| Unit name | Retreat or Rout? British Policy-Making at the End of Empire (Level H Special Subject) |
|---|---|
| Unit code | HIST30010 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | H/6 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 1 (weeks 1 - 12) |
| Unit director | Professor. Potter |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
None |
| School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
After the Second World War, the British empire was destroyed in Burma, India/Pakistan and Palestine, as mass political mobilisation, mass killings and mass displacement of civilians overwhelmed the colonial order. However, at the same time the British reoccupied colonies lost to the Japanese in the Far East, fought off a Communist insurgent challenge in Malaya, suppressed African resistance in Kenya and attempted to harness the remaining colonies as engines of post-war British economic recovery. Only in the wake of the disastrous Suez Crisis of 1956, and a more general ‘profit and loss’ reassessment of colonial rule in the late 1950s, did British policy makers opt for the ending of formal imperial control. Thanks to the British Documents on the End of Empire Project (BDEEP), we can examine British policy-making during the decolonisation period for ourselves, and develop our own understanding of how nationalism, dwindling resources and Cold War diplomacy gradually persuaded British politicians and civil servants that the end of empire was inevitable, and even welcome. Sovereignty was handed over to new ‘national’ governments, to the general satisfaction of many British policy-makers and African and Asian nationalists. As the BDEEP volumes illustrate, during the 1960s Britain’s old alliances, commitments and responsibilities, previously prioritised, were rapidly, even precipitately, abandoned. Democratic structures, hastily constructed in the last days of empire, soon collapsed in many former colonies. Were British policy-makers to blame?
By the end of the unit students should have:
Weekly 2-hour seminar
Access to tutorial consultation with unit tutor in office hours
3000 word essay (summative, 50%) and 2-hour unseen written examination (summative, 50%)
The essay and examination will assess the student’s understanding of the unit’s key themes, the related historiography as developed during their reading and participation in / learning from small group seminars, and ability to understand and deploy relevant primary sources.
Ronald Hyam, Britain’s Declining Empire, 1918-1968 (Cambridge, 2006)
Frank Heinlein, British Government Policy and Decolonisation, 1943-1963 (London, 2002)
J. Brown and Wm. R. Louis (eds.), The Oxford History of the British Empire Volume IV: the Twentieth Century (Oxford, 1999)
John Darwin, Britain and Decolonisation: the Retreat from Empire in the Post-war World (Basingstoke and London, 1988)
