Empires of the mind: the colonial past and the politics of the present

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For Churchill’s speech see “The English Empire of the Mind (Churchill Harvard 1943) Youtube”; Churchill, The Second World War: Volume V, Closing the Ring, 110–111; Fitzgerald, “When Churchill Flirted with Basic English,” 7 May 2012. www.eamonn.com. Accessed 1 August 2019; Windsor, ““Empires of the Mind”? C.K. Ogden, Winston Churchill and Basic English,” https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/030989ar; and See also Toye, Churchill’s Empire, 240.

2. Though the idea lived on into the post-war period. The right-wing politician Duncan Sandys for instance complained in 1965 that ‘as more and more people learn English all over the world, fewer and fewer of them can understand each other?’ He went on to suggest that it might be better to ‘put more emphasis on the teaching of correct pronunciation and less on the teaching of Shakespeare and Chaucer’ House of Commons Debates, 719, 13 April 1965.

3. Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back.

4. 27–30% is still clearly very high and needs more detailed research for full verification‘ See Muslims over represented in the prison population of France’ Defend Europa, April 5 2018. The original 70–80% figure came from a book Islam in Prisons by Farhad Khosrokhavar and appears to have generated a public myth.

5. Katarzyna Falecka, “From colonial Algeria to modern day Europe: the Muslim veil remains an ideological battleground,” The Conversation January 24 2017, www.conversation.com, Accessed 2 August 2019.

6. Clayton, The Wars of French Decolonization, 154.

7. 22 Maria, “The Veil as Metaphor of French Colonized Algeria,” 2002, www.jsri.ro/old/html.version/index/no_3/maria_boariu-articol.htm Accessed 28 July 2019.

8. One recent study of pieds noirs resettled in France after 1962 argues that their former settler identity was deliberately obscured in the interests of redefining their identity as French. See Choi, Decolonization of the French of Algeria: Bringing the Settler Colony Home.

9. Gaston and Hilhorst, Nostalgia as a Cultural and Political Force in Britain, France and Germany … At Home in One’s Past, 27; de Diego and Valiente Ots, “Nostalgia: a conceptual history,” 404–411.

10. As Martin Thomas has pointed out, ‘Conservative and Labour governments of the 1950s and 1960s looked on Algerian colonial violence, its settler dimension especially, not merely as a road not taken, but as a path best avoided, no matter what.’ Thomas, Fight or Flight: Britain, France and Their Roads From Empire, 355.

11. Bleich, “The legacies of history? Colonization and immigrant integration in Britain and France,” 171–195.

12. Rockett, “Algeria in France: War and Defeat in Republican Culture,” PhD Thesis, Department of History, University of Sheffield, September 2011.

13. See especially Gilbert and Vorms, “How the Algerian War Shaped French Cities,”21 March 2012; Ewane, “La guerre d’Algerie a Lyon: la Bataille pour le controle de l’habitat,” 22 February 2012; Blanchard, “The Police and the ‘Algerian Medinas’ in France: Argenteuil, 1957–1962.” 7 March 2102; and de Barros, “’Bidonvilles’: from colonial policy to the Algerian War,”21 March 2012. www.metropolitiques.eu. Accessed 3 August 2019.

14. Shepherd, “The real tributaries of Enoch’s “rivers of blood”,” The Spectator, 7 June 2018.

15. Cannadine, “Emollience: Stanley Baldwi and Francis Brett Young,” 159–185.

16. See in particular Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain.

17. Cannadine, “Statecraft: The Haunting Fear of National Decline,” 26–44.

18. See in particular Brook, Duncan Sandys and the Informal Politics of Britain’s Late Decolonisation.