British Decolonization Research Articles

A Front for ‘Humanity’ Greek and Greek Cypriot Orthodox Advocates Between Anti-colonialism, Self-determination and Enosis (1950–1960)

During the 1950s, the Greek Cypriot Archbishop Makarios was the first to associate political claims for the annexation of Cyprus to Greece (Enosis) with the international anti-colonial claims for self-determination. Makarios alleged that British authorities had violated human rights and pressurised the Greek government to back the Cypriot population. As soon as armed conflict broke out in 1955, Greek Orthodox prelates and civil society actors, led by Makarios, launched an international ‘illumination campaign’ to expose the British authorities. This article investigates the Greek-based human rights activism arising from within the Greek and Greek Cypriot Orthodox Church, with the parallel support of right-wing civil society advocates. It therefore aims to shed new light on British decolonisation through the lens of religious humanitarian networks that spread in the Global South, international church forums and international humanitarian organisations. The study contends that these advocates put forward their own irredentist version of a ‘conservative human rights revolution’. Moreover, the article shows how Greek humanitarian and child welfare organisations borrowed nationalist arguments from these activists. Ultimately, ecclesiastical lobbying for human rights impacted the outcome of Cyprus’ decolonisation, inheriting ethno-nationalist arguments against federalisation since the establishment of the Republic of Cyprus in August 1960.

Contesting an Elastic Constitution: British Nationality and Protection in the Mandates

Current studies of British citizenship and nationality neglect the development of legal frameworks prior to the Second World War. A growing body of literature, invigorated by the 2017 Windrush scandal, charts the collapse of imperial citizenship as a dimension of British decolonisation from the 1960s onwards. In contrast, this article analyses how the British empire’s framework of national belonging became strained during the early 1920s, as Dominion leaders increasingly asserted their own sense of statehood and the League of Nations mandates system introduced new forms of imperial rule. The article considers General Jan Smuts’ decision to afford British naturalisation to 7,000 German colonists residing in the mandate of South-West Africa. League officials argued that Smuts’ scheme undermined the anti-annexationist ‘spirit’ of the Covenant, because mass naturalisation represented a practical declaration of South African sovereignty in the mandate. Meanwhile, British mandarins in the Home, Colonial, and Foreign Offices believed Smuts’ policy would destabilise the empire’s constitutional distinctions between territorial zones of formal and informal imperial governance. They also feared it would inspire subaltern inhabitants of other British-protected foreign spaces, especially mandatory Palestine and the Indian princely states, to similarly demand naturalisation in order to claim stronger legal rights for themselves as British subjects. Ultimately, Smuts leveraged his political stature to secure British and League consent for his plan. To maintain a façade of constitutional coherence and metropolitan control, Whitehall mandarins recast Smuts’ naturalisation scheme as an imperial anomaly. Non-European inhabitants of the British mandates, and the wider informal empire, were granted the uncodified, indeterminate status of ‘British Protected Persons’ (BPPs). Recent scholarship has recognised BPP status as a form of de facto statelessness. Inter-war policymakers in the Home and Colonial Offices drew similar parallels, this article shows.

‘Why does Africa matter and what should be our aim?’ British Foreign Policy, the Commonwealth, and the 1965 East and Central African Heads of Missions Meeting

This article explores British decolonisation through the lens of the first meeting of Britain’s Heads of Missions (Ambassadors and High Commissioners) in East and Central Africa in May 1965. The meeting gives a unique insight into the thoughts and ambitions of a select group of senior diplomats as they offered their ideas of what policy should be and assessed Britain’s historical and contemporary relationship with Africa. Mid-1965 was a moment when multiple, if limited, options were available as the British government sought to reconfigure relationships and preserve influence in former colonies. The meeting is significant in a number of ways. Firstly, the meeting was an expression of power relations between different government departments in Whitehall, with the Commonwealth Relations Office valuing Africa more than the powerful Foreign Office; secondly, it reinforced the diplomats’ sense of their position as supposed ‘experts’ on Africa, more advanced and rational than the Africans with whom they worked; thirdly, it revealed official beliefs that Britain was the more powerful partner in relationships with Africa, able to exert influence though ongoing bilateral relationships and the Commonwealth.

