STEPHEN HOWE Ruskin College, Oxford

Internal Decolonization?
British Politics since Thatcher
as Post-colonial Trauma
Abstract
In recent years a growing number of commentators, especially ones associated
with the idea of a new imperial history, have argued that British politics and
culture remained more heavily shaped by colonialismand decolonization than had
previously conventionally been thought. This paper pursues that line of thought in
relation to political debates during and since the 1980s, especially those concerning
devolution, constitutional reform, and race relations. It then, however, highlights
some major problems with and limitations of this kind of argument, suggesting
that the emerging historiography of Britain's internal decolonization remains at
present empirically weak, conceptually cloudy, and often unhelpfully polarized.
This paper suggests an argument about British political debates and
developments since the 1980s as a form of internal decolonization. It
proposes that a number of transformations, and several converging lines of
analysis and critique, especially from the left, since the Thatcher years
should be seen as distinctively post-colonial or post-imperial: that a set of
ideas about a crisis of the British state, together with consequent attempts
to transform or even in some sense dismantle that state, were fairly direct
outgrowths of, or intimately intertwined with, the era and processes of
decolonization.
In the first part of the article, that argument is sketched in fairly broad
strokes. I then call it into question, to cast doubt on the status and
explanatory scope of my own claims. In other words, this paper comes
close to auto-destruction, or self-deconstruction. It follows almost inevit-
ably that it raises doubts about the whole emerging structure of debate
Twentieth Century British History, Vol. 14, No. 3, 2003, pp. 286304 OUP 2003, all rights reserved
on the internal effects of the Empire, its ends, and its aftermaths. This is
naturally an unusual, even idiosyncratic, approach. It is intended, however,
to suggest that the uncertainties expressed hereinsofar as they may not
be only the authors personal uncertaintiesmight perhaps be enabling or
liberating for future work in this field. If it is correct to suggest that many of
the key questions about the long-term domestic effects of decolonization
remain entirely open (a suggestion also explored from a very different
angle in Bill Schwarzs contribution to this collection
1
), then perhaps others
can take encouragement from that. The self-questioning in which the
second part of this paper engages arises from and reflects a quite genuine,
even pervasive, intellectual dilemma at the current state of researchon such
questions.
Analysis of the domestic consequences of British colonialism and
decolonization is in many ways a very new subject. But it is also, of course,
a subject with a substantial prehistory. Nineteenth-century Liberals and
Radicals worriedrepeatedly that the Empire might at best distract attention
andresources fromdomestic reform, at worst breedhabits of autocracy and
corruption which, repatriated from colonies to metropole, would destroy
the spirit of liberty at home.
2
Early British socialists substantially inherited
and repeated such RadicalLiberal arguments, though they coexisted
uneasily with pro-imperial Empire Socialist beliefs in such milieux as the
early Fabian Society, in Labours parliamentary ranks and even among
Communists.
3
A little later, various left-wing intellectuals viewed the
Empire as the crucial obstacle to social transformation within Britain
andin an argument of which George Orwell was the most famous, most
citedexponentto the development of a truly radical, egalitarian British or
English patriotism.
4
(They were typically unclear and unconcerned as to
whether it was Britishness or Englishness that they had mainly in mind.)
This was certainly not only a claimadvancedwithinthe British left: the idea
of a fundamental incompatibility between the spirit of liberty at home and
dictatorial rule in the colonies, and that only by dismantling the Empire
could the British return to their own better traditions and values, was
common to anti-colonialist thinkers from Gandhi to C. L. R. James or
George Padmore. Implication in imperialism, on this view, was not merely
1
Bill Schwarz, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette: Reflections on the Emergence
of Post-colonial Britain, Twentieth-Century British History, 14 (2003), 264285.
2
Miles Taylor, Imperium et Libertas? Rethinking the Radical Critique of Imperialism
during the Nineteenth Century, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 19 (1991).
3
Howe, Anticolonialism in British Politics: The Left and the End of Empire 19181964 (Oxford,
1993), esp. ch. 2.
4
For instance, Orwell, Not Counting Niggers, originally published in Adelphi (July 1939);
Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters, vol. 2 (London, 1968). Howe, Labour Patriotism
191983, in Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National
Identity, vol. 1, History and Politics (London, 1989).
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 287
a symptom of British liberalisms and later socialisms alleged domestic
shortcomings, but was their main cause.
5
Economic arguments were often conjoined to these political ones:
both the classic Hobsonian case that investment in the Empire was
dysfunctional for Britains economic well-being, benefiting only very small
and essentially parasitic social enclaves, and the more specifically Marxist
claim that a privileged portion of the British working classa labour
aristocracyderived those relative privileges, and hence a reactionary
politics, from the Empire. The Hobsonian case has undergone an intriguing
recent revival, to which we shall refer later. The labour aristocracy theory,
though, was always a focus for division and conceptual confusion, even
among British Marxists, andalthougha fewsocialist historians triedto dust
it off and update it in the 1970s, it has essentially vanished from sight. A
much more recent approach has tried to do essentially the same work by
shifting the explanatory emphasis from economics to racial consciousness,
suggesting that early British Labour developed a specifically white-
imperial or British-diasporic kind of internationalism; but the formulation
of this case has seemed thus far to be frankly speculative and constructed
on a very narrow evidential base.
6
Far more lastingly influential, though also highly contested even among
socialist historians, was a line of argument developedwithinthe NewLeft
of the 1960s, notably by Perry Anderson and Tom Nairn. This saw imperial
power as having enabled the perpetuation of control over the British state
by a largely pre-industrial, patrician elite. Britains bourgeois revolution
always remained incomplete, and it was external expansion that kept it
so, preserving what Anderson and Nairn repeatedly denounced as an
anachronistic polity and culture, lacking equally in a properly modernizing
industrial bourgeoisie, a suitably class-conscious proletariat and an intelli-
gentsia with the capacity for holistic self-analysis. The Empire was the
incubatorand later, the life-support machinefor political deference and
hierarchy, constitutional sclerosis, economic inefficiency, cultural insularity,
and archaism.
