Colonial Sequence 1949 to 1969 (1970) continues the sequence begun in Colonial Sequence 1930 to 1949 and presents a valuable body of evidence for the enquiry into Britain’s colonial actions, written at a time when Britain was retreating from empire. In these collected articles we see Britain’s colonial service in action, snapshots from the time and place, revealing colonialism with all its limitations and mistakes, achievements and ideals.
Much has been written on the how colonial subjects took up British and European ideas and turned them against empire when making claims to freedom and self-determination. The possibility of reverse influence has been largely overlooked. Insurgent Empire shows how Britain's enslaved and colonial subjects were not merely victims of empire and subsequent beneficiaries of its crises of conscience but also agents whose resistance both contributed to their own liberation and shaped British ideas about freedom and who could be free. This book examines dissent over the question of empire in Britain and shows how it was influenced by rebellions and resistance in the colonies from the West Indies and East Africa to Egypt and India. It also shows how a pivotal role in fomenting dissent was played by anti-colonial campaigners based in London at the heart of the empire.
First published in 1999 , this book provides an analysis of the role of constitutional governance from an international and interdisciplinary perspective. The range of disciplines represented in the collection of papers aims to open new perspectives on topics that are frequently left to the expert hands of political scientists and layers alone. It reveals scope for the further study of historical, cultural and rhetorical approaches in tandem with traditional approaches. The blend of cross-national experience and comparisons and the fertilisation of one discipline by another should appeal to a wide interdisciplinary audience.
The middle decades of the twentieth century witnessed the great dramas of the ending of Western imperial rule in Africa and Asia. A series of nationalist onslaughts was launched against the British Empire and these greatly reshaped the modern world. Professor Anthony Low has studied the end of the British Empire and its aftermath for many years. This volume brings together for the first time many of his major essays on the subject.
Margery Perham was an outstanding influence on official and academic thinking on British Colonial rule and decolonization in Africa during the middle part of the century. The book traces how the Second World War transformed her view of colonial rule and of the rate at which it would have to be relinquished.
The White Spaces of Kenyan Settler Writing provides an overview of Kenyan literature by white writers in the half-century before Independence in 1964. Such literature has been over-shadowed by that of black writers to the point of critical ostracism. It deserves attention for its own sake, as the expression of a community that hoped for permanence but suffered both disappointment and dispossession. It deserves attention for its articulation of an increasingly desperate colonial and Imperial situation at a time when both were being attacked and abandoned in Africa, as in other colonies elsewhere, and when a counter-discourse was being constructed by writers in Britain as well as in Africa. Kenya was likely the best-known twentieth-century colony, for it attracted publicity for its iconic safaris and its Happy Valley scandals. Yet behind such scenes were settlers who had taken over lands from the native peoples and who were trying to make a future for themselves, based on the labour, willing or forced, of those people. This situation can be seen as a microcosm of one colonial exercise, and can illuminate the historical tensions of such times. The bibliography is an attempt to collect the literary resources of white Kenya in this historically significant period.