‘In the Mutual Interest’: The Making and Breaking of the United Kingdom-Ceylon Defence Agreement, 1947–1957

ABSTRACT Historians have lavished enormous attention on British decolonisation but Britain’s post-imperial military relationships with its former colonies have too often been overlooked. The 1947 United Kingdom-Ceylon Defence Agreement established as a condition of the island’s independence was the first such military arrangement. Crucially, this agreement was vaguely conceived to serve ‘in the mutual interest’ of both states. Yet this article demonstrates that negotiations to implement the United Kingdom-Ceylon Defence Agreement produced deep rifts between London and Colombo. Both Labour and Conservative governments viewed Ceylon as vital to the defence of the Empire-Commonwealth in the Cold War due to its geostrategic position. Britain thus had to retain access to its bases on the island. Still, Britain’s financial constraints and global military commitments forced London to press Ceylon to contribute more to Commonwealth defence. In contrast, Ceylon’s first three prime ministers desired a British military presence to provide a cheap deterrent to an apparently imminent Indian invasion. Nevertheless, Colombo also sought to dispel claims the Defence Agreement derogated Ceylon’s sovereignty. By 1956, therefore, the election of a Sinhalese nationalist government in Ceylon and Britain’s Suez fiasco confirmed the Defence Agreement no longer served ‘in the mutual interest’ and it was swiftly terminated.

Internationalising Arts, Gaining Visibility: Internationalisation of the National Art Gallery through the Promulgation of the Malayan Identity and Commonwealth Ideals

AbstractThe early history of the Malaysian National Art Gallery has been thoroughly elucidated through many different sources but its role as promoter of Malaysia’s art in the first ten years of its early formation have never been critically examined. This paper will trace the transnational relationship of the National Art Gallery through its exhibitions co-organised with the Commonwealth Institute in London within the larger context of the post-World War II period and the British decolonisation in Malaya. This paper will situate and contextualise its research on Malaya’s early exhibition history on multiculturalism and the Malayan identity framework, and later draw the link and connection between the Commonwealth Institute and the context of its establishment in Britain and the establishment of the National Art Gallery in Malaya. Subsequently, this paper will trace and demonstrate the importance of these early exhibitions to be understood in the larger context of (a) the need to exert international visibility during the period of Confrontation and (b) the exhibition as a platform that mooted the Malayan identity that aligns with the core values and principles of the Commonwealth. As such, this paper demonstrates that the transnational relations between the National Art Gallery and the Commonwealth Institute in the realm of Malaysia’s exhibition history must be analysed in tandem with the issues that are faced by a new British Commonwealth country, i.e., Malaysia during the immediate post-war period.

The Labour Government and Decolonisation in British West Africa (1945-51)

The present research paper attempts to examine the attitude of the Labour Government 1945-51 towards the process of decolonisation in British West Africa and whether the party, with its socialist agenda, was able to initiate any new course different from that of the capitalist, imperialist Conservatives. To inquire into this, the paper sheds light on the colonial policies adopted by the Labour Party before 1945 and after to show how far the Party’s actions once in office were consistent with its resolutions once in opposition. Previous historical research on British decolonisation dating back to the late 1950s presented the Party as playing a major role in unscrambling the empire and assigned it a positive role in Africa. However, the chief limitation of this historiographical genre is its lack of objectivity as it did not make use of primary sources. Relying on some archival sources and adopting an analytical approach, this study argues that the Labour government of 1945-51 did not mark a new move towards decolonisation in West Africa. Contrary to what has often been assumed, the Party’s approach to colonial questions was not different from that of the Conservative Party. Labour adhered to the political, economic, social and ideological constituents that defined the culture of imperialism. Its colonial policy was neither innovative nor did it involve any revolutionary break with the past official colonial policy. A major influential factor had been British national self-interest.

Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligence, An Intelligence Empire

Gale, a Cengage company, introduces many previously classified documents from The U.K. National Archives in their digital collection Declassified Documents Online: Twentieth-Century British Intelligences: an Intelligence Empire. The archive provides over 500,000 pages of declassified UK government documents on activities pertinent to British intelligence, decolonization, and security policies from 1905 to 2002. Sourced from five government departments, these unique primary source materials support research in twentieth century history, politics, and international relations by highlighting British operations in a time of global conflicts and shifting alliances.

