Empire and Beyond: The Pursuit of Overseas National Interests in the Late Twentieth Century

Abstract

‘IMPERIALISM is no word for scholars’, imperial historian Sir Keith Hancock is reported to have said.1 He was thinking of the pitfalls of definition; the problem with terms such as ‘imperialism’, ‘decolonisation’ and ‘informal empire’ is that their definitions can become so elastic that they cease to define.2 One might well echo Hancock's sentiment today, because the search for the end of ‘the British empire’ during the ‘decolonisation period’ has led to an artificial division of the post-Second World War years into a period of ‘declining empire’ and one of ‘post-empire’, in which the links between the two have been very poorly conceptualised. This division has distorted our reading of the decades following 1945 and has deflected attention from the many continuities in Britain's relations with the wider world by giving empire, and more especially the loss of it, too great a prominence in British and world affairs. The alternative interpretation outlined here plays down the importance of decolonisation and emphasises the hardy survival of Britain as an international player that never ceased to seek a global role and that retained manifold international interests and responsibilities, together with the political and security capabilities necessary to support them.3 This interpretation de-emphasises the common, even hackneyed, picture of a sudden shift from empire to post-empire in the 1960s, a shift that in reality never fully took place, and thus challenges the ‘now you see it, now you don’t’ view of empire that struggles to capture the more complex reality of Britain's world role in the last half century.