Category: Decolonisation
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Sydney, London, Moscow, Beijing: Schisms in the international communist movement, 1947-61
The following forms part of a forthcoming book chapter on the relationship between the Communist Parties in Britain, Australia and South Africa. It builds on previous posts (here and here) and will also be worked into the manuscript that I am currently developing from my postdoctoral research. As per usual, any feedback is most welcome!…
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The Communist Party of Australia and Anti-Colonial Activism in Papua New Guinea
This is the extended part of a paper that I wrote with Padraic Gibson for the Eric Richards’ Symposium in British and Australian History, which was held at Flinders University last week. The abstract for our paper was as below: Alongside the Communist Party of Australia’s (CPA) work for Aboriginal rights, the Party’s demands for…
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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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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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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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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…
New Historical Express 