Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2237312
Lori Maguire
ABSTRACT The British maintained a consulate in Hanoi throughout the Vietnam War, even though neither government officially recognised the other. Although these representatives were extremely restricted in their movements, they managed to remain remarkably well informed about the capital, the country, and the impact of the war. This article examines the valedictory despatches of three of the last consuls, who gave their final impressions of their post in the waning days of the conflict. The first diplomat, Daphne Park, wrote hers in 1970, when the war was still raging. The second despatch, by T.J. Everard, dates from 1973, year of the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. participation in the conflict. The third, from J.H. Fawcett, was sent in January 1975 as the complete defeat of South Vietnam neared. Each one provides a fascinating insight into a country, a war, and a period of great upheaval. They each reflect on, in very different ways at very different points, the evolution of the North Vietnamese people and their slow and uneven departure from war as they seek to rebuild the nation. They also illustrate the slow progression of the British consulate in Hanoi from MI6 outpost to a more conventional embassy status.
{"title":"The diplomatic departure from limbo: three valedictory despatches by British consuls in Hanoi during the period of the Vietnam War","authors":"Lori Maguire","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2237312","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2237312","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The British maintained a consulate in Hanoi throughout the Vietnam War, even though neither government officially recognised the other. Although these representatives were extremely restricted in their movements, they managed to remain remarkably well informed about the capital, the country, and the impact of the war. This article examines the valedictory despatches of three of the last consuls, who gave their final impressions of their post in the waning days of the conflict. The first diplomat, Daphne Park, wrote hers in 1970, when the war was still raging. The second despatch, by T.J. Everard, dates from 1973, year of the Paris Peace Accords that ended U.S. participation in the conflict. The third, from J.H. Fawcett, was sent in January 1975 as the complete defeat of South Vietnam neared. Each one provides a fascinating insight into a country, a war, and a period of great upheaval. They each reflect on, in very different ways at very different points, the evolution of the North Vietnamese people and their slow and uneven departure from war as they seek to rebuild the nation. They also illustrate the slow progression of the British consulate in Hanoi from MI6 outpost to a more conventional embassy status.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"555 - 572"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44951572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-17DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2237314
A. Rodd
ABSTRACT The United Kingdom’s trade policy of ‘Commonwealth Preference’, long treasured by Australians and New Zealanders, was phased out half a century ago as Britain shied from the expense of remaining a world power, and sought the practical benefits of commercial integration in the European Economic Community. In the context of the 2016 referendum, leading Brexit supporters resurrected memories of Britain’s erstwhile trade with Commonwealth partners, disingenuously presented as an alternative to the country’s most profitable markets in Europe. This article examines the substance of the current Conservative government’s purported British re-engagement with the Commonwealth states of the Pacific, be it Australia and New Zealand or small Pacific Island states, in fields including trade, aid, strategic relations and diplomacy more broadly.
{"title":"British diplomatic re-engagement in the Pacific: more than just words?","authors":"A. Rodd","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2237314","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2237314","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The United Kingdom’s trade policy of ‘Commonwealth Preference’, long treasured by Australians and New Zealanders, was phased out half a century ago as Britain shied from the expense of remaining a world power, and sought the practical benefits of commercial integration in the European Economic Community. In the context of the 2016 referendum, leading Brexit supporters resurrected memories of Britain’s erstwhile trade with Commonwealth partners, disingenuously presented as an alternative to the country’s most profitable markets in Europe. This article examines the substance of the current Conservative government’s purported British re-engagement with the Commonwealth states of the Pacific, be it Australia and New Zealand or small Pacific Island states, in fields including trade, aid, strategic relations and diplomacy more broadly.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"605 - 632"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48205533","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-03DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2217106
Robert S. G. Fletcher, Benjamin Mountford
ABSTRACT In 1935, a Joint Parliamentary Committee at Westminster reported on ‘The Petition from the State of Western Australia in Relation to Secession’. The culmination of a process triggered by a 1933 referendum, when two-thirds of West Australians voted to secede from the Australian Commonwealth, the Joint Committee famously resolved that Western Australia’s petition was ‘not proper to be received’. Not for the last time in British history, a referendum result promising sweeping constitutional change collided with the practicalities of its implementation. But while Western Australia’s secession movement foundered, it nonetheless sparked a series of debates around London’s obligations to overseas Britons, Britannic identity, and the future of imperial relations. While previous scholarship has for the most part focused on the local and national dimensions of Western Australian secession, this article examines it as a window onto the complex political partnerships that comprised Britain’s interwar empire. It makes the case for the movement’s imperial significance and offers the first substantive investigation of its influence on interwar imperial affairs. It argues that West Australian secession deserves more serious consideration than it has traditionally been awarded, not only as a local and national question, but above all as an imperial issue.
