Did loss of imperial power and the end of empire have any significant impact on British culture and identity after 1945? Within a burgeoning literature on national identity and what it means to be British this is a question that has received surprisingly little attention. Englishness and Empire makes an important and original contribution to recent debates about the domestic consequences of the end of empire. Wendy Webster explores popular narratives of nation in the mainstream media archive - newspapers, newsreels, radio, film, and television. The contours of the study generally follow stories told through prolific filmic and television imagery: the Second World War, the Coronation and Everest, colonial wars of the 1950s, and Winston Churchill's funeral. The book analyses three main narratives that conflicted and collided in the period - a Commonwealth that promised to maintain Britishness as a global identity; siege narratives of colonial wars and immigration that showed a 'little England' threatened by empire and its legacies; and a story of national greatness, celebrating the martial masculinity of British officers and leaders, through which imperial identity leaked into narratives of the Second World War developed after 1945. The book also explores the significance of America to post-imperial Britain. Englishness and Empire considers how far, and in what contexts and unexpected places, imperial identity and loss of imperial power resonated in popular narratives of nataion. As the first monograph to investigate the significance of empire and its legacies in shaping national identity after 1945, this is an important study for all scholars interested in questions of national identity and their intersections with gender, race, empire, immigration, and decolonization.

Ranging from analyses of contemporary culture, postcolonial writing, political rhetoric and postimperial memory after 9/11, this collection demonstrates that far from being parochial and self-involved, the question of Englishness offers an important avenue for thinking about the politics of national identity.

At the start of the Second World War, Britain was at the height of its imperial power, and it is no surprise that it drew upon the global resources of the Empire once war had been declared. Whilst this international aspect of Britain’s war effort has been well-studied in relation to the military contribution of individual dominions and colonies, relatively little has been written about the Empire as a whole. As such, An Imperial World at War makes an important contribution to the historiography relating to the British Empire and its wartime experience. It argues that the war needs to be viewed in imperial terms, that the role of forces drawn from the Empire is poorly understood and that the war's impact on colonial societies is barely grasped at all in conventional accounts. Through a series of case studies, the volume demonstrates the fundamental role played by the Empire in Britain’s war effort and highlights some of the consequences for both Britain and its imperial territories.Themes include the recruitment and utilization of military formations drawn from imperial territories, the experience of British forces stationed overseas, the use of strategic bases located in the colonies, British policy in the Middle East and the challenge posed by growing American power, the occupation of enemy colonies and the enemy occupation of British colonies, colonial civil defence measures, financial support for the war effort supplied by the Empire, and the commemoration of the war. The Afterword anticipates a new, decentred history of the war that properly acknowledges the role and importance of people and places throughout the colonial and semi-colonial world.’ This volume emanates from a conference organized as part of the ‘Home Fronts of the Empire – Commonwealth’ project. The project was generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and led by Yasmin Khan and Ashley Jackson with Gajendra Singh as Postdoctoral Research Assistant.

This book is the first major attempt to examine the cultural manifestations of the demise of imperialism as a social and political ideology in post-war Britain. Far from being a matter of indifference or resigned acceptance as is often suggested, the fall of the British Empire came as a profound shock to the British national imagination, and resonated widely in British popular culture. The sheer range of subjects discussed, from the satire boom of the 1960s to the worlds of sport and the arts, demonstrates how profoundly decolonisation was absorbed into the popular consciousness. Offers an extremely novel and provocative interpretation of post-war British cultural history, and opens up a whole new field of enquiry in the history of decolonisation.

