Abstract
This article seeks to intervene in the debate over the legacy of the British Empire, using the British Union of Fascists (BUF) as a case-study. It will argue that, during the interwar period, the BUF drew heavily on earlier constructions of racialized imperial masculinity in building their ‘new fascist man’. The BUF stand out in the period following the First World War, where hegemonic constructions of British masculinity were altogether more domesticated. At the same time, colonial policymakers were increasingly relying on concessions, rather than force, to outmanoeuvre nationalists out in the Empire. For the BUF, this all smacked of effeminacy and they responded with a ‘new man’ based on the masculine values of the idealized imperial frontier. By transplanting these values from colony to metropole, they hoped to achieve their fascist rebirth of Britain and its Empire. This article charts the BUF’s construction of this imperial ‘new fascist man’ out the legacy of earlier imperialists, the canon of stories of imperial heroism, and the gendered hierarchies of colonial racism.
Highlights
The debate over the legacy of the British Empire, over the degree to which the domestic British nation was affected by the Empire and over what effect the Empire had on British racial thinking, remains
Heroic high imperialism persisted; as George Orwell noted in 1940, in boys’ weeklies it was mentally still 1910 and ‘at the outposts of Empire the monocled Englishmen are holding the niggers at bay.’[18]. But in the world of politics, the rough-and-ready Kiplingesque imperialism of the late Victorian and Edwardian period had its second life in interwar British fascism
Drawing deeply on the imperial discourse of the mid-to-late nineteenth century and the right-wing radicalism of the Edwardian period, the British Union of Fascists built their ideology out of the past and present of the British Empire, and conceived of their hoped-for future in its image. For their new fascist man, they drew on imperial constructions of the ‘White Man’ as a symbol of the mythic power to re-make the world through will alone
Summary
Founded in 1932 by Sir Oswald Mosley, the buf was not Britain’s first fascist movement but was its largest in terms of membership and public profile. Alison Light has argued that following the First World War there was ‘move away from formerly heroic and officially masculine public rhetorics of national identity’ to ‘an Englishness at once less imperial and more inward-looking, more domestic and more private – and, in terms of pre-war standards, more “feminine”.’11 Interwar Britishness was construed less in the image of the imperial adventurer and more in terms of ‘“the little man”, the suburban husband pottering in his herbaceous borders.’[12] This wider cultural mood was embodied in politics by Stanley Baldwin, Conservative Party leader from 1923 to 1937 and Prime Minister at various times during the 1920s and 1930s. In the world of politics, the rough-and-ready Kiplingesque imperialism of the late Victorian and Edwardian period had its second life in interwar British fascism
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