Hanging on to the Imperial Past

Abstract

As we have seen in the previous two chapters, the reality of the end of the formal empire was becoming increasingly clear through the 1960s as one colony after another became an independent state. Despite what this could mean for Britain’s international power, position and relationships with other states, the ending of empire was widely supported among the British left from the Labour Party through to the communist party and beyond.1 There were long-standing strains of anti-imperialism across the British left that formed a unifying basis for CND, the AAM, the NUS and the NICR movement. Each of these groups, and the movements around them, were emphatically and vocally opposed to empire. But what exactly empire meant was not simple. It depended on perspective and changed over time. What CND, the AAM, the NUS and NICR activists objected to was the inequality of empire. The term ‘empire’ had become associated with ‘militarism, despotism, and domination’, ensuring its unpopularity both during and after the Second World War.2 But there was some attempt to rehabilitate the empire in the aftermath of the Second World War. As Wendy Webster has argued, during and immediately after the war the popular understanding of empire was that of a ‘people’s empire’, which carried on from the ‘people’s war’. This showed the British Empire in a positive light, unified while racially and culturally diverse.