Englishness and Post-imperial Space: The Poetry of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes probes into the English mindset immediately after the British withdrawal from the colonies, and examines how the loss of power and global prestige affected contemporary poetry, particularly that of Philip Larkin and Ted Hughes. Frustration and disillusionment, even anger, characterised the era and many of the literary works the period produced. Most writers became insular and were obsessed with the ‘English’ elements in their writing. The great, international and cosmopolitan themes (of Eliot, for instance) were replaced by those of narrow domestic importance. It is in such a context, this book argues, that Larkin and Hughes returned to the old England, most notably to the themes of gradually vanishing pristine landscape and national myths and legends, to the archetypal English customs and conventions. It examines their poetry mainly from the perspective of Englishness, a burgeoning area of academic interest. Intricately connected with the values emanating from England as a geographical and socio-cultural space, Englishness as a concept is intrinsic to the identity of a people who gradually became globally powerful. The loss of empire dealt a severe blow to this sense of the self. This book explores the dynamics of the representation of this sense of loss and the frustration it produced in the poems of Larkin and Hughes.

During the Second World War, people arrived in Britain from all over the world as troops, war-workers, nurses, refugees, exiles, and prisoners-of-war-chiefly from Europe, America, and the British Empire. Between 1939 and 1945, the population in Britain became more diverse than it had ever been before. Through diaries, letters, and interviews, Mixing It tells of ordinary lives pushed to extraordinary lengths. Among the stories featured are those of Zbigniew Siemaszko - deported by the Soviet Union, fleeing Kazakhstan on a horse-drawn sleigh, and eventually joining the Polish army in Scotland via Iran, Iraq, and South Africa - and 'Johnny' Pohe - the first Maori pilot to serve in the RAF, who was captured, and eventually murdered by the Gestapo for his part in the 'Great Escape'. This is the first book to look at the big picture of large-scale movements to Britain and the rich variety of relations between different groups. When the war ended, awareness of the diversity of Britain's wartime population was lost and has played little part in public memories of the war. Mixing It recovers this forgotten history. It illuminates the place of the Second World War in the making of multinational, multiethnic Britain and resonates with current debates on immigration.

Ideas of Englishness, and of the English nation, have become a matter of renewed interest in recent years as a result of threats to the integrity of the United Kingdom and the perceived rise of that unusual thing, English nationalism. Interrogating the idea of an English nation, and of how that might compare with other concepts of nationhood, this book enquires into the origins of English national identity, partly by questioning the assumption of its long-standing existence. It investigates the role of the British empire - the largest empire in world history - in the creation of English and British identities, and the results of its disappearance. Considering the ’myths of the English’ - the ideas and images that the English and others have constructed about their history and their sense of themselves as a people - the distinctiveness of English social thought (in comparison with that of other nations), the relationship between English and British identity and the relationship of Englishness to Europe, this wide-ranging, comparative and historical approach to understanding the particular nature of Englishness and English national identity, will appeal to scholars of sociology, cultural studies and history with interests in English and British national identity and debates about England’s future place in the United Kingdom.

The end of empire shaped the way the British public saw their place in the world, society and the ethnic and racial boundaries of their nation. Focussing on some of the most controversial organisations of the 1960s, this book illuminates their central importance in constructing post-imperial Britain.

This book throws new light on the impact of informal ‘old boy’ networks on British decolonisation. Duncan Sandys was one of the leading Conservative politicians of the middle decades of twentieth-century Britain. He was also a key figure in the Harold Macmillan’s ‘Winds of Change’ policy of decolonisation, serving as Secretary for the Colonies and Commonwealth Relations from 1960 to 1964. When he lost office he fought strenuously to undermine the new Labour Government’s attempts to accelerate colonial withdrawal and improve race relations in Britain. Sandys developed important private business interests in Africa and intervened personally through both public and official channels on the question of Rhodesia, Commonwealth immigration and the ‘East of Suez’ withdrawal in the late 1960s. This book will appeal to students of decolonisation and twentieth-century British politics alike.

Indigeneity is inseparable from empire, and the way empire responds to the Indigenous presence is a key historical factor in shaping the flow of imperial history. This book is about the consequences of the encounter in the early nineteenth century between the British imperial presence and the First Peoples of what were to become Australia and New Zealand. However, the shape of social relations between Indigenous peoples and the forces of empire does not remain constant over time. The book tracks how the creation of empire in this part of the world possessed long-lasting legacies both for the settler colonies that emerged and for the wider history of British imperial culture.