Decolonization, Foreign Aid and Post-Independence Nigerian Underdevelopment

Aside meeting Nigerian nationalist needs more than before, the decolonization period was also characterized by the intensification of the economic exploitative use of Nigeria as a colony, particularly during the Second World War. The government pursued the maximum utilization of Nigeria’s economic resources through highly rigid policies such as forced labour and drastic lowering of producer prices in order to boost production of Nigerian product such as rubber, palm oil, tin and groundnuts, which were strategic to Britain’s war effort. The government disrupted the internal marketing systems and introduced state controlled marketing of Nigeria agricultural exports. The colonial educational system was structured to produce clerks but not economically productive skilled personnel who can create wealth. This paper contend that just as colonial Nigerian society was unequal (privileged British colonists and poor Nigeria subjects), Nigeria currently suffers from inequality within the contemporary globalized international economic system mainly due to the British-imposed colonial economic model of primary products exports as the cornerstone of Nigeria’s national economy during the decades preceding independence. Instead of initiating policies that would jump-start Nigerian industrialization, the British colonial policy of dependence on primary products laid the foundation for post-independence Nigeria’s underdevelopment. Nigeria’s current crisis of development is further aggravated by decades of ineffective foreign development aid mainly because such aids are largely not negotiated but dictated, and managed by officials of the international or multilateral aid agencies who do not have adequate understanding of Nigerian development needs and circumstances. Such aids, in most cases, thus result in a worsening economy characterized by increasing unemployment, spiral inflation, hitches in the productive mechanism, and widening income inequality. This paper explores the role of British decolonization process, and foreign aid in post-independence Nigerian underdevelopment. The study concludes that home-grown approaches anchored upon good governance, effective utilization of resources, probity and accountability are crucial to Nigeria’s recovering from its current condition of underdevelopment. It adopts the historical analytical method.

Colonialism and Compromise: The Shanghai Municipal Police and the Arrest of Communists, 1927–37

AbstractThe Shanghai Municipal Council (SMC), which was mainly controlled by British residents in the treaty port of Shanghai, and protected by the British Foreign Office, came under serious challenge from the Guomindang (GMD) (the rising Nationalist Party of China) from 1927 onwards. The Shanghai Municipal Police (SMP)—an imperial police force with powers to arrest, prosecute and detain—was forced to collaborate with the GMD, and practice unlawful arrest, extradition and re-indoctrination of Communist suspects and convicts. This resulted in the erosion of state powers and the management of prisons. This article argues that the dismantling of British colonialism began to take place in Shanghai during the inter-war period at the expense of some English legal conventions, as demonstrated by SMP violations of existing legal practices and humanitarian commitments. Second, it also suggests that English judicial conventions had an unintended impact on some Chinese civilians, who were keen to safeguard their rights during their detention and trial in and beyond the Shanghai Legation. This article, therefore, offers a new periodisation of British decolonisation and a re-examination of colonial legacy in East Asia.

Decolonising the master’s house: how Black Feminist epistemologies can be and are used in decolonial strategy

ABSTRACT Understanding Black Feminist thinking and decolonial strategy as intimately connected, this paper argues that the foregrounding of Black Feminist epistemology is crucial in the decolonisation of university curricula. Focusing specifically on British undergraduate law curricula this paper argues that Black British Feminist modes of thought could produce effective and long-lasting change in the way that we teach and learn about law, that could bring an end to colonial continuities. The first two sections of this paper explain what exactly is meant by “decolonisation”, “Black Feminist epistemology” and “Black British Feminism”, while the last two sections look at how a Black British Feminist decolonisation of legal curricula could take place.

Judicial Committee of the Privy Council: The Persistence of a British Colonial Institution

Following the British decolonization process, the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council (JCPC) continued as the final appellate court for many new states. Originally designed as a colonial court, the JCPC, therefore, continues to influence independent states. This testifies to the persistence of British colonial influence in the jurisprudence of former colonies. This research on the JCPC provides evidence colonial influences persist beyond the ceremonial and examines the Gambia and New Zealand as cases illustrating different paths to shedding this colonial institutional.