7
All these were polemics and hypotheses specific to the leftmainly the
left outside the Labour Party. It is arguable, however, that rather more
mutedvariants on many of themcouldbe found elsewhere in the 1950s and
5
See, for instance, Jamess The Case for West Indian Self-government, (1933) in Anna
Grimshaw (ed.), The C. L. R. James Reader (Oxford, 1992).
6
See Alastair Bonnett, How the British Working Class Became White: The Symbolic
(Re)formation of Racialised Capitalism, Journal of Historical Sociology, 11 (1998); Jonathan
Hyslop, The Imperial Working Class Makes Itself White: White Labourism in Britain,
Australia, andSouthAfricabefore the First WorldWar, Journal of Historical Sociology, 12 (1999).
7
Anderson, Components of the National Culture, New Left Review, 50 (1968), Origins of
the Present Crisis, NLR, 23 (1964); Nairn, The English Working Class, NLR, 75 (1972).
288 S T E P HE N HOWE
1960s. Various commentatorsmost recently, Stuart Wardhave sug-
gested that decolonization had a major if only partly acknowledged impact
on the condition of Britain debates of those years, with a broad range of
economic and political commentators intimately associating Britains
comparatively poor economic performance, the widely perceived crisis of
confidence among its ruling elites, and self-questioning about national
purpose and even identity with reactions to decolonization.
8
I think such
arguments remain at present avowedly speculative. The received wisdom
that decolonization had astonishingly little impact on Britain itself, that
public opinion remained largely indifferent to it, and that its cultural reson-
ances were scattered, minor, and largely ephemeral is being questioned
rather than overturned. Most suggestions to the contrary have been either
polemical or allusive. At one extreme, to be encountered among many
literary and cultural critics, the radical transformation of Britain through
decolonization, its post-colonialization, is established by reference to a
handful of specific cultural artefacts or trends, whether these are the novels
of Salman Rushdie (the most frequently cited instance of all) or Zadie
Smith, or changes in British dietary or musical tastes. At the other extreme,
some influential recent work in cultural and social history proceeds simply
by assuming that colonial expansion was both ubiquitously constitutive of
metropolitan British culture and, equally, crucially dependent on it. It then
follows naturally that the continuing internal consequences and manifes-
tations of the Empires aftermath must be equally ubiquitous. Historians or
other commentators who fail to recognize this are culpably myopic. Their
deficiencies in this regard must, it is suggested, be explicable in essentially
political terms, above all by reference to implied attitudes towards British
race relations. David Cannadines Ornamentalism has been a particular
target for attack in these ways. Antoinette Burton charges of that work that:
if to ornamentalize is to trivialize, then this book has a lot to account for,
since, as historians of modern Britain know, to dismiss or even subordinate
race to class is to risk turning a blind eye to its ongoing impact in Britain,
fromLondon to Oldhamand beyond.
9
Asserting the enduring centralityof
8
Ward, Introduction, in idem. (ed.), British Culture and the End of Empire (Manchester,
2001), 911. For some interestinglyrelatedarguments onpost-imperial France, seeKristinRoss,
Fast Cars and Clean Bodies. Decolonization and the Reordering of French Culture (Cambridge, MA,
1995).
9
Burtons reviewof Cannadines Ornamentalism, AmericanHistorical Review107 (2002), 498.
The same accusation is repeatedly levelled in numerous contributions to the special issue of
the Journal of Colonialism and Colonial History (vol. 3, issue 1, 2002) devoted to Ornamentalism:
see especially Tony Ballantyne, Introduction: Debating Empire; Jean Allman England
Swings Like a Pendulum Do? . . . Africanist Reflections on Cannadines Reto-Empire; Geof
Eley, Beneath the Skin. Or, How to Forget about the Empire Without Really Trying; Modhavi
Kale, OHBEhave! The Mini-Me Version; and, perhaps most aggressively, Burton once more,
Dj Vu All over Again.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 289
the Empire to contemporary British life is not so much an historical
argument as a political or, indeed, ethical (anti-racist) imperative.
Among those few historians who have thus far sought to go beyond
such unhelpful polarities, quite divergent approaches are already in
evidence. Should one accept the older conventional wisdom that decolon-
ization was not an issue of great significance for most post-war British
citizens, and certainly not a traumatic experience, but, rather than taking
that situation for granted as British historians have tended to do, regard it
as a conundrum demanding serious scrutiny? Or should we question the
original assumption, and expect to discover symptoms of post-colonial
trauma in all kinds of unexpected places? Even, for instance, in the
fascinating recent volume of essays on British Culture and the End of Empire
which Stuart Ward has edited. Ward himself inclines to the latter view; but
contributor John MacKenzie subscribes to the former, which he interprets
by way of the piecemeal nature of the decolonization process, the official
presentation of it as planned and voluntary, and the delusions of continued
global strength, which obscured the facts of decline from clear viewto most
people in Britain.
10
Very few of the other articles in that volume explicitly
engage with the general interpretive issues at all. Wendy Websters closely
parallel work in progress, meanwhile, appears to be moving towards a
stance similar to Wards.
11
Meanwhile our picture of how policy-makers and official minds were
thinking about and responding to these developments remains inevitably
tentative, as the fruits of research on newly opened government papers on
the withdrawal from East of Suez, the fate of Malaysia, and its relations
both to Indonesias regional ambitions and to the war in Vietnam, or the
endof the formal Empire in the Gulf, for instance, are only just beginning to
appearwith Wm. Roger Louis, as always, at the cutting edge of such
investigations.
