Revisiting the Transatlantic Triangle: The Decolonisation of the British Caribbean in Light of the Anglo-American Special Relationship

The international collapse in the price of sugar, together with increasing immigration restrictions in the late 1920s and 1930s, produced great pressure on wages and employment throughout the British Caribbean. The underlying tensions reached their boiling point in the years between 1935 and 1938. The chronology proved fateful and speaks for itself: a sugar strike in St. Kitts, 1935; a revolt against an increase of customs duties in St. Vincent, 1935; a coal strike in St. Lucia, 1935; labor disputes in the sugar plantations of British Guiana, 1935; oil strikes in Trinidad and Tobago, 1937; urban riots in Barbados, 1937; and acute disturbances in Jamaica, 1938. While these disturbances, together with the radicalization of the colonial discourse, facilitated the archipelago's constitutional decolonization, attributing all social, economic, and constitutional postwar reforms to the riots alone constitutes an immense leap of faith. A careful analysis of the chronology, let alone a detailed study of the archival records, suggests a robust correlation between the islands' constitutional evolution and the geopolitical worries of the Anglo-American alliance. The German threat, on the one hand, led Britain to re-articulate its colonial project and, on the other, compelled the US to make sure the British did not walk away from their responsibilities. The strategic importance of “the slums of empire” came to light dramatically once the theater of war became apparent. The Caribbean now became “the show window” where British and American interests collided against each other.     

Reluctant Appeaser: Douglas Hailsham and the German Problem 1932–1938

This article considers the ministerial career of Douglas Hogg, first Viscount Hailsham, during the 1930s and, in particular, his attitude towards the appeasement of Germany. Although Hailsham was a leading Conservative in the inter-war period and held key posts during the 1930s, his role in Britain's policy of appeasement has been overlooked. He was consistently wary of the Nazi menace and as Secretary of State for War from 1931–1935 he urged a firm line towards Hitler's Germany. As the decade progressed, however, the inescapable realities of Britain's international predicament drove Hailsham to support the government's appeasement policy, at least until September 1938. Although he forecast the near inevitability of the Second World War, he could not devise a viable alternative to the appeasement of Germany. Hailsham's experience thus offers a significant addition to the historiography of appeasement and to understanding the distinctions between “appeasers” and “anti-appeasers.”     

Tweaking the Lion's Tail: Edgar J. Tarr,the Canadian Institute of International Affairs,and the British Empire, 1931–1950

In its first 2 decades the Canadian Institute of International Affairs (CIIA), Canada's premier foreign policy think tank, never functioned merely as a neutral and apolitical research organization. Under the leadership of Edgar Tarr, president of the Monarch Life Assurance Company, and in its capacity as the Canadian Council of the transnational Institute of Pacific Relations (IPR), in the 1930s and 1940s the CIIA became an instrument that championed Canadian national autonomy and sought to expand Canada's international role, while challenging British imperialism, racism, and Anglo–Saxon dominance. Prominent Canadian diplomats and other officials were complicit in this enterprise, which reached its apogee at the IPR conference held at Mont Tremblant, Quebec, in December 1942. The CIIA's activities during this period revealed the porosity and imprecision of the boundaries in Canada between the state and non-state realms. Throughout World War II, DEA and other Canadian government representatives attended CIIA and IPR conferences as “official non-officials,” effectively cooperating with private individuals in a network of purportedly non-governmental organizations that enabled Canada to exert leverage on the British government, reject British leadership, align itself with the United States, and secure a greater world role. CIIA leaders and Canadian officials also consciously encouraged nationalist forces in India, China, and Southeast Asia that sought to reject colonial rule and Western dominance. CIIA activities thus became part of a web of diplomatic interactions across a transnational network of think tanks within and outside the British Empire that had their own impact upon international affairs.     

The Preventive War that Never Happened: Britain,France, and the Rise of Germany in the 1930s

The theory of “preventive war” states that, under certain conditions, states respond to rising adversaries with military force in an attempt to forestall an adverse shift in the balance of power. British and French passivity in response to the rapid rise of Germany in the 1930s would appear to constitute one of the leading empirical anomalies in the theory, one the theory's proponents must explain. After clarifying the meaning of the preventive motivation for war and specifying the conditions under which it should be the strongest, we examine French and British behavior in the crises over the Rhineland in 1936 and Sudeten Czechoslovakia in 1938 through an intensive study of government documents and private papers. We argue that French political leaders, anticipating a continuing adverse shift in relative power, wanted to confront Hitler, but only with British support, which was not forthcoming. British leaders believed, even by 1936, that the balance of power had already shifted in Germany's favor, but that German ascendancy was only temporary and that British rearmament would redress the balance of power in a few years. We contrast our argument with alternative interpretations based on domestic political pressures and ideologically driven beliefs and interests.     