“Sacred Trust”: Rethinking Late British Decolonization in Indigenous Canada

AbstractThis article considers the political activism of Canada's Indigenous peoples as a corrective to the prevailing narrative of British decolonization. For several decades, historians have described the end of empire as a series of linear political transitions from colony to nation-state, all ending in the late 1960s. But for many colonized peoples, the path to sovereignty was much less straightforward, especially in contexts where the goal of a discrete nation-state was unattainable. Canada's Indigenous peoples were one such group. In 1980, in the face of separatism in Quebec, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau pledged to renew the Canadian Confederation by bringing home the constitution, which was still retained by the British Parliament. But many Indigenous leaders feared that this final separation of powers would extinguish their historic bilateral treaties with the British crown, including the Royal Proclamation of 1763 that guaranteed Indigenous sovereignty in a trust relationship with Britain. Indigenous activists thus organized lobbying campaigns at Westminster to oppose Trudeau's act of so-called patriation. This article follows the Constitution Express, a campaign organized by the Union of British Columbia Indian Chiefs in 1981. Maneuvering around the nuances of British political and cultural difference, activists on the Constitution Express articulated and exercised their own vision of decolonization, pursuing continued ties to Britain as their best hope for securing Indigenous sovereignty in a federal Canada.

From Commonwealth Responsibility to the National Interest: Australia and Post-war Decolonisation in South-East Asia

ABSTRACTThis 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.

Locating exile: decolonization, anti-imperial spaces and Zimbabwean students in Britain, 1965–1980

Exile is usually cast as a time of hardship, narrated through tropes of nostalgia and loss. Yet it is not always experienced and remembered in this way. This article provides a counterpoint to the familiar nostalgic lament by exploring the narratives of Zimbabwean students ‘in exile’ in Britain during the country's liberation war of 1965–1980, who looked back on their stay in the imperial heartland as a time of opportunity and excitement. They recalled their own youthful militancy, the optimism of liberation movements before independence and invoked the conviviality of joint political campaigns with British-based allies. The article explains their up-beat recollections by locating exile in transnational socio-political spaces created by Rhodesia's contested sovereignty, focusing on exiles' relations with mainstream liberal-left solidarity organizations, with Caribbean/black British groups and the liberation movements' own transnational networks. By locating exile in this way, the article extends two hitherto disconnected bodies of scholarship – on southern African nationalisms in the making and British decolonization and postcolonial cultural politics. It highlights how Zimbabwean students helped foster liberation movements' international standing and their influence on post-independence ideas of status. The article also offers a new vantage point on Britain's re-racialized cultural politics, as performed in middle-class spaces on student campuses and internationalist campaigns. Zimbabwean students' accounts of exile in Britain can thus do more than reveal the inadequacies of generalisations about a singular exile condition. Their narratives of the opportunities and sociability of exile in Britain reveal the occlusions of narrow military versions of southern African liberation history, while adding new, transnational dimensions to historical geographies of decolonization, urban cosmopolitanism and the African presence in 1960s and 1970s Britain.

The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton (review)

