Category: Empire
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Two new articles on the international far right, anti-communism and settler colonialism
This is just a quick plug for my two new articles on the international right, anti-communism and settler colonialism. The first is ‘Policing Communism Across the ‘White Man’s World’: Anti-Communist Co-operation between Australia, South Africa and Britain in the Early Cold War’, published in Britain and the World journal. Find a version on academia here.…
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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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Public engagement ftw!
Two guest posts by yours truly have been published in the last two days. The first is on my research into the UK perspective on the dismissal of Gough Whitlam in 1975 and has been published by The Conversation. The second is on Oswald Mosley’s British Union of Fascists and their view of Australia as…
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Russia and the United States have been fighting for dominance in Syria since 1957
Of the latest release of files from the National Archives, most media attention has focused on the files relating to the investigation into the Cambridge Spies Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean. However there was one file relating to the possible reaction by the USSR to an invasion of Syria by the United States in the…
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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 