Sir Eric Phipps,the British Government,and the Appeasement of Germany, 1933–1937

This article argues that Sir Eric Phipps’ reputation as an “anti-appeaser” of Germany during his Berlin embassy 1933–1937 is not accurate. While Phipps was not in favor of placating Hitler by making territorial concessions, he had much in common with those who had sought a rapprochement with Germany in the 1920s through a policy of inclusion and reconciliation. Particular importance is placed on Phipps’ attitude towards the League of Nations, with detailed consideration also being accorded to his relationship with the British Foreign Secretaries and Foreign Office officials of the period, as well as his views on the Entente Cordiale.     

Some Men Named William Hunter

The Hunter family of Rhode Island produced two important American diplomatists of the nineteenth century. The elder William Hunter served for nine years as the American envoy to Brazil, where he exerted positive influence over the young emperor, Dom Pedro II. The younger William Hunter entered the Department of State in 1829 and spent fifty-seven years there under twenty-one Secretaries of State. For decades the department’s third-ranking officer, he became its “mentor and authority.” The overlapping careers of Hunter and his two successors helped guide American diplomacy until 1937.     

Henry Cabot Lodge,Hawaii, and the Shift from Continental to Hemispheric Defense

Over the course of the 1890s, the United States shifted from a continental defense model toward a hemispheric one. Senator Henry Cabot Lodge (R-MA) was a leading proponent of this shift. Lodge was convinced that the United States needed to build a blue-water navy, acquire maritime bases overseas, establish its predominance in Central America, and push US influence out into the Pacific. The first test of this vision came not against Spain or Germany in the Caribbean, but against the possibility of British and Japanese influence over Hawaii in 1894–95. Domestic political and economic considerations acted mainly as a constraint on Lodge’s vision rather than as a basis for it. The main impetus was strategic, as he looked to safeguard an extended security zone for the United States in Atlantic, Pacific, and Caribbean waters. As he put it, “I would take and hold the outworks, as we now hold the citadel, of American power.”     

伪满协和会分会规则的演变及成效

伪满协和会是近代日本侵略中国东北时期由日本侵略者勾结汉奸在伪满洲国发起成立的政治组织,分会既是协和会的基层组织单位,又是协和会开展活动的主体。1935年2月第一次调整协和会分会规则时,只调整了分会设置原则。1937年8月的第二次调整则对分会规则进行了全面调整。其目的都是为适应日本侵华政策的时局需要,最大限度地发挥协和会在伪满殖民统治的作用。经过这两次调整,分会数量大幅度增加,其恶劣行径所影响的范围也日趋扩大,给中国东北社会及东北人民带来深重的灾难。     

Review essay: Alternative histories of revolutionaries in modern South Asia: context,chronology, and archives

Abstract

This review essay discusses two recent monographs on revolutionaries and political violence in South Asia, Kama Maclean’s A Revolutionary History of Interwar India: Violence, Image, Voice and Text (2015) and Durba Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists: Political Violence and the Colonial State in India, 1919-1947 (2017). Ghosh and Maclean’s books contribute to an expanding body of scholarly work on anticolonial politics in India, a rich historiography on liberalism in the British Empire, and studies of visual culture and oral histories in modern South Asia. Specifically, Maclean’s A Revolutionary History centers on the Hindustan Socialist Republican Army (HSRA) in Punjab and Delhi in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Maclean reconfigures the political terrain of India’s independence struggle and illustrates the importance of revolutionary violence in nonviolent politics through unstudied visual sources and oral histories. In turn, Ghosh’s Gentlemanly Terrorists focuses on Bengal, particularly revolutionaries in the Anushilan Samiti and Jugantar from 1919 to 1947. Complicating the history of colonial constitutionalism as a gradual expansion of rights and representation, Ghosh demonstrates how constitutional reforms that aimed to promote liberal governance in India were tied to repressive emergency legislation. This review essay addresses how Gentlemanly Terrorists and A Revolutionary History contribute to ongoing efforts to rethink both the political chronology and the wider political landscape of interwar India by incorporating revolutionaries into the story of independence. It also considers how Maclean and Ghosh creatively utilize non-state archives and vernacular sources, in conjunction with colonial records, to follow the retelling of revolutionary histories in different media.     

A history of drones: moral(e) bombing and state terrorism

This article argues that an historical investigation of air power makes possible the critique of current regimes of drone surveillance and bombing as a practice of state terrorism. By identifying certain key themes regularly used in terrorism studies for the classification of violence as “terrorism”, this article shows that early air power theorists understood military aircraft as essentially instruments of terrorism. A central argument permeating these theorists’ conception of air power was that the military value of aviation lay in its capacity to target the enemy’s population and, by means of bombing, generate a significant “moral effect” – that is, a psychological effect against the morale of civilians. This strategic formula constituted a central component of British air control schemes during the interwar period, where terror bombing was deployed systematically in order to control and pacify colonial populations. In arguing that widespread and long-lasting terror remains an inalienable feature of air power, this article concludes with a call for a critique that accounts for the fact that current deployments of armed drones – for instance, the US “targeted killings” programme – effectively reproduce these historical and material conditions of terrorist violence.     