Reviewed by: The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism by Antoinette Burton Kate O'Malley (bio) The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism, Antoinette Burton; pp. xiv + 320. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2015, £22.99, £16.99 paper, $31.95, $24.95 paper. Antoinette Burton's The Trouble with Empire: Challenges to Modern British Imperialism is an exciting read for historians who have engaged with histories of dissent, and it should be required reading for historians of the British Empire more generally. The trouble with Empire, Burton tells us, is that "British imperial histories" have not been "written with dissent and disruption in the lead" (1). We have been led to believe that agents of resistance shaped the end of Empire only. Thus, a presumption of basic stability in the preceding decades of colonial rule has evolved "especially as it is popularly consumed and understood" (2). Burton questions from the outset the rise-and-fall narratives of Empire, which downplay the impact, "let alone the role, of the anticolonial movements and people on the imperial framework" (16). It is refreshing in this regard to see Ireland referenced early on, and alongside South-Asian and African movements, as Ireland often is overlooked in the historiography of British decolonization in particular. Perhaps Ireland is too close to the imperial metropole, historically too complex, and, until relatively recently, too politically sensitive a subject with which British historians of Empire could engage. Burton promises to open our ears to the drumbeat of resistance and insecurity in three specific domains—military, economic, and political—and the book is divided into chapters accordingly. In the first chapter, Burton brings us through vast geographical terrains, some familiar, others less so. We revisit sites of imperial conflict, from the Indian Mutiny/First War of Independence of 1857 and the Boer Wars to the Cattle Killing Movement in Xhosland and the campaigns against the Maori in New Zealand. Perhaps the shortest and not so sweetest of engagements for British forces came in the Anglo-Zulu War with the Battle of Isandlwala in 1879, which "was lost between 8 a.m. and 2:30 p.m." (74). These conflicts are recast for us with the help of a "close reading of British imperial battle literature and military accounting [which] suggests … a pattern of defensive engagements, local struggle and decidedly imperfect 'victory' across most of the Victorian empire" (53). Couple this with her coverage of the ferociousness of retribution and counter-insurgency (especially the brutal repression in Benares, which involved the "[g]entleman [End Page 692] executioners of young Indian boys"), and Burton successfully argues that the second half of the nineteenth century was one of the densest moments of imperial instability in the history of the Empire (61). In the second chapter, devoted to economic protest, Burton highlights a theme that also does not feature much in grand narrative accounts of modern British imperialism. It might be classified as a maligned add-on, much like women or gender in larger compendium volumes, although women appear throughout this book (understandably, given Burton's back catalogue). Yet, "ordinary colonial subjects routinely disrupted the business of empire … in a variety of ways," and, in this segment of the book, Burton harvests grains of sedition strewn across the Empire to great effect (88). From the story of the Krobo in the Gold Coast, who brought unprecedented prosperity to the indigenous community by resolving a price fixing dispute and developing ports on the river Volta, to the story of Charles Boycott going viral, apparently unconnected strikes, boycotts, and desertions are consolidated from vastly different territories whose common denominator is British colonial rule. The success of the Indian swadeshi campaign is rightly given due weight. Raj era reaction and suppression are crucial here, especially in Bengal where it resulted in significant wider politicization of local communities, or so-called radicalization, to use imperial parlance. The "hartal" or strike aspect of the 1919 Jallianwala Bagh massacre have been restored: "a very particular mode of protest … designed to impose economic sanctions on the regular business of imperial commerce" (111). The final chapter suggests that we undertake a rereading of the winner...

The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small Distant War by Souchou Yao

Reviewed by: The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small Distant War by Souchou Yao Nazirah Lee The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small Distant War Souchou Yao + Copenhagen: NIAS-Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2016. 178pp. ISBN: 978 87 7694 190 (hbk) According to author Souchou Yao, The Malayan Emergency: Essays on a Small Distant War is an attempt to present the Malayan Emergency (1948–60) in a wide context. The book contains nine chapters. It begins with a chapter on the British Empire, followed by a chapter on communism entitled ‘On Communism; New Person in a New Era’. The two subsequent chapters discuss imperial policing and British counterinsurgency and the Revolutionary War. In the fifth and sixth chapters the author concentrates on British propaganda, strategies and approaches during the Malayan Emergency. Discussion of the leftists, the most crucial group involved in the insurgency, is delivered in the seventh chapter. In line with the author’s intention to present the Malayan Emergency from a new perspective, Chapter 8 presents stories of the British who were protected by the communists during the Japanese occupation. A desire for a reassessment of the communists is hinted at in the final chapter, ‘On Writing People’s History: Home Grown Revolution’. Throughout the book, the author underlines the need for a closer scrutiny of aspects of the Malayan Emergency in addition to the Malayan Communist Party (MCP) uprising, the success of British High Commissioner Sir Gerald Templer and the government’s victory in 1960. This approach allows the author to offer a fascinating argument on the Malayan Emergency and reveals to readers another side of the story, especially on the British Empire and MCP during that period. The book undoubtedly contributes to the substantial existing works on the Malayan Emergency by presenting a fresh perspective. The foci of the discussion are the British authorities and the communists in Malaya. Yao begins his discussion on the rhetoric of British decolonization, arguing that instead of divestment, Britain was eager to protect her interests and prestige. In the case of Malaya, the Malayan Emergency was used as a platform to demonstrate British commitment to the anti-communist war, which was seen as a good way to mollify United States resentment against the British. Furthermore, Malaya had its own economic significance for the British. The price of tin and rubber soared following the outbreak of the Korean War in 1950, resulting in Malayan exports increasing from US$226 million to US$406 million (p. 16). Britain direly needed to maintain its power in Malaya to secure that huge financial resource for its empire. In summary, Yao convinces the reader that the British undertaking in Malaya [End Page 165] during the Emergency was calculated and carried out with a strong political will of self-interest (p. 18). P. Deery (2003) suggests that the British authorities were in a conundrum about the communist insurgency and grappled with the issue of political terminology in 1948–51. Subsequently, the event was treated as acts of thugs and criminals. Nevertheless, Yao affirms that the British employed a fierce approach against the communists from the beginning of the Malayan Emergency, using brutal force to punish and terrorize them. This approach was combined with the policy of control of the masses, such as by requiring identity cards and implementing emergency laws and regulations. Yao has a similar view to Low Choo Chin (2016) that the British practised physical control over contested segments of the population. Yao mentions the relocation of residents of Batu Arang in 1948 and the deportation of 26,000 people. Emergency regulations provided the British with a judicial framework that made their various counterinsurgency measures legal (p. 55). These included the execution of ‘draconian measures’ such as curfews, food control and restriction and collective punishment, which were seen as unfair and unjust. Collective punishment was used as a means to collect information about communists. Yao presents two cases that took place in Tanjong Malim and Permatang Tinggi (pp. 109–11). Residents of Permatang Tinggi suffered a huge loss when their houses and shops were demolished because they refused to cooperate with the British authorities. They only regained their freedom after a year. Prior...