12
We seem to be getting a picture of official and ministerial
thinking remaining more imperially minded later than some of us might
have expected. We are, for instance, catching glimpses of an Edward Heath
who was, alongside his Europeanism, also intenselyconcernedto retain the
remnants of imperial influence or prestigesuggesting that we should not
perhaps assume so readily as some have tendedto do that Britishstatesmen
in the 1960s and 1970s were either European-minded or globalists-cum-
Atlanticists. Heath was, it would seem, both. Several recently published
10
Compare Ward, Introduction, with Mackenzie The Persistence of Empire in Metro-
politan Culture, in the same volume.
11
Wendy Webster, Therell Always Be an England: Representations of Colonial Wars and
Immigration, 19481968, Journal of British Studies, 40 (2001).
12
Louis, The Dissolution of the British Empire in the Era of Vietnam, American Historical
Review 107 (2002); idem., Antonius lecture, St Antonys College Oxford, June 2002 (forth-
coming). See also Jim Tomlinson, The Decline of the Empire and the Economic Decline
of Britain, Twentieth-Century British History, 14 (2003), 201221.
290 S T E P HE N HOWE
and immediately forthcoming works will doubtless shed new light on
aspects of these questions. It is more doubtful, however, whether we will
yet be enabled by these to say anything very confident about the broader
domestic repercussions of late decolonization.
So, the doubts and dilemmas about the explanatory status of historical
argument in this field, to which reference was made at the outset, are
already creeping into this account. Before they are allowed to return in full
force, though, I suggest that the case for domestic decolonizationbe pushed
much further, and much nearer to the present, than has yet been done.
Doing so requires reliance on, though it cannot in this paper involve any
full exposition of, a set of ideas about differential historical temporalities.
The notion that historical time is multiple, that different kinds of processes
move to different rhythms, has been familiarthough also much contested
and ambiguousat least since Fernand Braudels great book on the early
modern Mediterranean world.
13
In relation to the histories of Britain and of
the Empire, we might register the deployment of related ideas, in radically
diverse idioms and with sharply different intents, in anthropologist
Johannes Fabians Time and the Other of 1983, or by Perry Andersonwhenhe
resumed his 1960s debate with Edward Thompson in the early 1980s, in
post-colonial literary theorist Homi K. Bhabhas rather opaque meditations
on a colonial time-lag, or Gwyn Alf Williamss return to Braudel in his
essay The Primitive Rebel and the History of the Welsh.
14
Most important,
perhaps most directly relevant, and certainly the argument to which the
present sketch is most directly indebted, is Bill Schwarzs suggestion that
the domestic time of decolonization has been radically distinct from that
of the transfers of political power in the colonies themselves. It has been a
later, much delayed time, one that is still happening now.
15
As Schwarz
suggests, the very idea of the post-colonial, in this context, implies ques-
tioning whether Britain is yet, or fully, post-colonial. He urges that the key
areas for such an investigation are those of the cultural and symbolic, of
collective mentalities. It may be, however, that a line of argument running
closer to high politics may also yield some intriguing results.
The cultural argument may cut both ways. It might be reasoned to some
effect that the domestic cultural time of decolonization was in significant
13
Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
trans. Sian Reynolds (London, 1972; originally published in French, 1966).
14
Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes its Object (New York, 1983);
PerryAnderson, Arguments withinEnglishMarxism(London, 1980), esp. 737; Homi K. Bhabha,
The Locationof Culture (London, 1994), esp. 24656; GwynA. Williams, The PrimitiveRebel and
the History of the Welsh, in idem., The Welsh in their History (London, 1982).
15
An argument made in several mostly unpublished papers; its underpinnings are most
fully explicated in Already the Past: Memory and Historical Time (unpublished, 2002). See
also his Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette, Twentieth-Century British History, 14 (2003),
26485. My heartfelt thanks to Bill for sharing his thoughts andhis forthcoming work withme.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 291
respects considerably earlier than the colonial time of transferring power.
Some years ago, the late Ronald Robinson wrote influentially of the moral
disarmament of the Empire; and we could equally well speak of the
imaginative disarmament of the Empire, already in process when works
like A Passage to India or Orwells Burmese Days were written, fully
consolidated by the time Colonel Blimp appeared on cinema screens.
16
Despite Churchills desire to suppress the latter, despite all the efforts of the
Empire Marketing Board or the whole panoply, and interwar and later
pro-imperial propaganda which John Mackenzie has so impressively
detailed, the Empire was increasingly imagined and depicted as of the past
well before its real end.
17
It was archaic. We have since been taught, by
David Cannadine among others, how much of this was ironically owed to
its rulers own deliberate creation of archaisms.
18
It was more than a little
absurd, its ruling spirits and personalities infinitely mockable. Its time was
not that of Britains domestic self-images, its emerging patterns of work,
leisure, and consumption, its Americanizing popular culturenot those of
the 1930s, let alone the 1950s.
It is, though, not the traces of premature internal imaginative decolon-
ization that are to be pursued here, but those of belated, time-lagged
political decolonization. During the 1970s, the British public sphere was
suffused with multiple discourses of crisis. There was conflict in Northern
Ireland which, in 19724, came closer to full-fledged civil war than at any
time since. There was resurgent nationalist sentiment in Scotland and to a
somewhat lesser extent in Wales, while some also discerned a revived,
reconfigured English nationalism for which Enoch Powell remained the
prophet even as he moved into political self-exile in Ulster. It began to be
suggested that all this amounted to the impending Break-Up of Britain in the
title of Tom Nairns immensely influential book first published in 1977.
19
A
crisis of profitability intersected with one of industrial militancy, amidst
which the death of what some were just starting to call labourism was
widely predicted. Aseries of moral panicsanother popular phrase of the
timeclustered ever more threateningly around issues of race.
20
Even
general elections failed, almost for the first time, to produce decisive
results. The idea of the states overload gained popularity in certain
academic circles, that of its ungovernability in more apocalyptic political
and journalistic ones.
16
R. E. Robinson, The Moral Disarmament of African Empire, 191947, Journal of Imperial
and Commonwealth History, 7 (1979).
