The Commonwealth: Selected Articles from the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History
The launch of the 2022 Commonwealth Games has reignited debate about the Commonwealth. For many, it is merely a symptom of ‘Imperial nostalgia’. Certainly, as a number of articles that have appeared in the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History demonstrate, British policy-makers were slow to shed the assumptions and habits of imperial rule. The piece by Emmanuel Nwafor Mordi on the repatriation of West African troops after the Second World War argues, for example, that this process was consciously delayed in the interests of underpinning the UK’s continued global ambitions and maintaining British colonial rule. If we currently struggle to define the meaning and value of the Commonwealth, Christopher Prior notes that those questions were no less acute in the 1940s and ‘50s. Some new members of the Commonwealth seized on the idea of it being a ‘work in progress’ to attempt to shape it in their interests. Raphaëlle Khan considers how the post-independence government of India sought to use its discussions around membership to negotiate a common citizenship, something it hoped would help to combat discrimination against Indians across the Empire. Meanwhile, the sorts of racial discrimination that the Indian government was seeking to counter were alive and well in some of the most secretive corners of the British state. As a revealing article by Daniel W B Lomas demonstrates, as late as the 1960s, civil servants were barred from sensitive posts in government by Whitehall’s security vetters on the basis of their ethnicity. Yet Robert Saunders takes aim at the accusation that ‘Imperial nostalgia’ animated the UK’s 2016 vote to leave the EU, seeing this as an unhelpful term which underplays the complex ways in which the legacies of Empire continue to shape the country’s domestic and external policies. Together, our selected articles point to the continued scholarly interest in decolonization and the development of the Commonwealth
Edited by
Professor Philip Murphy(Institute of Commonwealth Studies, University of London, UK)
Professor Stephen Howe(Department of Historical Studies, University of Bristol, UK)