Empire, Anglosphere, Commonwealth: A Review Essay

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Notes

1. There’s a pre-eminent British view that all good and liberal things come from the British experience. But the English are notoriously ‘a mad, bad, and dangerous people’, and accordingly British government provides for the most draconian and tyrannical mechanisms for their control. These were, of course, embedded in colonial arrangements and tended to be resorted to more frequently abroad. Not surprisingly, therefore, Defence of the Realm Acts, Press Acts, Freedom of Assembly Acts and their like, and the criminalisation of certain social practices (particularly with regard to marriage and sex) feature prominently in the laws of post-colonial states.

2. Indeed, a whole special issue of Modern Asian Studies, ‘Petitioning and Political Cultures in South Asia’, Guest Editors Rohit De and Robert Travers, is devoted to this subject: Modern Asian Studies, 53 (1), 2019, pp 1–312.

3. The text of Princess Elizabeth’s broadcast can be found at: https://www.royal.uk/21st-birthday-speech-21-april-1947

4. B E Kipkorir, Descent From Cherang’any Hills: Memoirs of a Reluctant Academic (Macmillan Kenya, Nairobi, 2009), pp. 102–103. Dr Kipkorir went on from school to Makerere University and Cambridge. He was to serve Kenya in local government, as chairman of the Kenya Commercial Bank, and as Ambassador to Washington.

5. Princess Elizabeth’s speech, ibid.

6. A young and particularly perceptive journalist spent the critical years of rapid decolonisation writing for The Times. His direct experience was mostly in Africa. Reflecting on that decade of change from the calm of an administrative appointment in Oxford University, he wrote a devastating and brilliant criticism of how it was all done: W P Kirkman, Unscrambling an Empire: a critique of British Colonial Policy 1956 − 66 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966).

7. The word was coined in 1995 by the science fiction (sic) writer Neal Stephenson in his novel The Diamond Age.

8. Kenny & Pearce show that for more than a decade right of centre politicians in Britain, Canada, Australia and the United States have been in communication, visiting each other, and supporting research institutes exploring ways in which the formation of supra-national economic blocs (like the European Union) or other treaty-based international agreements might be unsettled and overall economic regulation be reduced. This has proved an attractive issue not just for some British Conservative Party politicians but for right-wing nationalists elsewhere in the world.

9. Dr Manmohan Singh was speaking on the occasion of receiving an Honorary Degree at Oxford University (8 July 2005). The text of his speech can be found: https://arisebharat.com/tag/dr-manmohan-singh-at-oxford-university/

10. The London Declaration, 28 April 1949, enabled India, as a Republic, to remain a full member of the Commonwealth. In an after-dinner talk to celebrate what is widely recognised as ‘the birth of the modern Commonwealth’, Dr Alex May put 1949 in historical perspective, making a spirited case for the Statute of Westminster (1931) as an alternative birthday, among others. https://www.commonwealthroundtable.co.uk/commonwealth/commonwealth70-reflections-on-the-london-declaration-of-1949/.

11. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 6, 1, 1953, pp 1–15. Few short academic papers have had the creative impact of these 15 pages.

12. The Round Table: The Commonwealth Journal of International Affairs, vol. 108, no. 1, February 2019, pp 9–20.