Memories of Empire . Volume I

The conventional wisdom about Britain’s disengagement from empire in the decades immediately after 1945 is that decolonisation was achieved without a crisis in the domestic state equivalent to that which afflicted France during the Algerian war of independence. While historians have increasingly dismissed congenial explanations for British imperial retreat which had argued that independence was a consequence of either altruism or a sober and dispassionate recognition that Britain’s global commitments were no longer sustainable, it has still been generally assumed that the end of empire was achieved without any momentous discontinuities in the political life of the home nation. It is this historiographical and conceptual complacency that Bill Schwarz brilliantly repudiates in this, the first volume of a trilogy dedicated to the subject of ‘memories of empire’. Schwarz’s premiss is that ‘out of the crises attendant upon decolonization came a new politics of the right, and settler populism became a vehicle for the ideological recasting of the political right in the metropole’. A ‘nominally archaic, colonial vocabulary’—more specifically the language of ‘racial whiteness’—was sequestered to help make sense of a novel, contemporary, situation—namely the presence in Britain of non-white Commonwealth migrants. Indigenous white Britons re-imagined themselves as white settlers, confronting a racial other that was identified with disorder and barbarism. However, unlike their imperial forebears, these white Britons lacked the comfort of being able to articulate racial whiteness within an essentially heroic vein, in which the colonial settler had triumphed over both native and nature. At the dawn of the postcolonial era, whiteness was now associated with vulnerability, betrayal and defeat—the defenders of racial exclusivity and ethnic nationalism obliged to turn inward to ‘the impossible reveries of a past colonial order’

Ancient history · Archaeology · Barbarism · British Empire · Colonialism · Decolonization · Empire · Historiography · Ideology · Independence (probability theory · Indigenous · Political science · Politics · Sociology · White (mutation · Australian History and Society · History · Law

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  Open Access•Brook•Sociologia Ruralis•2020

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