Englishness and Empire, 1939-1965

The impact of the decline of the British Empire upon British culture and national identity is an obviously important topic which has remained under-explored. This valuable and well-researched work fills an obvious gap. It examines what the author describes as ‘popular narratives’ of English national identity and how they were moulded and affected by the decline of the Empire between the outbreak of the Second World War and the death of Sir Winston Churchill, through such categories as immigration and race, gender, and ‘manliness’, employing primary and secondary sources, films, and the BBC. Ambiguity is highlighted with, for instance, the 1953 Coronation, which is discussed in a major chapter as a turning-point between the traditional and contemporary views of the Empire. Most British people liked the Empire/Commonwealth, especially the white Dominions where their relatives lived and where they, or their children, often emigrated, but were indifferent to the tropical Empire or, indeed, to old-fashioned notions of Empire per se. In the end, support for a continuation of the Empire/Commonwealth collapsed, through an onslaught by left-oriented political and cultural radicals, right-oriented anti-immigration Powellites, and liberal-centrist pro-Europeans, while the indigenous inhabitants of the tropical Empire of course rejected the Commonwealth in anything more than a ceremonial survival. America and its dominant but ambiguous cultural impact are also seldom far from the centre of things. This is very much a work of cultural history and may suffer from the limitations of that perspective, for instance the assumption that one may readily understand intentionality, as in films, or use them as reliable evidence. Some important features of the changes in attitude described in the book are not mentioned, for instance the Cold War, which dominated all British perceptions of foreign policy after the mid-1940s, and which alone one might argue marginalised all narrative about the Empire. Some attention, too, might have been paid to the well-worn subject of British ‘decline’, which moved to the centre of public debate after Suez, and remained there until the mid-1990s. Nevertheless, this is an impressive book, valuable for its exhaustive and multifaceted use of sources and for the author's sophisticated perceptions of cultural change and its impact

Aesthetics · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · British Empire · Commonwealth · Economic history · Empire · Genealogy · Identity (music · Immigration · National identity · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Australian History and Society · Commonwealth, Australian Politics and Federalism · History · Law

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