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。     

Citizens of Empire: Education and Teacher Exchanges in Canada and the Commonwealth, 1910–40

This article examines how one group of actors actively infused education, citizenship and Canada’s international relationships with a sense of empire in the first third of the twentieth century. Making use of archival and published sources from collections in Canada and Britain, it focuses in particular on imperial citizenship teaching in Canadian schools, a number of education conferences held in the United Kingdom and the exchanges of elementary and high school teachers and school inspectors between commonwealth countries. In this period, politicians and bureaucrats in Canada and other dominions actively connected their education systems to an imperial network at the very moment that others were striving to attain more economic and political autonomy from the British government. Education came to occupy a significant cultural space alongside the trade agreements and constitutional changes that slowly recalibrated the nature of the British imperial system in the interwar period. Imperial education projects were an important feature of the cultural politics of a fading empire, but they were driven by actors in both the imperial centre and the self-governing dominions. This article argues that between 1910 and 1940 teachers and politicians in Canada drew on an international support network, actively fostered new ideas of citizenship, and strove to assert the country’s belonging in the British Empire.     

Memorial gardens as dramaturgical space

Abstract

Since the end of the First World War British and Allied military cemeteries and memorial sites have been designed within a carefully controlled Imperial aesthetic. The emotional and historical capital of these sites has made objective judgement difficult; the burden of martial memory has made innovation in design almost impossible. This paper examines how the Dominion forces – notably Canada – achieved a distinct nationalism in their war memorials after the Great War. By focussing on two recent Canadian memorial sites – in London and France – the paper speculates on the ways in which artistic and military precedent informs the construction of monuments of conflict. The study concludes by looking at the recent public enthusiasm for floral and other temporary memorials which have challenged the rhetoric of official mourning.     

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.     

‘Masters in Their Own House’: Britain,the Dominions and the 1946 Ex-Service Free Passage Scheme

The dominant narrative of post-1945 British migration is that of the ‘ten pound poms’: British civilians who availed themselves of the system of subsidised migration and emigrated to Australia for the bargain price of £10, with the rest of the cost of passage being split between the British and Australian governments. It is little wonder that historians have tended to focus on this scheme, as between 1947 and 1972 around one million Britons used it to resettle in Australia.¹1. Constantine, ‘Waving Goodbye?’, 193. However, concealed within huge movement of people is a much smaller, but nonetheless important, migrant stream: the free passage scheme, a program which was open to veterans of the British forces and the Merchant Navy, under which almost 50,000 people settled in Australia. It operated only between 1946 and 1955 and was designed as a part of the package of benefits offered to all British veterans of the Second World War. The research on which this article is based, which was funded by the Scottish Centre for Diaspora Studies at the University of Edinburgh and headed up by Professor Sir Tom Devine, aimed to investigate the background and implementation of the 1946 free passage agreement. The project revealed significant differences between the 1946 scheme and its post-First World War equivalent. The British government's attitude towards the concept of empire migration had shifted from support to reluctance, as post-1945 planners worried about a shrinking British population and potential economic competition from the dominions. At the same time, the dominions were determined to prioritise their own reconstruction programmes, rather than assist Britain in resettling its veterans. Only Australia agreed to take British ex-service personnel, but as part of a much wider immigration plan designed to boost the Australia population and economy.     

Between Vanity and Sensitiveness: Indo–British Relations During Vijayalakshmi Pandit’s High-Commissionership (1954–61)

Studies of Indo–British relations in the 1950s have been usually dominated by the personalities of Jawaharlal Nehru and, after him, VK Krishna Menon. This article instead focuses on Vijayalakshmi Pandit and her tenure as India’s High-Commissioner in London. Pandit came to London having served as Nehru’s envoy to the Soviet Union, the USA and the United Nations. Based on government records and private papers in India, Britain and America, this article shows that her time in London offers insights into the wider context of changes in Indo–British relations and presents her High-Commissionership as a microcosm of the inter-governmental relations.     

Walking the Thin Line: India's Anti-Racist Diplomatic Practice in South Africa,Canada, and Australia, 1946–55

Historians of India's foreign policy have often failed to see beyond the ‘Great man’ Jawaharlal Nehru. This Nehru-centric vision is not only misleading, but also unfair to Nehru. Here, we seek to take the gaze off Nehru and New Delhi so as to view Indian foreign policy from different locations. We examine the ways in which India's diplomats in Australia, Canada, and South Africa resisted racial discrimination. India's anti-racist diplomacy has most often been viewed as pointless moralistic ranting: the domain of the ‘hypersensitive, emotional’ Indian. We argue, however, based on largely unexamined archival material and an emphasis on the practice of Indian diplomacy, that India's diplomats in these bastions of settler-colonial racism were tactful, strategic, and effective in challenging racist, colonial practices and bringing an anti-racist discourse to international politics. Nehruvian foreign-policy discourse, and its goal of an anti-racist world order, then, was tempered by its diplomatic practices. In particular, this occurred outside of New Delhi in places where India's hopes for productive international relationships clashed with its Nehruvian worldview.     

二元型殖民地与非殖民化

二元型殖民地是殖民化中形成的三种主要类型的殖民地之一.英国的非殖民化经历了四个阶段.非殖民化对二元型殖民地产生了独特的影响,集中体现在非殖民化的冲击与产生正面效果之间存有一个明显的时间差,实行多种族统治的新国家较多地保留了原有的政治、经济制度.这些特征将继续推动或制约这类殖民地形成的国家的未来发展.     

A ‘New’ Commonwealth for Britain? Negotiating Ghana's Pan-African and Asian Connections at the End of Empire (1951–8)

This article examines to what extent Nkrumah's Pan-African ambitions and Asian connections altered the meaning of the ‘new’ Commonwealth for British policy-makers. It discusses India's influence on British political options in the Gold Coast during the negotiations for independence and Commonwealth membership and assesses the impact of Ghana's Pan-Africanism on two major facets of Commonwealth politics: Britain's ability to balance its relations with the Commonwealth and France, the other main European actor in Africa; and Britain's capacity to maintain the idea of a common heritage, which Pan-African projects like the Ghana–Guinea Union threatened to disrupt.