Between policy and reality: multiculturalism, the second generation, and the third space in Britain

Despite the significant level of cultural diversity that exists in contemporary Europe as a consequence of immigration and diaspora, state policies on multiculturalism in several countries have not kept pace with the complex and dynamic processes created by these pluralising social forces and realities. This has given rise to exclusionary contexts that have led to feelings of alienation by immigrant communities. In Britain, the violent street confrontations in Bradford in 2001 and the London bombings of 2005 both epitomised, as well as were outcomes of, the British nation state’s failure to foster dialogue and a sense of inclusion among these communities. Foregrounding the extent of the grievances and frustrations prevalent in British society, these social disturbances have also contributed to renewed debates on issues of national identity, belonging, and multiculturalism. More importantly, these clashes, involving mostly the second-generation British Asian Muslim community, have brought to the fore the dissonance between assumptions of belonging underlying “state multiculturalism”, which moves to fix and stabilise identities, and those that inform the complex processes of identification and constructions of the “third space” of belonging by racialised minority communities. Focusing on Britain, this paper’s central hypothesis is that official multiculturalism has failed to take into account the fluid and heterogeneous frames in and through which second-generation British Asians ground their cultural and political identities and demands. As many of the nation states in Europe are today, like Britain, multiethnic in composition with expanding Asian communities, how successfully or not Britain modifies its integration policies with respect to the presence of minorities of immigrant origin has enormous implications not only for Europe but also for Asia and Asia–Europe relations.     

The subjective and objective violence of terrorism: analysing “British values” in newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack

This article examines how ?i?ek’s analysis of “subjective” violence can be used to explore the ways in which media coverage of a terrorist attack is contoured and shaped by less noticeable forms of “objective” (symbolic and systemic) violence. Drawing upon newspaper coverage of the 2017 London Bridge attack, it is noted how examples of “subjective” violence were grounded in the externalisation of a clearly identifiable “other”, which symbolically framed the terrorists and the attack as tied to and representative of the UK Muslim community. Examples of “systematic” violence were most notable in the ideological edifice that underpinned this framing but also in the ways in which newspaper reports served to draw upon British values in the aftermath of the attack. This directed attention away from the contradictions within the UK, towards narratives that sought to “fix” these contradictions through eradicating the problem of “the other” and/or by violently protecting the British values “they” seek to undermine. As a consequence, newspaper coverage worked to uphold the illusion that “peace” could be achieved by eradicating terrorism through further forms of objective violence, including, internment without trial; the “ripping up” of human rights; and closer surveillance of Muslim communities. Indeed, it was this unacknowledged violence that worked to maintain British values in the press' coverage.     

Major-General Sir Douglas Gracey: Peacekeeper or Peace Enforcer?

Current events in Afghanistan have once again placed the political context of British forces acting in difficult circumstances under the global microscope. This article focuses upon the high policy difficulties of administering peacekeeping duties by examining the controversial role of Major-General Gracey in South Vietnam and Cambodia in 1945. Gracey's British and Indian troops were deployed in French Indo-China to oversee the surrender of Japanese forces and the liberation of the Axis occupied territory. But they quickly became entangled in peacekeeping duties between the returning French colonial regime and the emergence of various Vietnamese groups determined to take advantage of the power vacuum. By examining both primary and secondary sources and scrutinising Gracey's private papers this article attempts to reappraise a difficult period in British history.     

Nation-Building in the Philippines: Rooseveltian Statecraft for Imperial Modernization in an Emergent Transatlantic World Order

The acquisition of the Philippines in the wake of the Spanish–American War gave Theodore Roosevelt's presidency an unprecedented mandate for conflict resolution, post-war reconstruction and development through modernization and democratization. A network of bilateral inter-colonial relations contributed to the extension of triangular transatlantic reciprocal influence. The lessons of America's continental empire-building, assessment of competing colonial experiments, and modern attempts at public diplomacy fed into a strategy of preventive containment of Japanese expansionism through popular consent. The intention was to institute an enduring “special relationship” to build up America's power in the Pacific, and to transform the Philippines into a model that would then “naturally” expand into a transcontinental informal empire by proxy.     

