Category: British Commonwealth
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Cypriot colonial citizenship and UK immigration controls, 1920s-1950s
This week, the citizenship of Cypriots as part of the British Empire/Commonwealth (prior to Cypriot independence in 1960) has been the subject of debate in the Australian media, thanks to the controversy surrounding Senator Nick Xenophon. My colleague Andrekos Varnava and I have worked on the question of Cypriot citizenship during the colonial era and…
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South African progressives and the Suez Crisis of 1956
On 29 October, 1956, the Suez Crisis began with an Israeli attack upon Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula, with the UK and France intervening the subsequent days to ‘protect’ the Suez Canal. Many historians have viewed these actions as the last major ‘roll of the dice’ for the British and French governments hoping to stem the decolonisation…
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New piece at History & Policy: Brexit, imperial nostalgia and the “white man’s world”
This is just a quick note to let people know that the website History & Policy has published a piece by myself and Steven Gray (University of Portsmouth) on Brexit and imperial nostalgia for the ‘white man’s world’ of the former settler colonies. You can read the piece here.
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Forming the National Front of Australia: ASIO and the fledgling far right group
On Saturday June 2, 1978, a group of nine people gathered in a room of the Southern Cross Hotel in the Melbourne CBD to launch the National Front of Australia (NFA). According to the ASIO informant, nine people attended the meeting, including several well-known far right activists, a 16 year old schoolboy and an undercover…
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The road to ‘The Dismissal’ in 1975: The British perspective
The Museum of Australian Democracy has announced that in commemoration of the fortieth anniversary of the dismissal of the Whitlam government, it will be tweeting the events of late 1975 leading up to 11 November. This will be a very interesting for those into in Australian history and helpful in understanding how the events in…
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Communism, anti-racism and the ‘imperialist war’ phase in South Africa, USA and Australia, 1939-41
With the anniversary of the outbreak of the Second World War this week, this post is an extract from a paper that I am writing on the Communist Parties in South Africa, the United States and Australia and their agitation for black soldiers to join the war effort after the Soviet Union joined the Allies…
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Policing Communism Across the British Empire: A Transnational Study
This is a revised (yet shortened) version of the conference paper I gave last week at the XXIV Biennial Conference of the Australasian Association for European History. I am currently knocking it into shape for submission as a journal article, so any feedback, comments or questions is most welcome. If you’re interested in reading the…
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Is it just me or is this extract anti-semitic? A 1943 report on the Communist Party of South Africa
I previously posted this on Facebook, but thought I’d post it here as well… This is an extract from a report on the Communist Party of South Africa by the British High Commissioner in Pretoria during the Second World War, Lord Harlech (or William Ormsby-Gore), to the Colonial Office in London (April 1943): It is…
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Tory anti-communism in the early 1950s
In the early years of the Cold War, many saw communism as a very real and present threat to British society and the maintenance of the British Empire. The consolidation of the Eastern Bloc, the successful revolution in China, the Malayan Emergency and the Korean War heightened fears that a communist revolution could soon occur…
New Historical Express 