{"title":"‘Westralia shall be free!’: the secession of Western Australia and the state of the British Empire, 1933-1935","authors":"Robert S. G. Fletcher, Benjamin Mountford","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2217106","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2217106","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT In 1935, a Joint Parliamentary Committee at Westminster reported on ‘The Petition from the State of Western Australia in Relation to Secession’. The culmination of a process triggered by a 1933 referendum, when two-thirds of West Australians voted to secede from the Australian Commonwealth, the Joint Committee famously resolved that Western Australia’s petition was ‘not proper to be received’. Not for the last time in British history, a referendum result promising sweeping constitutional change collided with the practicalities of its implementation. But while Western Australia’s secession movement foundered, it nonetheless sparked a series of debates around London’s obligations to overseas Britons, Britannic identity, and the future of imperial relations. While previous scholarship has for the most part focused on the local and national dimensions of Western Australian secession, this article examines it as a window onto the complex political partnerships that comprised Britain’s interwar empire. It makes the case for the movement’s imperial significance and offers the first substantive investigation of its influence on interwar imperial affairs. It argues that West Australian secession deserves more serious consideration than it has traditionally been awarded, not only as a local and national question, but above all as an imperial issue.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"367 - 397"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-03","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48123888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-07-02DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2216143
L. Fenton, P. Tinkler
ABSTRACT Cultural understandings of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault have shifted considerably since the 1960s in the United Kingdom and more widely. This article investigates how changing discourses around sexual abuse, harassment and assault are navigated by British women in later life when they narrate experiences that occurred in their youth in the 1960s and early 1970s. It identifies six sites of youth that are relevant to understanding how women narrate experiences of sexual violence: home; school; local outdoor places; workplaces; heterosexual intimacies; independent travel. These sites are associated with different points on a ‘girl to woman’ register, tracing a pathway from the immaturity of girlhood, through the liminal state of young womanhood, into maturity. How interviewees positioned themselves on this register reflects how they understood their youthful selves in different sites, and their past experiences of unwanted sexual attentions. While gender inequality is understood to have limited women’s education and employment opportunities in youth, it is surprisingly absent from narratives of sexual violence. In attending to this absence, we argue that what is at stake for the women in how they navigate shifting cultural discourses is narrating a version of themselves that is agentic and morally responsible.
{"title":"Me Too? Re-encountering youth experiences of sexual violence in post-war England from the vantage point of later life","authors":"L. Fenton, P. Tinkler","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2216143","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2216143","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Cultural understandings of sexual abuse, sexual harassment and sexual assault have shifted considerably since the 1960s in the United Kingdom and more widely. This article investigates how changing discourses around sexual abuse, harassment and assault are navigated by British women in later life when they narrate experiences that occurred in their youth in the 1960s and early 1970s. It identifies six sites of youth that are relevant to understanding how women narrate experiences of sexual violence: home; school; local outdoor places; workplaces; heterosexual intimacies; independent travel. These sites are associated with different points on a ‘girl to woman’ register, tracing a pathway from the immaturity of girlhood, through the liminal state of young womanhood, into maturity. How interviewees positioned themselves on this register reflects how they understood their youthful selves in different sites, and their past experiences of unwanted sexual attentions. While gender inequality is understood to have limited women’s education and employment opportunities in youth, it is surprisingly absent from narratives of sexual violence. In attending to this absence, we argue that what is at stake for the women in how they navigate shifting cultural discourses is narrating a version of themselves that is agentic and morally responsible.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"339 - 366"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-07-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46294965","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-22DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2226061
Gary Love
ABSTRACT This article explores the links between the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties in Europe between the late-1940s and the late-1970s. Its findings show that these parties were closer to each other than has been assumed. The British and Scandinavian Conservative parties built up significant relationships with each other at the organisational level throughout the 1950s, which led to transfers of political knowledge and information mostly from Britain to Scandinavia. From the 1960s the circulation of knowledge started to flow in both directions, but it was strongest in the Swedish case. The British Conservative Party then bridged the gap between the Scandinavian Conservative parties and the West German CDU/ CSU and the Austrian ÖVP in Europe, helping to cement the parties into a new centre-right international known as European Democrat Union. This gave the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties more contacts abroad and reinforced the view that British Conservatism was not an ideological outlier in Europe. But the history of inter-party cooperation shows that the British and Scandinavian Conservatives were mostly at odds with the greater integrationist and federalist ambitions of Christian democrats. Therefore, the article offers us another way of explaining the persistence of Euroscepticism in the British Conservative Party.