17
Mackenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion 18801960
(Manchester, 1984).
18
Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British Saw their Empire (London, 2001).
19
Nairn, The Break-Up of Britain: Crisis and Neo-nationalism (London, 1977).
20
The key work of the time here was Stuart Hall et al., Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State,
and Law and Order (London,1978).
292 S T E P HE N HOWE
Thatcherism was presented as a solution to these multiple crises. The
argument over how it provided such solutions, how far, and to whose
benefit has never since relented. But in the process, it generated its own
version of crisis talk. Still more intensely than during the preceding years,
this came to be formulatedin terms of a crisis of national identity, andhence
as one intimately associated with the legacies of Empire.
The transforming moment, on this particular battlefront of a multi-
fronted contestation, was the Falklands war. And for the purposes of the
argument I am sketching, the key response was Anthony Barnetts essay
Iron Britannia, first published as a special issue of New Left Review in the
summer of 1982, and soon thereafter in book form. Barnett saw the beliefs
that drove the government into war, and enabled that effort to command
seemingly overwhelming support from the parliamentary opposition and
the general public, as a revivified Churchillism, an anachronistic vision of
national greatness, driven by the inheritedideology of absolute, indivisible
sovereignty. Britains warThatchers war, as many on the left too easily
slipped into calling itwas very obviously an imperial one, though, as
Barnett suggested, it was of a distinctively hybrid kind: in part a colonial
war of defence and also a post-colonial war of intervention.
21
Barnett
also briefly suggested something which was soon to be far more fully
elaboratedby others: that the external, territorial dimensionof sovereignty-
assertion was closely linked to the internal nature of the state, with
doctrines of the indivisibility of power, the theoretical supremacy of
Parliament, and the reality of overweening, uncheckedexecutive authority,
an overcentralization unmatched by any other state of similar size.
It was also widely suggested that the Falklands war told us something
important, unwelcome, and even frightening about the character of British
patriotism. The late-Victorian radicals term jingoism was dusted off and
put to multiple new uses. A few years later, one overexcited commentator
called Thatchers adventure the nadir of the imperial atavism, the
deranged popular xenophobia that disfigures this island now. (The author
of those words has long since become embarrassed by their hyperbole.
22
)
Somewhat more soberly, these events prompted a host of historians to
start thinking about the past, present, and possible futures of patriotism
and national identity in Britain. The centrepiece here was an enormous
and often impassioned 1983 History Workshop conference, under the
inspiration of Raphael Samuel, on Patriotism. The conference resulted,
after considerable editorial delays, in the 1989 publication of a three-
21
Anthony Barnett, Iron Britannia, NLR 134 (1982), 70.
22
StephenHowe, Lines of Dissent: Writing fromthe NewStatesman19131988 (London, 1988),
345.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 293
volume collection under that title.
23
But it also, less directly, inspired an
explosion of other historical work on Englishness and Britishness, more
often than not marked by a strong political and present-minded purpose,
from the volume edited by Robert Colls and Philip Dodd, Englishness, in
1986, through Patrick Wrights On Living in an Old Country in 1985, and the
preoccupation with English identity and idea of national heritage which
consumed Samuel himself throughout the last years of his life and
produced his Theatres of Memory (1995) and the posthumous Island Stories
(1998), to Linda Colleys Britons (1992).
24
The History Workshop conference, and a great deal of the ensuing work
on national identity, was, as Samuel later wrote, born out of anger at the
Falklands War, and consternation at the apparent failure of the anti-War
half of the nation . . . to assert itself.
25
Samuel himself, characteristically,
sought to broaden the argument and to put a positive spin on it, entitling
his introduction to the Patriotism volumes Exciting to be English, and
subsequently developing an affection for the English heritage industry
which surprised some of his friends and admirers. In general, however,
it was the anger and consternation of which he had written which
continued to predominate. And these seemed naturally to march hand in
hand with several other, contemporaneous intellectual developments: the
explosion of innovative work on Scottish and Welsh history and identity
which accompanied the revival and growth of nationalist sentiment there;
Nairns ideas, which were beginning to be echoed by so many others, on
the impending break-up of Britain; and, as we shall see, newly emerging
currents of thought about British race relations and about the countrys
constitution and political institutions.
As the Thatcher years wore on, the assertion gained force that the UKs
own governing and constitutional arrangementsthe essential character
of the state, including its centralism, its alleged archaism, its poor record
of economic and political managementwere crucially and damagingly
shaped by the legacies of the global Empire. The rhetoric of Britain as
the last colony of the Empire was especially associated with the left, and
eloquently if fleetingly expounded by figures like Tony Benn.
26
But it had
more systematic proponents too, and by the late 1980s one could speak not
23
Raphael Samuel (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity
(3 vols, London, 1989).
24
Robert Colls andPhilipDodd, Englishness (London, 1986); Patrick Wright, On Living in an
Old Country (London, 1985); Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory (London, 1995) and Island
Stories (London, 1998); Linda Colley, Britons (London, 1992). One might indeed extend the
lineage right through to Robert Colls, Identity of England (Oxford, 2002) and Richard Weight,
Patriots (London, 2002).
25
Samuel, Preface, in Patriotism, vol. 1, x.
26
Tony Benn, Arguments for Democracy (Harmondsworth, 1982), ch. 1.
294 S T E P HE N HOWE
only of a newmood, but a newparadigm, almost a newconsensus, on such
questions emerging on the intellectual centre-left.
Anthony Barnetts Iron Britannia, in 1982, had, as suggested already,
hinted in this direction, while the weekly Observer commentary of Neal
Ascherson pointed similar pathways across the decade. Aschersons
articles, many of them collected in Games with Shadows (1988), tellingly
relativised the preoccupations of Londons political culture by urging
how odd, archaic, and frankly unsophisticated much of their language
appeared when set against what was emerging in Edinburgh and in
numerous east-central European cities.