Being Nuclear on a Budget: Churchill,Britain and “Atoms for Peace,” 1953–1955

This analysis critiques the impact of President Dwight Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” initiative on Washington’s alliance with Britain, itself a newly crowned nuclear state. Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s taste for personal diplomacy led him to support his friend’s proposal without real consideration for how the contributions of fissionable materials and manpower demanded by the scheme would damage Britain’s overstretched domestic nuclear project. Membership of an international atomic agency allowed Britain to reaffirm its global status whilst depleting the resources needed to develop its native technology. In turn, the article discusses the commercial challenge posed by American nuclear firms and highlights how reactor exports quickly became a contest between the quality of British research and the quantity of American subsidies. In this way, it establishes how “Atoms for Peace” prejudiced both Britain’s domestic nuclear effort and export potential, in turn shedding light on Washington’s relations with an ailing Great Power.     

International Administration Between the Wars: A Reappraisal

This article traces the chronology of the interwar decline of European influence and power, arguing that its origins outside Europe are to be found as much in the paradoxical status of international administration of colonial and post-colonial areas as in the direct challenges posed to European stability by revisionist states in the early 1930s. It demonstrates that an inherent ambivalence toward the interwar colonial world and its relationship to Europe presaged and conditioned the collapse of Europe's own balance of power.     

In Pursuit of a Pacific Strategy:British Planning for the Defeat of Japan, 1943–45

This article seeks to explain why the British pushed for a role in Pacific operations during the Second World War when it faced other strategic priorities in Southeast Asia, as well as a powerful American military that maintained tight control over operational decision-making. Although several quarters in Whitehall, including the Prime Minister, Winston Churchill, had doubts about the necessity of a Pacific strategy, there were sensible reasons behind pursuing such a course. It would illustrate to an “anti-imperialist” America that Britain was not only interested in recovering its colonial possessions but also prepared to fight the Japanese on their homeland. More importantly, taking part in the main operations would allow the British to claim a voice at the peace table while helping to encourage the Americans to cement their close working relationship with Britain in the postwar period.     

The Eurafrique Initiative,Ernest Bevin and Anglo–French Relations in the Foreign Office, 1945–1950

This analysis examines the prevalence of Eurafrican thinking in the British Foreign Office throughout the late 1940s. Drawing on British and French diplomatic archives, it reveals the centricity of the Foreign Office, and British Embassy at Paris to a project largely confined to the mental map of the Foreign Secretary, Ernest Bevin. The financial stains facing Britain, often misinterpreted as “decline”, seemed a temporary phenomenon that “multilateral European cooperation” could rectify. Although shelved in 1949–1950, the Eurafrique initiative has seen few historians analyse its strategies across the corridors of power. This analysis reappraises British desires for Western European “co-operation” and a renewed faith in the Entente Cordiale as a geo-political counterweight to growing East–West bipolarity. Discussions of strategies to pool African possessions to recover the European economy were short-lived. Yet they challenged prospects of long-term economic dependence upon the United States in favour of an Anglo–French led European bloc.     

The Road to Pergau Dam: Aid Policy,Ideology, and the Thatcher Government

This analysis charts the changes in British aid policy under the Margaret Thatcher government (1979–1990). In particular, it examines the impact of so-called neo-liberal ideology in overseas development strategy in an era where “structural adjustment”—aid in return for market-based reforms—became World Bank and International Monetary Fund orthodoxy. There is some evidence to show British increases in multilateral aid during the 1980s supported a neo-liberal aid policy. Bilateral aid policy, however, demonstrated a subordination of aid to foreign policy and a pro-business—not ideologically pro-market or neo-liberal—alignment. One of the results of these structural changes was the Pergau Dam scandal at the end of the Thatcher years.     

“Only the USSR Has… Clean Hands”: The Soviet Perspective on the Failure of Collective Security and the Collapse of Czechoslovakia, 1934–1938 (Part 2)

The second part of this two part essay focuses on the Czechoslovak crisis in 1938, based on papers from the Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii in Moscow and the recently published journals of Soviet ambassador in London, Ivan M. Maiskii. The essay is also grounded in British, French, and Romanian archives, and the standard document collections, including the American and German series. The Soviet Union did all that it could do, given Anglo-French abdication, to help the Czechoslovak goverment defend its independance against Nazi Germany. The British and French portrayed a manipulative Soviet Union, seeking to abandon treaty commitments to Czechoslovakia, while at the same time they fled from obligations to Prague and projected their own evasions onto Moscow. In spite of everything, the Czechoslovak president, Edvard Bene?, might have held the fate of his country in his own hands. Would he do “something crazy”, would Czechoslovakia fight alone at the outset, hoping that public opinion would force France and Great Britain into war? Tragically, Bene? would not bid va banque and indeed was complicit in the Anglo-French abandonment of his country. By its reckoning, the Soviet Union escaped the crisis with “clean hands”, though a clear conscience was no consolation in Moscow, where the government had to contemplate the ruin of collective security and its own isolation in Europe.