{"title":"The British Conservative Party, the Scandinavian Conservative Parties, and Inter-Party Cooperation in Europe, 1949-78","authors":"Gary Love","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2226061","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2226061","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article explores the links between the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties in Europe between the late-1940s and the late-1970s. Its findings show that these parties were closer to each other than has been assumed. The British and Scandinavian Conservative parties built up significant relationships with each other at the organisational level throughout the 1950s, which led to transfers of political knowledge and information mostly from Britain to Scandinavia. From the 1960s the circulation of knowledge started to flow in both directions, but it was strongest in the Swedish case. The British Conservative Party then bridged the gap between the Scandinavian Conservative parties and the West German CDU/ CSU and the Austrian ÖVP in Europe, helping to cement the parties into a new centre-right international known as European Democrat Union. This gave the British and Scandinavian Conservative parties more contacts abroad and reinforced the view that British Conservatism was not an ideological outlier in Europe. But the history of inter-party cooperation shows that the British and Scandinavian Conservatives were mostly at odds with the greater integrationist and federalist ambitions of Christian democrats. Therefore, the article offers us another way of explaining the persistence of Euroscepticism in the British Conservative Party.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"398 - 431"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46473815","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-21DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2228230
A. Harris
{"title":"Mass observers making meaning: religion, spirituality and atheism in late 20th-century Britain","authors":"A. Harris","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2228230","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2228230","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47019437","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-21DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2226070
L. Waddington
ABSTRACT Historical and sociological scholarship on the British coalfields has been driven by a sustained interest in community and class. Consequently, however, a focus on community can subsume camaraderie/comradeship as a category of historical analysis and its potential value as a framework for understanding change and continuity in practice, experience, and identity. Drawing on methodological tools from the history of emotions, and oral history interviews with ex-miners, this article employs the concept of ‘emotional practices’ to define camaraderie as a learnt, embodied, and affective workplace practice. Arising out of class processes, camaraderie constituted a workplace skill, important in communicating and mobilising ways of feeling and being, which oscillated between integration and alienation, alleviating and aggravating work experiences. It argues men’s lamentations over the loss of camaraderie should be understood as a profound emotional experience of deskilling, affecting how workers navigated and negotiated work and workplace transitions, and communicated with their co-workers and to themselves who they are. By integrating the history of work and the history of emotions into an analysis of camaraderie, it offers a contribution on the lasting effects of deindustrialisation on the body, experience, and identity, and towards a new way of conceptualising camaraderie as ‘emotional practices’.
{"title":"‘Rethinking camaraderie as emotional practices: deindustrialisation and deskilling in South Yorkshire coalfields, 1980s-2000s’","authors":"L. Waddington","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2226070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2226070","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Historical and sociological scholarship on the British coalfields has been driven by a sustained interest in community and class. Consequently, however, a focus on community can subsume camaraderie/comradeship as a category of historical analysis and its potential value as a framework for understanding change and continuity in practice, experience, and identity. Drawing on methodological tools from the history of emotions, and oral history interviews with ex-miners, this article employs the concept of ‘emotional practices’ to define camaraderie as a learnt, embodied, and affective workplace practice. Arising out of class processes, camaraderie constituted a workplace skill, important in communicating and mobilising ways of feeling and being, which oscillated between integration and alienation, alleviating and aggravating work experiences. It argues men’s lamentations over the loss of camaraderie should be understood as a profound emotional experience of deskilling, affecting how workers navigated and negotiated work and workplace transitions, and communicated with their co-workers and to themselves who they are. By integrating the history of work and the history of emotions into an analysis of camaraderie, it offers a contribution on the lasting effects of deindustrialisation on the body, experience, and identity, and towards a new way of conceptualising camaraderie as ‘emotional practices’.","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"37 1","pages":"432 - 464"},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46004951","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-06-20DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2227845
Richard Johnson
{"title":"‘Women Against the Common Market’","authors":"Richard Johnson","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2227845","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2227845","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-06-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48316016","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-04-28DOI: 10.1080/13619462.2023.2205128
Victor Bailey
{"title":"The Official History of Criminal Justice in England and Wales Volume III: The Rise and Fall of Penal Hope DAVID DOWNES London and New York, Routledge, 2021 xii+277 pp., ISBN 978 0 367 65395 8 (hbk) (£130), 978 1 003 12927 1 (ebk) (£33.29)","authors":"Victor Bailey","doi":"10.1080/13619462.2023.2205128","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/13619462.2023.2205128","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":45519,"journal":{"name":"Contemporary British History","volume":"43 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-04-28","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135912762","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}