‘The Danger is Two-Fold’: Decolonisation and Cold War in Anti-Communist Asia, 1955–7

This article examines the intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation in anti-Communist Asia in the 1950s. Drawing on the papers of former South Korean President Syngman Rhee housed at Yonsei University, the article explores both the motivations behind as well as the constraints upon South Korea's efforts to cultivate a military alliance in what it called ‘Free Asia’. Articulating some of the concrete political differences between South Korea and its potential partners in Asia, the article argues that Rhee's hardline views of the Cold War were interwoven with his ambivalence about Japan's reintegration in the post-war world. As a result of this intersection between the Cold War and decolonisation, the South Korean President was unable to achieve consensus with the rest of anti-Communist Asia. In exploring this chapter of South Korean diplomacy, the article calls on Cold War diplomatic history to integrate non-Communist Asia and for the historiography of decolonisation to investigate the legacies of Japan's empire in post-war Asia. It also suggests that scholars ought to reflect more deeply on the interrelationship between the Cold War and decolonisation.     

Allies at the End of Empire—Loyalists,Nationalists and the Cold War, 1945–76

ABSTRACT

The wars of decolonization fought by European colonial powers after 1945 had their origins in the fraught history of imperial domination, but were framed and shaped by the emerging politics of the Cold War. Militia recruited from amongst the local population was a common feature in all the counter-insurgencies mounted against armed nationalist risings in this period. Styled here as ‘loyalists’, these militia fought against nationalists. Loyalist histories have often been obscured by nationalist narratives, but their experience was varied and illuminates the deeper ambiguities of the decolonization story, some loyalists being subjected to vengeful violence at liberation, others actually claiming the victory for themselves and seizing control of the emergent state, while others still maintained a role as fighting units into the Cold War. This introductory essay discusses the categorization of these ‘irregular auxiliary’ forces that constituted the armed element of loyalism after 1945, and introduces seven case studies from five European colonialisms—Portugal (Angola), the Netherlands (Indonesia), France (Algeria), Belgium (Congo) and Britain (Cyprus, Kenya and southern Arabia).     

Economic Protectorate in Britain’s Informal Empire: The Trucial Coast during the Second World War

This article examines the economic and political impact of the Second World War upon a small outpost of Britain’s informal empire. It analyses the multiple ways in which the economy, trade and governance of the Trucial Coast were disrupted, disturbed and challenged by the exceptional circumstances of the war. In response to these circumstances, a variety of emergency arrangements were introduced, resulting in an unprecedented degree of involvement of outsiders and foreign agencies in the management of the local economy. The transformation of Britain’s traditional policy of non-interference in the internal affairs of the Trucial Coast is traced back to the exigencies of wartime conditions.     

Fiction and memoir of Britain’s Great War: disillusioned or disparate?

Historical and literary critical orthodoxies hold that unfavourable British literary responses to the First World War did not materialise until Journey’s End and the war-books controversy of 1930. What appears to have happened is that an initial and largely factitious 1930 newspaper controversy has been conflated artificially with artefacts of popular culture from the 1960s to create a linear historical narrative of popular misrepresentation. A review of war fiction and memoir in English published prior to 1929 shows this narrative to be entirely unhistorical: considerable numbers of unfavourable responses to the First World War exist in British writing from this earlier period. The argument that there was a spell of post-war optimism before the general public changed its mind in 1929 is impossible to sustain. There never was a unitary British narrative of the First World War, and if the general perception of it by the British people since 1929 has been negative, the explanation does not lie in Depression-era war books but in whatever caused readers and reviewers of the time to respond favourably to individual accounts of the war rather than to a patriotic gloss.     

Critical Masses: Augmented Virtual Experiences and the Xenoplastic at Australia’s Cold War and Nuclear Heritage Sites

Critical Masses is a multidisciplinary pilot project that aims to graphically represent and mediate the histories, spaces and narratives concerning former nuclear installations within central Australia. These include the abandoned British atomic test sites at Emu Field and Maralinga, the Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM)/Intermediate Range Ballistic Missile (IRBM) rocket launchers at Woomera, and the decommissioned US National Security Agency early warning satellite base at Nurrungar. Significantly, each of these Cold War sites are situated in either hazardous, remote, secure and/or culturally sensitive areas and require sophisticated analysis and negotiation in order to best render their complexity for both online access and on-site tourism. In association with the Maralinga-Pilling Trust and traditional indigenous landowners a multi-tiered approach (re)creating these locations is being modelled across platforms for diverse audiences. Digital materials are being authored and designed for stand-alone DVD, online interactive sites and archives, an immersive/simulated space for interpretation centres, and augmented/enhanced reality interfaces via GPS and mobile/handheld devices used in situ at key sites.     

Lancashire's ‘War’ with Australia: Rethinking Anglo-Australian Trade and the Cultural Economy of Empire, 1934–36

Following the recent cultural turn in economic history, this article resurrects a neglected imperial trade war between Lancashire and Australia to explore the nature of the cultural economy of the British Empire in the interwar period. New work has emphasised the importance of Britishness as the basis for co-ethnic networks that helped underwrite imperial expansion through the nineteenth century. However, this welcome new focus on culture’s significance for economics has, curiously, tended to obscure its dynamic interaction with the economy. Economic activity did not simply benefit from culture, as concepts like co-ethnicity suggest, but also helped to produce that culture. As result, the meanings of Britishness mobilised by trade were never stable, even in the heart of empire itself. This article focuses on a boycott of Australian produce started by grocers in Lancashire cotton towns in 1934, in response to new Australian tariffs on imported cotton goods. Tracing the cultural meanings constructed from the very first planting of cotton in Australia, through to the boycott and its aftermath, exemplifies the dynamic and contingent nature of Britishness generated through trade.