27
The New Statesman, especially
under Stuart Weirs editorship at the end of the 1980s and the start of the
1990s, was energetically pursuing a closely related agenda.
The most sustained and influential versions of the argument, however,
were probably David Marquands The Unprincipled Society (1988), and a
little later Will Huttons The State Were In (1995).
28
Both arose in great part
from a desire to account for, and remedy, Britains endemic economic
underperformance; and both argued that the root of the problems was
essentially institutional, and that institutional failure in its turn owed a
great deal to the imperial legacy. A major influence behind Huttons
polemic was Cain and Hopkins British Imperialism (1993).
29
Hutton took
over their arguments on the historic dominance of gentlemanly capital-
ism and of the financial sector, seeing this as responsible for industrial
underinvestment, lack of innovation, and short termismmaking theirs
arguably the first analytical work on the Empire since Hobson to have had
a significant, if indirect, impact on domestic political debate.
The argument about state institutions themselves, meanwhile, ran in
outline as follows. There has been an enduring bifurcation in Britains
governing culturebetween a broadly liberal, eventually democratizing
ethos at home and an autocratic one in the Empire. That bifurcation had not
simply grown up, but was deliberately forged, in part to insulate the
domestic polity against external shocks like those which had almost
destroyed the first British Empire in the 1770s, and in part conversely to
quarantine colonial systems of rule from potential pressures from within
domestic British political debate. Yet both structures and attitudes
developed in and for the running of a global empire nonetheless had a
powerful effect at homeand one which has endured well after the
Empires external dissolution. This could be discerned from the mid-
Victorian NorthcoteTrevelyan reforms which created the modern civil
27
Ascherson, Games with Shadows (London, 1988).
28
David Marquand, The Unprincipled Society: NewDemands and Old Politics (London, 1988);
Will Hutton, The State Were In (London, 1995).
29
P. J. CainandA. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, vol. 1, Innovationand Expansion16881914;
vol. 2, Crisis and Deconstruction 19141990 (London, 1993).
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 295
service, and which were so heavily based on Indian precedents, to the
structure of secretive, unaccountable Cabinet committees first developed
for imperial purposes: the Colonial Defence Committee, its successor after
1902 the Committee of Imperial Defence, the Joint Intelligence Committee,
and the post-war Overseas Policy and Defence Committee. Excessive
executive power, excessive official secrecy, excessive centralization, and an
entire governing ethos whichwas platonically paternalistic, perhaps liberal
but certainly not truly democratic, instinctively secretive and elitistall
could be seen as imperial hangovers. And the unwritten constitution, the
lack of entrenched citizenship rights, the ancien regime character of the
British polity, as more and more critics began calling it during the 1980s, all
flowed from those origins.
30
One more element in the emerging debate of the 1980s requires mention.
Still another, related and converging, line of argument that imperialism
was decisive in shaping internal British life and attitudes arose from
currents in race relations research and activism. The idea that the Empire
was the incubator of British racism has a fairly long prehistory. It was
proposed in various forms by writers associated with journals like Race
Today, Race and Class, and The Black Liberator in the 1970s, and by scholars
like John Rex and Peter Fryer. Perhaps the most crucial point of influence
for the 1980s and after, however, was a group of writers who initially came
together at the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies.
They includedStuart Hall and also Bill Schwarz, whose impact on thinking
about the domestic consequences of decolonization I have already, albeit
too briefly, acknowledged. But most obviously and emblematically, there
was the group of young scholars and activists who in 1982that crucial
year againco-wrote The Empire Strikes Back, a work whose very title
encapsulates the implied argument.
31
That group included Paul Gilroy,
whose subsequent work, from 1987s There Aint No Black in the Union Jack
onward, has become surely the most pervasive single influence in Britain
on thinking about the relations among national identities, cultural trans-
formations, and racial imaginings.
Thus the languages of decolonization increasingly pervaded British
domestic debate through the 1980s and beyond, from argument over the
futures of Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland, through a dramatically
renewed and often febrile attention to the nature of English and/or British
patriotism and the future of national identity, to analyses of Britains
economic performance, governing institutions, and constitutional future.
30
These claims are sketched in Stuart Weir and David Beetham, Political Power and
Democratic Control in Britain (London, 1999), esp. ch. 2 (which was based on my drafts).
31
Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, The Empire Strikes Back: Race and Racism in
Seventies Britain (London, 1982).
296 S T E P HE N HOWE
And the revival of British republicanism, though it clearly also had other
and more conjunctural roots, can also be seen as part of the same post-
colonial phenomenon. A relatively small group of peopleacademics,
especially historians, journalists, some who held political office as MPs or
peersinitiated and dominated these debates, but their influence soon
spread far beyond those fairly narrow circles. Their political backgrounds
were quite diversethey included former Trotskyists, Eurocommunists,
and Liberals, and prominent figures in the breakaway Social Democratic
Party, as well as many who were active in the Labour Party and a few
maverick Toriesbut they found a surprising and increasing amount of
common ground over what was wrong with Britain and what needed to be
done. As is the way of these things in Britain, most of themkneweachother,
and they came together in a range of political and intellectual initiatives in
the late 1980s and early 1990s, perhaps most centrally in the constitutional
reform lobby Charter88.
32
From the end of the 1980s, demands for sweeping constitutional reform
were heavily shaped by the analyses I have sketched, and were most
influentially mobilized by Charter88. A written constitution and Bill of
Rights, electoral reform and abolition of the hereditary element in our
governing bodies, decentralization, freedomof information, downsizing of
executive power, the embrace both of Scottish and Welsh self-government
and of European integrationin short, the dismantling of Britains ancien
regimeamounted to a programme of thoroughgoing internal decolon-
ization. It all had a powerful influence too on New Labour thinking. The
Blair governments since 1997, however, whilst implementing large parts of
that reform programme, seemed to their radical critics to combine this with
a continued and in some respects even intensified commitment to certain
old regime habits and practices, above all in relation to the powers of the
executive. But that intensely contradictory, unfinished story is outside this
papers framework.
