Idea Of Commonwealth Research Articles

From The Greek Commonwealth to The Commonwealth of Nations: Zimmern, Curtis, and a Tale of Two Titles

ABSTRACT This article analyses the development of the notion of ‘commonwealth’ within the Round Table group in relation to two books: Alfred Zimmern’s The Greek Commonwealth (1911) and Lionel Curtis’ The Commonwealth of Nations (1916). Modern historians of International Relations have argued that the title of Zimmern’s book alluded to conceptions of the British empire as a ‘commonwealth’. Drawing on previously unused archival sources and on detailed study of the different editions of The Greek Commonwealth, this article shows that Zimmern’s title did not refer to any form of political organization larger than the city-state and that IR historians have wrongly read into Zimmern’s book both the idea of commonwealth and the reading of the Athenian empire developed by Lionel Curtis. The article explores Curtis’ development of the concept of commonwealth and its reception by Zimmern and other members of the Round Table, and sets the historical narrative Curtis offers in The Commonwealth of Nations against The Greek Commonwealth. It shows that, even though Curtis used Zimmern’s work as a source, he took issue with its presentation of Athens precisely in relation to the questions of imperial organization that were the Round Table’s central concern.

The Plural Society: Labour and the Commonwealth Idea 1900–1964

ABSTRACTThe Labour Party founded in 1900 necessarily confronted the imperial nature of the British state, the empire as an economic and military entity, and the inequalities it contained. Yet Labour initially thought on the subject primarily in terms of the liberal objective of the advancement of self-government. It was only in the 1930s, in the writings of Lansbury and Attlee, that more systematic thinking about the empire in terms of global divisions of labour of which the British working class were among the beneficiaries, began to emerge. Tensions between the perceived interests of these beneficiaries and of the working classes of the empire as a whole remained in Attlee’s postwar government. It did, however, begin to develop a reconceptionalisation of the empire as a multi-racial Commonwealth. This facilitated a Labour patriotism around the Commonwealth that reached its apogee in Gaitskell’s weaponising of it as a means of resisting European entry in 1962. Yet the economic and military relations he evoked were already out of date, leaving his successor, Harold Wilson, to adjust to a multi-racial partnership.

The Commonwealth and South Africa: From Smuts to Mandela

ABSTRACTThe creation of modern South Africa as an independent unitary state within the British Empire (c. 1910) gave birth to the Commonwealth idea. Jan Smuts’s views on Commonwealth were formative and they continued to inform the evolution of the organisation until the end of the Second World War. Also significant was the role played by Afrikaner nationalist leader J. B. M. Hertzog, who exerted a critical influence on the 1926 Balfour Declaration and Statute of Westminster. At the point of South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, the Commonwealth divided between new entrants, who cast South Africa as a pariah, and older member states who lamented the exit of a troubled family member. Even after South Africa’s departure from the Commonwealth in 1961, apartheid’s significance as the global exemplar of institutionalised racism and colonial rule helped to bind the Commonwealth as a multi-racial organisation with strongly defined ethical values. South Africa’s reintegration in 1994, with Nelson Mandela to the fore, was welcomed as a triumph for the Commonwealth. Paradoxically, however, this proved a pyrrhic victory and may actually have contributed to the Commonwealth’s state of indirection.

A Unified Empire of Equal Parts: The Dutch Commonwealth Schemes of the 1920s–40s

A few short years after the end of the Second World War, the Dutch colony in the East Indies became the independent Republic of Indonesia. Importantly, the final agreement signed in 1949 also established a Dutch-Indonesian Union, a loose commonwealth connecting the two nations. Contemporary and recent observers alike have dismissed this Union as a last-ditch and ultimately futile effort by the Dutch to maintain their fading imperial authority, but, as this article demonstrates, the commonwealth idea originated years before the events of decolonisation. Exploring the various schemes advanced during the 1930s and 1940s, this article devotes particular attention to the period 1941–45, when members of the Dutch resistance in the German-occupied metropole proposed and debated the Netherlands' imperial future for the benefit of a general public seemingly willing to consider colonial reform. Seen in light of its pre-war and wartime popularity, the commonwealth's post-war appearance hardly seems surprising or desperate. Rather, it emerges as a logical outgrowth of decades-old ideas and developments in both the European Netherlands and the East Indies.

The West, the Anglo‐Sphere and the Ideal of Commonwealth

This article considers the idea of commonwealth as a means of understanding human “politics” that does not rely on the violence of the state. It considers the idea of commonwealth to involve cultural and other forms of ties that transcend the borders of states and link people who share common views and aspirations together. It examines two contemporary visions of commonwealth, that of the West and that of the Anglo‐sphere. It argues that the sorts of bonds that these commonwealths entail are positive so long as they are recognised as embodying both strengths and weaknesses and are not used as means to attempt to demonstrate the supposed superiority of their virtues.

"[L]aughing nations of happy children who have never grown up": Race, the Concept of Commonwealth and the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition

