Category: Colonial/Postcolonial History
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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…
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We’re all off to Newcastle: The AAEH 2015 Conference
Coming around every two years, the Australasian Association of European History conference is being held in Newcastle (Australia) in July and by all accounts, it is one of the funnest conferences to attend for historians in the field (see Brett Holman’s reports from 2013 and 2011). Like many others, I will be making my way…
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The Last Stubborn Outpost of a Past Epoch: The British Communist Party and National Liberation in Zimbabwe, pt. 3
This is the third (and final) post in a series looking at how the Communist Party of Great Britain viewed and interacted with the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe between the late 1960s and the early 1980s. The other instalments can be found here and here. Throughout the 1970s, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe was seen as a weak…
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Communists and the enlistment of ‘native’ soldiers in the Second World War
Although there was no uniform policy across the British Empire, in South Africa and Australia, ‘natives’ were discouraged from enlisting in the armed forces during the Second World War and if enlisted, were not provided with the same level of training and equipment given to white soldiers. In both countries, the Communist Party were one…
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The Communist Party and the 1981 riots
Over the weekend of April 10-12 1981 (34 years ago this last weekend), black and white youth rioted on the streets of Brixton and these riots, along with the riots that spread across the country’s inner cities in July of the same year, became a symbol of the unrest caused by Thatcherism, as well as…
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British attitudes towards the ‘White Australia Policy’ in the inter-war period
I am currently writing a research article on the British Union of Fascists’ view of Australia and how it fit into the fascist view of empire in the inter-war period. As Paul Stocker has recently written, the fascist view of empire was predominantly an extension of already existing conservative attitudes towards the empire, but was…
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How the Aboriginal Tent Embassy challenged the government’s protest laws
Tomorrow is the 43rd anniversary of the establishment of the Aboriginal Tent Embassy outside (Old) Parliament House in Canberra. This post is about how the Tent Embassy challenged the protest laws enacted by the McMahon government the previous year, which sought to quash dissent outside the house of Federal Parliament. The McMahon government believed it…
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Exploiting the Pearce Commission: The British Communist Party and the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia, pt 2
This is the second part in a three-part series of blog posts about the Communist Party of Great Britain’s relationship with the national liberation struggle in Rhodesia/Zimbabwe between 1965 and 1979. This post focuses on the Pearce Commission in 1972 and how the Communists used it to publicise its opposition to the Smith regime. After…
New Historical Express 