So; I have begun to tell a story about certain crucial debates over and
transformations in British life since the 1980s as a distinctively, centrally
post-imperial story; one where a whole series of ideas and developments
interrelate closely with, even flow naturally from, the preceding events of
decolonization. It is a story of the Empire coming home, in the delayedway
which Bill Schwarzs and others ideas about differential temporalities
would have led us to expect. It is a story, I think, with a certain logic,
coherence, and plausibility. Astory, too, with obvious merits in terms of the
32
It should perhaps here be noted that I am no detached observer of this story, but was
and am a minor actor in it, from participation as a newish graduate student in the History
Workshop Patriotism, conference, to being a New Statesman political columnist in the late
1980s, and a co-founder of Charter88.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 297
themes of this collection and, I would guess, the intellectual predis-
positions of many scholars especially interested in these questions. More
broadly, it fits well with current academic trends: the great wave of the
present is to emphasize and investigate the Empire and its aftermaths as
having immense continuing consequences for the twenty-first-century
present, having an almost limitless capacity to transform formerly colon-
izing as well as formerly colonized societies, and having been fundamental
to and ubiquitous in Britains modern history. That story about domestic
decolonization is, above all, potentially an extremely interesting one.
But being interesting does not make it true. Life would be more
interesting if there were plesiosaurs in Loch Ness than if there were none;
but that is not a good reason for believing in aquatic monsters if there really
arent any. As was confessed, or warned, at the outset, the reasons for doubt
over this story are very numerous. We can sketch just a few of them.
Most generally, there are strong grounds for scepticismabout the overall
impact of the Empire on British life and culture. Some of the wider-ranging
claims made on this score, especially in the recent explosion of relevant
work in literary and cultural studies, have far outrun the evidence adduced
in their support, and sometimes appear simply to assume what they
purport to be investigating.
33
One might appropriately remain impressed
not so much by the Empires ubiquity in nineteenth- and twentieth-century
British life, but rather by how minor a role it played in a huge range of
developments, discourses, and social milieuxeven simply how absent
it is from many of them. The dominant strategy of many recent, self-
described new imperial historians is to take such seeming absences as
products of earlier historians myopia or blinkers, and seek to showthat the
Empire is really present and important in places and ways where it had
been thought not to be.
34
This is often interesting and important. But it
might still be suggested that there really were powerful kinds of insulation,
or partitioning, between domestic and imperial lives. At least as important
and challenging as trying retrospectively to dismantle those partitions, or
argue them out of existence, is to look harder at how and why they were
erected and maintained. Some of them were the conscious creations of
rulers and elites, and were important in enabling the effective adminis-
tration of the Empire itselfnot least in facilitating the uneasy coexistence
33
I have expressed that scepticismperhaps at times too forcefullyin several places. For
instance, The Slow Death and Strange Rebirths of Imperial History, Journal of Imperial and
Commonwealth History, 29 (2001).
34
See, for instance, Ian Baucom, Out of Place: Englishness, Empire, and the Locations of Identity
(Princeton, 1999); Antoinette Burton, Burdens of History: British Feminists, Indian Women and
Imperial Culture, 18651915 (Durham, NC, 1994); Simon Gikandi, Maps of Englishness: Writing
Identity in the Culture of Colonialism (New York, 1996); Catherine Hall, Civilising Subjects:
Metropole and Colony in the English Imagination, 18301867 (Cambridge, 2002); Peter Van der
Veer, Imperial Encounters: Religion and Modernity in India and Britain (Princeton, 2001).
298 S T E P HE N HOWE
of a democratizing public sphere at home and more autocratic modes of
rule out there. Others, perhaps, arose more spontaneously, from the
remarkableand, again, still too little investigatedcoexistence in British,
perhaps especially English, mentalities during and after the peak of
Britains world power of the globalized and the localist or parochial, of
Greater Britain and Little England.
35
The white riots in Notting Hill in 1958
were, as has often been suggested, a crucial negative moment in internal
decolonization, in the reshaping of white and black, British and West
Indian identities. But as they also, as Edward Pilkingtons reconstruction
of the events indicates, involved an intense localism, in which each tiny
sub-district of the area concernedLadbroke Grove and Notting Dale,
Colville and Notting Hill Gatewas a village, a distinctive territory to be
defended and fought for.
36
The very limitedhard evidence whichwe have on public opinion about
colonial legacies does not offer much support for those who would argue
that they remain central to British life and culture. For instance, a Gallup
Polls/Daily Telegraph survey in August 1997 sought to probe knowledge of
and attitudes to the Empire. Ignorance about the Empire was at least as
profound in its aftermath as the Colonial Office hadfound it to be during its
existence.
37
If in 1948 some respondents thought the USAwas still a British
colony, in 1997 a staggering fifty-three per cent did not know that it had
ever been one. Feweroften far fewerthan thirty per cent of those polled
gave correct answers to questions about the following: the former colonies
with which Stamford Raffles and Cecil Rhodes were associated; those
where Generals Gordon and Wolfe, and Falklands casualty Colonel
H. Jones, died; those where the battles of Plassey and Rorkes Drift, and the
Boxer Rebellion, took place; the author of Gunga Din; and the reigning
monarchs at the time of US Independence and of the Indian Mutiny. In
fact, the only historical question with (just) over thirty per cent correct
responses was With which colony was Robert Clive associated?and
since probably anyone who has heard of Clive at all knows him as Clive of
India, this is not a very striking feat of memory. Only minorities knew that
St Helena and Montserrat remained British possessionsforty-two and
thirty-five per cent respectivelyand this despite the fact that both terri-
tories had been in the news in preceding days. Perhaps more remarkably,
forty-seven per cent believedthat Australia was still a colonial dependency.
