Abstract
The story of the British Empire in the twentieth century is one of decline, disarray, and despondency. Or so we have been told. Historians have generally viewed Britain’s postwar imperial journey through the lens of reactive defeat. Ronald Hyam best captures this consensus in his work Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonization, 1918–1968 when he uses a cricketing analogy to describe the four main interpretations of Britain’s end of empire: “Either the British were bowled out (by nationalists and freedom-fighters), or they were run out (by imperial overstretch and economic constraints), or they retired hurt (because of a collapse of morale and ‘failure of will’), or they were booed off the field (by international criticism and especially United Nations clamor).”1 The key point here is that in each of these cases, Britain lost the match. Hyam adds his own voice to this cacophony of defeat: “‘[S]uccess’ is not a theme or prediction that history can endorse for the twentieth-century British empire.”2
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Notes
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire: The Road to Decolonisation, 1918–1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), xiii.
Ibid., 1.
For the most recent incarnation of this interpretation of empire, see Bernard Porter, The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society, and Culture in Britain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006).
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonization: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988). For a more recent analysis, see his The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Charles Townshend, Britain’s Civil Wars: Counterinsurgency in the Twentieth Century (London: Faber and Faber, 1986); Thomas Mockaitis, British Counterinsurgency, 1919–1960 (London: Macmillan Ltd., 1990); and John Newsinger, British Counter-Insurgency: From Palestine to Northern Ireland (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002).
Caroline Elkins, Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2005); David Anderson, Histories of the Hanged: The Dirty War in Kenya and the End of Empire (New York and London: W.W. Norton and Company, 2005); Daniel Branch, Defeating Mau Mau, Creating Kenya: Counterinsurgency, Civil War, and Decolonization (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009); and R. F. Holland, Britain and the Revolt in Cyprus, 1954–1959 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Similar case-studies have also been conducted in the journal literature. For Kenya, see David A. Percox, “Internal Security and Decolonization in Kenya, 1956–1963,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 29, Issue 1 (2001), 92–116; for Malaya, see A.J. Stockwell, “Malaysia: The Making of a Neo-Colony?” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 26, Issue 2 (1998), 138–56; for Cyprus, see Robert Holland, “Never, Never Land: British Colonial Policy and the Roots of Violence in Cyprus, 1950–1954,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 21, Issue 3 (1993), 148–76; and for Aden, see Spencer Mawby, “Britain’s Last Imperial Frontier: The Aden Protectorates, 1952–1959,” Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, Volume 29, Issue 2 (2001), 75–100.
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© 2011 Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon
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Grob-Fitzgibbon, B. (2011). Prologue. In: Imperial Endgame. Britain and the World. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-0-230-30038-5_1
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