"[L]aughing nations of happy children who have never grown up": Race, the Concept of Commonwealth and the 1924–25 British Empire Exhibition David Simonelli In April 1924, on the verge of the opening of the British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, a Hammersmith school prepared an exhibit on the nature of the populations who had created the British Empire. It was a sectional model that showed "the races that have contributed to the British breed". Allegedly, the original Britons were full of fervor, the Anglo-Saxons were adventurous lovers of the sea, and the Normans were controlled and refined. These "races" combined in the tableau to trade, build joint stock companies and colonize the planet. The promoters of the Exhibition soon acquired the tableau and put it on display at Wembley.1 The Hammersmith school's tableau revealed many of the beliefs of those people who wanted to see the Empire achieve measures of unity - political, economic, social, and cultural - in the interwar era. The term used to refer to this vague unity was "commonwealth", a term which up to that time had indicated the white-governed dominions, Canada, Newfoundland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the Irish Free State.2 Educators, intellectuals, civil servants and other imperialists involved in the British Empire Exhibition as an educational project wanted to phase out use of the word "empire" in favor of "commonwealth", since "commonwealth" sounded more egalitarian, like a free association of peoples rather than a product of conquest.3 Their goal was to imply that the people in the empire were "free" peoples, united in their admiration of British civilization and in their desire to trade with each other. The British Empire Exhibition that presented this vision ran for two years from 1924 through 1925, and was the most deliberate effort yet made to get the British people to utilize the colonies as cultural and economic assets. The exhibition was a watershed of imperial propaganda, an incredibly popular event that attracted the British public in the millions and left them with a strong impression of the "justice, progress and liberty" that abounded in their nation's empire.4 The tableau, however, represented an out-dated and one-sided vision of the concept of "commonwealth". Its combination of medieval "races" was alleged to have resulted in a long-term connection between Britain and what were now its dominions. By the early 1920s, those dominions were virtually independent. Their military and diplomatic connection to Britain had certainly grown profoundly during the Great War of 1914–1918. The rest of the Empire likewise contributed heavily to the war effort and grew more and more important to the British economy, especially India. The Exhibition was supposed to extend the tableau's vision of commonwealth. As the war ended, imperial-minded intellectuals and politicians began to see a new concept of commonwealth as the future of empire; the colonies would achieve self-government in return for sharing in the burdens of the largest war in world history to that time.5 The Exhibition therefore was seen as an opportunity to extend the idea of commonwealth to all of the Empire's "races", to redefine commonwealth as a combination of all of them in an economically and culturally harmonious unit. Yet "commonwealth" was also a term used by some intellectuals, politicians and cultural commentators in the 1920s and 1930s to moderate their ideas on race: between segregation and integration, between hierarchy and equality, between cultural superiority and cultural relativism.6 What the tableau really revealed was a slowly changing but common attitude amongst British intellectuals, politicians and the populace in general. Whatever happened in the future, there was no doubt that the British "race" would continue to dominate a united empire-commonwealth. The tableau presented medieval British ethnic groups in then-current anthropological terms to describe the genesis of the empire as a biological necessity. A fluid conception of "race" in Britain in the 1920s found itself pitted against an equally fluid conception of "commonwealth". Rhetorically, the British Empire Exhibition was an effort to change people's conceptions of "race", to recognize the equality of all peoples in the British Empire, as found in their supposedly...

Oxford and the idea of Commonwealth: essays presented to Sir Edgar Williams and The unofficial Commonwealth: the story of the Commonwealth Foundation 1965–1980

Journal Article Oxford and the idea of Commonwealth: essays presented to Sir Edgar Williams and The unofficial Commonwealth: the story of the Commonwealth Foundation 1965–1980 Get access Oxford and the idea of Commonwealth: essays presented to Sir Edgar Williams. Edited by Frederick Maddenand D. K. Fieldhouse. London, Canberra: Croom Helm. 1982. 167pp. £11.95.The unofficial Commonwealth: the story of the Commonwealth Foundation 1965–1980. By John Chadwick. London, Boston: Allen & Unwin. 1982. 266pp. Index. £15.00. $37.50. Lorna Lloyd Lorna Lloyd 1University of Keele Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar International Affairs, Volume 59, Issue 3, July 1983, Pages 479–480, https://doi.org/10.2307/2618812 Published: 01 July 1983

PARTISAN PICTURE

PARTISAN PICTURE Get access Oxford and the Idea of Commonwealth, edited by Frederick Madden and D. K. Fieldhouse. London, Croom Helm, 1982. vii+167 pp. £11.95. The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire: The Ford Lectures and other essays, by John Gallagher, edited by Anil Seal. Cambridge University Press, 1982. xxvii+211pp. £16. MICHAEL TWADDLE MICHAEL TWADDLE Institute of Commonwealth StudiesLondon Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar African Affairs, Volume 82, Issue 326, January 1983, Pages 131–132, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordjournals.afraf.a097484 Published: 01 January 1983

Immigration and the idea of commonwealth

Immigration and the idea of commonwealth

The Tudor Commonweal and the Sense of Change

The key to early Renaissance thought in England has often, and rightly, been sought in that twilight zone which is both medieval and modern in character, yet is, in a sense, neither. In that indistinct area the early Tudor view of society expressed in the concept of the “very and true commonweal” constitutes a prominent but equivocal landmark. Any student of the period knows that the idea was conservative, even reactionary in its implications, inspired in large part by a suspicious distaste for the changes that were taking place in early sixteenth-century England. Those, on the other hand, who have read at all carefully the comments made by these same Englishmen on the state of their own society know that they accepted in varying degrees the facts of change, subjected them to an often searching analysis, and in several important instances arrived at constructive policies on the basis of their analysis of social cause. What, then, is one to make of this paradox presented by constructive realism deployed in the cause of a reactionary social ideal, exploration of change conducted within an ostensibly static framework? Perhaps, as with so many aspects of early Renaissance thought, the difficulty is more apparent than real. Perhaps the commonwealth idea was not so nearly static as it appeared. Perhaps, indeed, the traditional formulas in which it ordinarily found expression simply mask a new sense of change, a dawning awareness of social process.Failure to understand the true nature of the ambivalence that seems at times to be built into the thought of the period, failure in particular to allow for the divergence between traditional theory, part of the rich legacy of medieval thought, and fresh attitudes prompted by actual experience in a time of revolutionary change, has too often resulted in failure also to appreciate the significance of the early Tudor pamphleteers and commentators of various sorts who examined their society with an eye both critical and constructive.

Commonwealth Idea and Prospect

Commonwealth Idea and Prospect