35
Perhaps the most stimulating, though necessarily tentative, exploration of these themes
thus far is Robert Colls, Identity of England.
36
Pilkington, Beyond the Mother Country: West Indians and the Notting Hill White Riots
(London, 1988).
37
See the surveys conducted in 1948 and 1951, and summarized in David Goldsworthy,
Colonial Issues in British Politics, 19451961 (Oxford, 1971), 398400.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 299
Unsurprisingly, respondents over fifty years old did better on almost all
factual questions than younger ones.
It is by no means clear that general knowledge would have been greater
in relation to the UKs own history. Perhaps more striking were the general
approval ratings. Seventy per cent said they personally took pride in the
fact that Britain once had a great empire; of these, sixty per cent regretted
that the Empire no longer existed, although eighty-two per cent of all
respondents thought decolonization had been inevitable. Fifty-eight per
cent felt that Britains rule had done more good than harm to the colonies;
seventy per cent that it had been beneficial to Britain itself. Only a minority,
howeverforty-four per centbelieved that Britain still had any duty to
help former colonies; while just nineteen per cent (perhaps a surprisingly
high figure) thought that the Commonwealth was more important to
Britain today than were the European Union or the USA.
38
There are several more specific reasons for doubt. Let us turn first to the
national and territorial dimension of the argumentto Ireland, Scotland,
and Wales. For Ireland, including contemporary Northern Ireland, the
literature seeking to link national experience to global decolonization is
very substantial, albeit mostly highly polemicalbut there are substantial
grounds for scepticism about how well colonial or post-colonial analytical
frameworks fit Irish experience.
39
When, more recently, I have tried to
look more closely into the fragmentation and desperation of senses of
Britishness among working-class Ulster Loyalists, I have failed to find
much that could clearly or honestly be characterized as distinctly, specific-
ally post-imperial. To put it, perhaps, too flippantly, I have gone looking for
post-colonialism on the Shankill Road, and not found it.
40
For Scotland and Wales, such analysis is in its infancy. The people one
might have expected to make substantial historical arguments arguments
for Welsh or Scottish nationalisms as movements of decolonizationTom
Nairn or Angus Calder, Gwyn Alf Williams or Dai Smitheither have not
done so, or have essayed them only in rather attenuated or undeveloped
forms. Williams, indeed, explicitly rejected internal colonialism as an
explanatory category for (imperial) Welsh history.
41
Even Nairn does not in
fact substantially discuss the British state and its break-up in a specifically
imperial context, nor does he analyse Scottish developments as colonial
ones. Examination of Scotland or Wales in colonial and post-colonial terms
has only come more recentlyhas followed, rather than preceding and
38
Fame of Once-proud Empire is Fading Fast, Daily Telegraph, 26 August 1997.
39
Howe, Ireland and Empire: Colonial Legacies in Irish History and Culture (Oxford, 2000).
40
Howe, MadDogs andUlstermen: The Alternative Modernities of Loyalism, inHastings
Donnan and Joe Ruane (eds), Alternative Modernities: Traditional Ireland in a Postmodern World
(Cork, forthcoming).
41
Williams, The Primitive Rebel.
300 S T E P HE N HOWE
shaping, the revival of political nationalism and (partial) self-government,
and has been mainly the preserve of literary and cultural critics. It is by no
means certain that, as and when that argument is more fully articulated in
historical terms, it will command widespread conviction.
42
The swelling
body of work on Scotland and the Empire has overwhelmingly focused on
Scots as agents rather than as victims of imperialism.
43
In relation to the constitutional arguments, one must register less
certainty than was implied earlier as to whether, or how far, Britains
ancien regime was a distinctively imperial polity. What was it that really
declined, and reached its crisis from the 1970s onward? Was it centrally,
distinctively an imperial state, forged through global expansion? Was
it rather the compound monarchy formed between the twelfth and the
sixteenth centuriesone which was, according to many views, an early
empire or instance of internal colonialism, but one whose connections
with later, Atlantic then worldwide, imperialism still need to be demon-
strated rather than assumed? Was it more crucially a state formed through
informal empire, as some critics emphasis on the centrality of the City
and of finance capital would imply? Was it the fiscalmilitary state of John
Brewers and others long eighteenth century?
44
An ancien regime polity
whose archaic features may have been sustained, but were not essentially
formed, by the Empire? Or perhaps a welfaristdeferentialist systemwhich
might correspond to David Marquands notions of Whig imperialism, but
was only loosely articulated with the lineaments of formal Empire?
45
It was, no doubt, all of thesewhich does not take us very far. Questions
about when things endedor may yet endand perhaps more import-
antly questions about what persists and remains formative of national
experience, cannot be resolved while we remain so uncertain about what
the most important things are, or how best to characterize the twentieth-
century UK polity. The vast bulk of the relevant literaturewhether on the
academic level or on that of political argumenteither does not address
these questions or makes sweeping and sharply polarized assumptions
about the answers. Indeed, for one key aspect of the debate, that on political
institutions, we face a paradoxthat the constitutional history of the
42
The repeated ambivalence of Murray Pittock, Celtic Identity and the British Image
(Manchester, 1999) is interesting and perhaps symptomatic in this regard.
43
John Mackenzie, On Scotland and the Empire, International History Review, 15 (1993),
71439, and Empire and National Identity: The Case of Scotland, Transactions of the Royal
Historical Society, ser. 6, viii (Cambridge, 1998); Richard J. Finlay, For or Against? Scottish
Nationalists andthe BritishEmpire, Scottish Historical Review, 71 (1992), 184206 andThe Rise
and Fall of Popular Imperialism in Scotland 18501950, Scottish Geographical Magazine, 113
(1997), 1321; Michael Fry, The Scottish Empire (Edinburgh, 2001).
44
Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 16881783 (London, 1989).
45
Marquand, After Whig Imperialism? Can There Be a New British Identity?, New
Community 21 (1995).
