Abstract
As Prime Minister Harold MacMillan said, the ‘winds of change’ were sweeping through the British Empire in 1960.1 India, Pakistan and Ghana were already independent states and, within a few short years, all of Britain’s African colonies followed. While MacMillan’s pronouncement referred specifically to political changes in Britain’s African colonies, no one, including MacMillan, could yet foresee what sort of impact these changes would have on politics, society and culture within the United Kingdom. It was apparent that politicians, senior civil servants and the upper classes put great stock in the empire, but the extent to which the majority of Britons knew or cared about the empire has been widely disputed.2 The extreme right were certainly concerned about the loss of empire as were the more moderate right wing of the Conservative Party. Churchill himself was a strong advocate of empire and particularly bemoaned the loss of India.3 The picture on the left was slightly more complicated. Labour Party policy was that Britain should give up its empire. Opposition to empire was one of the few truly unifying aspects of the postwar British left.4 There was general agreement that colonies and colonial peoples should be in control of their own destinies, but what exactly this meant for Britain — what this did to Britain’s international position, its place in the world — was a point of dispute.
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For example, see the ongoing debate in the following texts: John M. MacKenzie (1986) Imperialism and Popular Culture, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester University Press);
John M. MacKenzie (1984) Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960, Studies in Imperialism (Manchester University Press); Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists;
Bernard Porter (2004) The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–2004, 4th edn (Harlow: Pearson/Longman); Stuart Ward (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire
Richard Toye (2010) Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (London: Macmillan).
Stephen Howe (1993) Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire, 1918–1964 (Oxford: Clarendon Press).
V.H. Rothwell (1992) Anthony Eden: A Political Biography 1931–1957 (Manchester University Press), p. 243.
James Hinton (1989) Protests and Visions: Peace Politics in Twentieth-century Britain (London: Hutchinson Radius); Holger Nehring (2005) National Internationalists: British and West German Protests against Nuclear Weapons, the Politics of Transnational Communications and the Social History of the Cold War, 1957–1964’, Contemporary European History 14, no. 4.
Matthew Grant (2010) After the Bomb: Civil Defence and Nuclear War in Britain, 1945–68 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan).
Ruth Brandon (1987) The Burning Question: The Anti-nuclear Movement since1945 (London: Heinemann), p. 40.
Parkin, Middle Class Radicalism, p. 106. See also Byrne, The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, p. 42; Meredith Veldman (1994) Fantasy the Bomb, and the Greening of Britain: Romantic Protest, 1945–1980 (Cambridge University Press), pp. 121, 140–1,
Paul Mercer (1986) ‘Peace’ of the Dead: The Truth behind the Nuclear Disarmers (London: Policy Research Publications), p. 60.
Peace News, 21 Feb. 1958, quoted in Frank E. Myers (1965) ‘British Peace Politics: The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and the Committee of 100, 1957–1962’ (PhD thesis, Columbia University), p. 102.
Bertrand Russell (1961) Has Man a Future? (London: George Allen & Unwin), p. 83.
Robert F. Kennedy (1969) 13 Days: The Cuban Missile Crisis October 1962 (London: W.W. Norton & Company);
David Detzer (1979) The Brink: Cuban Missile Crisis, 1962 (New York: Crowell);
Don Munton and David A. Welch (2007) The Cuban Missile Crisis: A Concise History (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press);
Heather Lehr Wagner (2011) The Cuban Missile Crisis: Cold War Confrontation (New York: Chelsea House).
See for example Dominic Sandbrook (2007) White Heat: A History of Britain in the Swinging Sixties, 1964–70 (London: Abacus).
See for example Ferdynand Zweig (1961) The Worker in an Affluent Society: Family Life and Industry (Heinemann: London), pp. xvii, 268;
Ronald Inglehart (1977) The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles among Western Publics (Princeton University Press);
David Kynaston (2009) Family Britain, 1951–1957 (New York: Walker & Co.).
Lawrence Black and Hugh Pemberton (eds) (2004) An Affluent Society? Britain’s Post-War ‘Golden Age’ Revisited, Modern Economic and Social History Series (Aldershot: Ashgate);
Lawrence Black (2003) The Political Culture of the Left in Britain, 1951–1964: Old Labour, New Britain?, Contemporary History in Context Series (Basingstoke: Palgrave); Stephen Brooke (2001) ‘Gender and Working Class Identity in Britain During the 1950s’, Journal of Social History 34, no. 4.
Gerard J. De Groot (2009) The 60s Unplugged: A Kaleidoscopic History of a Disorderly Decade (London: Pan).
There are no historical works which discuss the NUS as an organisation. The only published work on the British student movement is that of Nick Thomas (2002) ‘Challenging Myths of the 1960s: The Case of Student Protest in Britain’, Twentieth Century British History 13, no. 3, 282.
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© 2013 Jodi Burkett
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Burkett, J. (2013). British ‘Greatness’ after Empire. In: Constructing Post-Imperial Britain. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008916_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137008916_2
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