Workers in the Vanguard: the 1960 industrial relations ordinance and the struggle for independence in Aden

The promulgation in 1960 of a new industrial relations ordinance in Aden was a singular event in the history of British decolonisation because it made many forms of strike action illegal. Earlier initiatives to liberalise trade union law in the colonies were intended to channel and manage the discontent of workers; but for nationalist movements, the new order in industrial relations provided an opportunity to mobilise workers in the cause of independence. Aden, which was the location of a significant British base, a major oil refinery and a key commercial port, became the site of a bitter confrontation between the nascent trade union movement and the colonial administration. Three aspects of the conflict were of particular significance. First, Aden’s unique political status as a British colony in the Arab world and its strategic and economic value, contributed to the fractious industrial relations environment. Secondly, conflicts between workers and the colonial government demonstrate continuity with wider British efforts to suppress anti-colonial dissent and demonstrate that charges of appeasement in the last years of empire are not well founded. Lastly, the exceptional nature of the new legislation attracted the critical attention of the ILO and the major international trade union confederations, which internationalised the dispute over the IRO. An examination of the manner in which the British Government sought to regulate its relations with various labour organisations, including the British TUC, the colonial ATUC and the two rival international labour confederations of the WFTU and ICFTU, demonstrates that the conduct of industrial relations in Aden was significant in the context of both the cold war and decolonisation.