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 301
Empire is an utterly neglected backwater (think of the total, rather sad,
indifference into which Maddens monumental collection of documents on
the subject has fallen) just when the post-imperial constitution of Britain
has moved to the centre of the political stage.
46
The British Empire was the
greatest creator of federal systems in world history (including many failed
ones)but almost nothing, to my knowledge, is written on relations
between this and debates on federalism or semi-federalism within the UK
and in Europe.
47
On race relations and the racial imaginings of Britishness, too, the
foundations are far less secure than was insinuated earlier. The Centre for
Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) volume The Empire Strikes Back was
invoked as a crucial text for this argumentbut actually that book barely
mentions specifically colonial roots or aspects of British racism beyond its
resonant, but in a sense misleading, title. Nor does Paul Gilroys sub-
sequent work do so in any substantial way. Indeed, Errol Lawrence, in the
CCCS volumes sole significant allusion to colonial legacies, suggests only
rather limited connections:
The imperial past in no way determines the shape of contemporary racism, but
the attitudes of superior/inferior, responsible/irresponsible, mother/children,
barbarism/civilization, etc., provide a reserve of images upon which racists and
racism can play. It helps explain the specific way racist ideas are formed in the
British (as opposed to the American) context.
48
Writing about race in Britain has been dominated not by colonial models,
but by Atlantocentrism. It is this which has created the assumption
fiercely criticized by people like Tariq Modoodthat British race relations
are characterized by dualism rather than pluralism.
49
In relation to the politically charged historiography of patriotism which
emerged in the wake of the Falklands war, yet again, an alternative reading
wouldbe impressednot by howmuch of it revolves aroundthe Empire and
its ending, but by how little does so. Of sixty essays in the three Patriotism
volumes, a maximum of nine (including my own) could be said directly to
address imperial questions. In Raphael Samuels own oeuvre, only one,
posthumously published, essayunfinished, tentative, and for that matter
error-prone in a way quite uncharacteristic of its authordirectly
46
A. F. Madden (with the assistance of D. K. Fieldhouse), Select Documents on the
Constitutional History of the British Empire and Commonwealth (5 vols, New York, 198591).
47
Even John Kendle, Ireland and the Federal Solution: The Debate over the United Kingdom
Constitution, 18701921 (Kingston and Montreal, 1989) and Federal Britain: AHistory (London,
1997), says little on this.
48
Lawrence, Just Plain Common Sense: The Roots of Racism, in CCCS, Empire Strikes
Back, 68: emphasis added.
49
Modood, Not Easy Being British: Colour, Culture and Citizenship (London, 1992)and
numerous subsequent essays by the same author.
302 S T E P HE N HOWE
addresses the Empire.
50
When, elsewhere, Samuel attempted a retro-
spective on the early New Left, although he listed many things the British
NewLeft didanddidnot do, anddidanddidnot learnfrom, he hadexactly
one sentence about the Empirewhich relates only to colonial wars as an
example of how the old enemies were thought to be still in place.
51
Very
few of the subsequent major works and collections of essays on patriotism,
Englishness, and Britishness, cited above, included extended discussion of
the imperial dimension.
Finally, many of the trends and debates mentioned above have been
common to, or have close analogues among, numerous European societies,
whether or not they once had empires. Comparative, trans-European
debates on race, migration, and citizenship remain few and far between,
and have rarely addressed the issue of whether or howimperial histories
or the lack of themmay be crucial in shaping current lines of argument
or of policy-making. Where such questions have been raised, as in
recent exchanges among social-democratic intellectuals from numerous
European countires, there seems to be some scepticism about how far one
could explain cross-European variation in national debates on or policies
towards issues of race and identity in terms of colonial or non-colonial
inheritances. In such spheres, one may guess, post-imperialism is likely to
look like just one variable, and not necessarily the most important one, in a
much larger complex of influences and inheritances.
52
This article has sketched what may be a suggestive, plausible case for
seeing British internal decolonization or becoming post-colonial as a
major theme, still awaiting proper investigation, for the 1980s and beyond.
Yet it has also offered numerous reasons for thinking that such a case must
be partial, flawed, or limited in very telling ways.
The likely conclusion, then, is perhaps on one level rather obvious and
bland. As has recently been suggested from a wide range of viewpoints,
issues of post-imperiality will engage ever more historical attention in the
near future, and deservedly so. But such investigation will go seriously
astray if it seeks to overcompensate for earlier neglect of these themes by
proclaiming or assuming their absolute centrality to contemporary British
historyand still more if there is a tendency, as in some recent polemical
exchanges, to see particular viewpoints on the historical issues involved
as necessarily associated with distinctive political or ethical stances. Bill
Schwarz is quite right to suggest that: this is not an argument in which
50
Samuel, Empire Stories: the Imperial and the Domestic, in Island Stories.
51
Samuel, Born-again Socialism, in Out of Apathy (London, 1989), 55.
52
Rene Cuperus, Karl Duffek, and Johannes Kandel (eds), Migration, Multiculturalism and
Citizenship: Dilemmas for European Social Democracy (Berlin, Amsterdam, and Vienna, 2003),
including the present authors Britishness and Multiculturalism.
P OS T- COL ONI AL B RI T I S H P OL I T I CS S I NCE T HAT CHE R 303
strict, separable historical causes can be adumbrated. Decolonization is
only one of the many, inchoate histories of post-colonial Britain.
53
It has been suggested hereto shift metaphorsthat we are still
groping around in an historiographical half-light on these themes. But that
can be rather an exciting thing to do. To strike a vaguely Hegelian note, that
half-light may be the dusk of a political system and a vast array of political
and historical beliefs; but it may be the dawn of a transformed historical
understanding. If we begin, as has been done here, by emphasizing how
much we simply do not know, we may be pleasantly surprised by how
much we discover.
53
Schwarz, Claudia Jones and the West Indian Gazette.
304 S T E P HE N HOWE