at using the political structures available to reframe their legal status. The election of Laurence Kavanagh, a second-generation Irish Catholic merchant from a tiny fishing outpost on Cape Breton Island, to Nova Scotia’s legislative assembly in 1820, is offered as an example of how this process actually worked on the ground and opens up a broader discussion about the importance of minority populations like Catholics to Britain’s imperial programme.     

'Unwitting Assets?': British Intellectuals and the Congress for Cultural Freedom

The purpose of this article is to document the activities, inBritain during the 1950s, of the Congress for Cultural Freedom(CCF), a body of anti-communist intellectuals based in Pariswhich received covert subsidies from the Central IntelligenceAgency. Although initially unpopular in Britain, the CCF eventuallywon significant support among the country's literary, political,and academic intellectuals, including most notably the youngLabour politicians known as the Gaitskellites. While suggestingthat the influence of the CCF, and therefore of the CIA, oncold war Britain was greater than has previously been supposed,the article also shows how the behaviour of British intellectualsoften confounded and frustrated the intentions of their secretiveAmerican patrons. ^* I am grateful to Brandon High, David Martin, Jasper Ridley,and Frances Stonor Saunders for their comments on earlier draftsof this article, the research for which was funded in part byMiddlesex University and the Fulbright Commission.     

Nationalism or ‘Tribalism’: The Evolution of Cape Afrikaner Ethnic Consciousness in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract. This article seeks to explore the evolution of the ethnic consciousness of the Afrikaners in the Cape Colony at an initial and crucial stage. The colonial Cape Afrikaners are treated as a core community, distinguished from Afrikaner communities in other states in South Africa. It is argued that their collective consciousness was shaped primarily by their core colonial experience rather than by their ethnocultural commonality with the other diaspora Afrikaner communities. Having been socialised into the British colonial state, they have evolved a collective consciousness premised on neither ethnic self-determination nor ethnic exclusiveness. Correspondingly, their political outlook incorporated both British imperialism and Cape white multi-culturalism. They were mobilised ethnically to secure their share in the spoils of the British colonial state rather than to attain ethno-nationalist goals.     

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。     

The Heath Government and British Defence Policy in Southeast Asia at the End of Empire (1970-71)

This article examines the rationale behind the Heath government's1970 decision to negotiate a Five Power Defence agreement withAustralia, New Zealand, Singapore and Malaysia and to maintaina small British military contingent in Southeast Asia as a partof this new politico-military framework. It argues that whileits overriding foreign policy concern was to end Britain's problematicrelationship with the European Economic Community and to makemembership of this grouping the cornerstone of its foreign policy,the Heath government was careful not to cast Britain's post-imperialfuture in purely European terms. The successful negotiationof the Five Power Defence Arrangements in 1970–71 wasinstrumental in achieving this by ensuring that London wouldmaintain close links with key Commonwealth partners in the Asianregion. In what was not only an attempt to neutralize potentialdomestic opposition to Britain's entry into the EEC, but alsoa lingering reluctance to do away with the rhetoric of Britainas a leading power with extra-European interests, Heath waseager to show that by making a contribution to the stabilityof Southeast Asia, Britain still had a role to play outsideEurope.     

Imagining an Imperial Modernity: Universities and the West African Roots of Colonial Development

This article takes the formation and work of the ‘Elliot’ Commission on Higher Education in West Africa (1943–45) to reconsider the roots of British colonial development. Late colonial universities were major development projects, although they have rarely been considered as such. Focusing particularly on the Nigerian experience and the controversy over Yaba Higher College (founded 1934), the article contends that late colonial plans for universities were not produced in Britain and then exported to West African colonies. Rather, they were formed through interactions between agendas and ideas with roots in West Africa, Britain and elsewhere. These debates exhibited asymmetries of power but produced some consensus about university development. African and British actors conceptualised modern education by combining their local concerns with a variety of supra-local geographical frames for development, which included the British Empire and the individual colony. The British Empire did not in this case forestall development, but shaped the ways in which development was conceived.     

India’s Part in the Politics of Fiji’s Decolonization: From ‘Outworn Slogans’ to ‘Pragmatism and Realism’

United Nations (UN) demands for the unconditional ending of colonial rule troubled British officials confronted by local political difficulties impeding their efforts to establish self-government for Fiji, alarmed Indigenous Fijian leaders who initially resisted that reform, and encouraged the polarizing demand by Indo-Fijian leaders for a common franchise. India was initially at the forefront in maintaining UN pressure on Britain to move Fiji rapidly to independence with this franchise. Yet in the last two years of British rule, as ethnic tension in Fiji rose dangerously, India assumed the lead in urging moderation at the UN. India’s volte-face from antagonist to ally of the British helped open the way to the political accord on which Fiji’s independence constitution was based. The article highlights the major part played by the pre-eminent Indigenous leader Ratu Kamisese Mara in winning India’s support for a cautious approach to reform.