The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis

Reviewed by: The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life by Thomas S. Davis Allan Hepburn The Extinct Scene: Late Modernism and Everyday Life. Thomas S. Davis. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. Pp. xiv + 307. $60.00 (cloth). A brilliant and timely book, The Extinct Scene joins the growing list of scholarly works that deal with Anglo-British modernism in the middle of the twentieth century, such as Tyrus Miller’s Late Modernism (1999), Marina MacKay’s Modernism and World War II (2007), Leo Mellor’s Reading the Ruins (2011), Peter Kalliney’s Commonwealth of Letters (2013), and Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s (2013). These works establish continuities from the interwar years through the Second World War and into the era of British decolonization. In The Extinct Scene, Davis defines an “outward turn” as characteristic of late modernism (3). Consciousness, feeling, and inwardness—traits important to high modernism—did not suit mid-century writers. From the 1930s through the 1960s, writers and artists turned to the political and economic turbulence in the world as resources for artworks; in particular, they represented the alignments and misalignments between citizens and states. At the same time, late modernist texts correlated everyday phenomena with political crises, such as the Spanish Civil War, the Sino-Japanese War, the [End Page 469] Second World War, and the Notting Hill Riots. In The Extinct Scene, Davis focuses on British culture, though he keenly notes the international stance of British writers and filmmakers; they look outward to Spain, China, and the Caribbean to understand changes in world-systems. Throughout The Extinct Scene, Davis keeps a steady focus on everydayness. In an explication of John Grierson’s documentary aesthetics in the 1930s, Davis claims that “art must capture and reveal something about everyday life. It should neither assume a mimetic function nor drift into a self-contained world of endless experimentation” (39). The everyday throws up any number of opportunities for seizing capitalism, politics, and history in action. For Humphrey Jennings, Charles Madge, and other researchers associated with Mass-Observation, the everyday manifests itself in singular events and anecdotes. Mass-Observation aimed to “uncover the particularities of everyday experience and show how that experience permeates the collective” (57). In this regard, late modernist film, fiction, and art renounce the avant-garde experiments of high modernism—interruptions, lyrical monologues, defamiliarization—unless they address the radical disruptions inflicted on everyday life by geopolitical forces. Davis puts the matter more succinctly: “Late modernism designates the moment when modernism no longer recognizes itself” (11). Neither realism nor the resources of high modernism adequately captured changes in the world-system that happened at mid-century. If anything distinguishes the difference between high modernism and late modernism, it is the determined politicization of art forms that occurs in works by George Orwell, Humphrey Jennings, Elizabeth Bowen, and numerous others. Davis’s superb analysis refreshes what scholars know about late modernist works, not least because he draws upon an original and compelling corpus of materials: Henry Green’s novel Party Going, the sociological interventions of Mass-Observation, Virginia Woolf’s The Years, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood’s Journey to a War, Henry Moore’s paintings of women and children in tube shelters, Cecil Beaton and James Pope-Hennessy’s History under Fire, Elizabeth Bowen’s short stories about blitzed London, a clutch of novels by Vic Reid, Sam Selvon, and Colin MacInnes, and, in an epilogue about the afterlife of modernist everydayness, W. G. Sebald’s Austerlitz. Davis’s close readings are virtuosic. His analysis of power relations between white landowners and black Jamaicans in Vic Reid’s New Day, for example, dwells on the transformative power of seeing, especially the ways that white and black citizens understand uprisings and bloodshed as actions that impinge on everyday life and incrementally register changes in geopolitics. By giving meticulous accounts of specific works, Davis vivifies late modernism. In one vector of inquiry in The Extinct Scene, Davis offers commentary on the duties and entitlements of citizenship. As expressions of a political unconscious, artworks model citizenship as a form of necessary engagement. Vernacular fictions such as Absolute Beginners (1959) and The Lonely Londoners (1956...

Britain's Decision to Withdraw from the Persian Gulf: A Pattern Not a Puzzle

ABSTRACTThe reasons for the British decision to withdraw from the Gulf are highly contentious. While some scholars have focused on short-term considerations, especially the devaluation of sterling towards the end of 1967, in the British determination to quit the Gulf, others have concentrated on longer-term trends in British policy-making for the region. This article sides with the latter. Britain's Gulf role came under increasing scrutiny following the 1956 Suez crisis as part of an ongoing debate about the costs and benefits of Britain's Gulf presence. In this sense, British withdrawal fitted into a wider pattern of British decolonisation. By the 1960s, the Treasury, in particular, strongly questioned the necessity and cost-effectiveness of the maintenance of empire in the Gulf to safeguard British economic interests there. Recent interpretations which seek to disaggregate the British decision to leave Southeast Asia from the decision to depart from the Gulf are also questionable. By mid-1967, it had already been determined that Britain would leave both regions by the mid-1970s, the only difference being that this decision was formally announced with respect to Southeast Asia, but not with regard to the Gulf. The devaluation of sterling in November 1967, therefore, merely hastened and facilitated decisions which had already been taken. Despite the end of formal empire in the Gulf, Britain did seek, not always successfully, to preserve its interests into the 1970s and beyond.

The Commonwealth and the Cold War, Neutralism, and Non-Alignment

In the Cold War era, the Commonwealth represented a global sub-system which both permitted and enabled multiple identities. Between 1949 and 1990, as a direct product of British decolonisation, the Commonwealth came to include forty-nine members of varying size with very different agenda and developmental needs to those larger members from the global ‘North’. Its heterogeneous membership included: NATO countries; ANZUS; the Non-Aligned Movement; the OAU; CARICOM; and the Organisation of East Caribbean States. As a ‘unique sovereign regime’, the Commonwealth defied ideological typecasting. It possessed organisational structure and bureaucratic support; it combined economic, financial, technical, and scientific association, and privileged the role of diplomacy through the latitude permitted to its Secretary-General. The Commonwealth's two sustained ‘grand strategies’ were the pursuit of racial justice (in Rhodesia, South West Africa/South Africa) and social justice through the promotion of development, focusing on the principal preoccupations of newly independent states and their nation/state-building projects. These intersected with, but were by no means defined by, the Cold War, and represented a collaboration of West/South, rather than the confrontation of East/West.