Empires of the Mind

by Robert Gildea

63 Darwin, The Empire Project, 205–9.

  2 Empires in Crisis: Two World Wars

  1 Virginia Woolf, ‘Thunder at Wembley’ [June 1925], in The Captain’s Death Bed and Other Essays (London: Hogarth Press, 1950), 203–6; Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (London: Chatto & Windus, 1996), 461–2.

  2 John Mackenzie, Propaganda and Politics. The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester University Press, 1984), 107–12; Andrew Thompson, The Empire Strikes Back? The Impact of Imperialism on Britain from the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Harlow: Pearson Longman, 2005), 86–7; Daniel Stephen, The Empire of Progress. West Africans, Indians and Britons at the British Empire Exhibition, 1924–25 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), 14, 23, 86–8, 123.

  3 Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘L’Exposition Coloniale de 1931: Mythe républicain ou mythe impériale?’, in Pierre Nora (ed.), Les Lieux de Mémoire I. La République (Paris: Gallimard, 1984), 561–91; Jacques Thobie, Jean Meyer, Jean Tarrade and Anne Rey-Goldzeiger, Histoire de la France coloniale II. 1914–1990 (Paris: Armand Colin, 1990); Martin Thomas, The French Empire between the Wars. Imperialism, Politics and Society (Manchester University Press, 2005), 91, 200–2, 228–30.

  4 Joan Beaumont, Broken Nation. Australians in the Great War (Sydney: Allen & Unwin, 2013), 17.

  5 John Darwin, The Empire Project. The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 333–46.

  6 The Worker, 5 Oct. 1916, cited in Beaumont, Broken Nation, 229.

  7 David Olusoga, The World’s War. Forgotten Soldiers of Empire (London: Head of Zeus, 2014), 158.

  8 Abderrahamane Bouchène, Jean-Pierre Peyroulou, Ounassa Tengour and Sylvie Thénault, Histoire de l’Algérie à la période coloniale (Paris: La Découverte, 2012), 230–58; Thobie, Histoire de la France coloniale II, 76–100; Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize. The Republican Idea of Empire in France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford University Press, 1997), 143–67; Olusoga, The World’s War, 158–64, 190–7.

  9 Olusoga, The World’s War, 217–31.

  10 Pierre-Jean Luizard, La Formation de l’Iraq contemporain (Paris: CNRS, 1991), 325–7.

  11 Leonard Stein, The Balfour Declaration (London: Valentine Mitchell, 1961), frontispiece and 664.

  12 Jonathan Spence, In Search of Modern China (New York and London: Norton, 1999), 258–77.

  13 Chushichi Tsuzuki, The Pursuit of Power in Modern Japan, 1825–1995 (Oxford University Press, 2000), 185–91.

  14 Erez Manela, Wilsonian Moment. Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford University Press, 2007), 35–8.

  15 James McDougall, A History of Algeria (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 152; Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 5, 67–75, 163–6; Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and its Attempt to End the War (London: John Murray, 2001), 398; Pierre Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh. A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 10.

  16 McDougall, History of Algeria, 152.

  17 Manela, Wilsonian Moment.

  18 Judith Brown, Modern India. The Origins of an Asian Democracy (Oxford University Press, 1985), 198–202, 211–14.

  19 Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 17–27.

  20 Macmillan, Peacemakers, 325–30; Manela, Wilsonian Moment, 113–15.

  21 Marilyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line (Cambridge University Press, 2008), 305.

  22 Spence, In Search of Modern China, 299–308, 317–18; Rana Mitter, A Bitter Revolution. China’s Struggle with the Modern World (Oxford University Press, 2004), 15–40, 71–129.

  23 Joe English, ‘Empire Day in Britain, 1904–1958’, Historical Journal, 49/1 (2006), 247–76.

  24 Marjory Harper and Stephen Constantine, Migration and Empire (Oxford University Press, 2010), 18, 58.

  25 P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, British Imperialism, 1688–2000 (Harlow: Longman, 2002), 579–82; Harper and Constantine, Migration and Empire, 17–30, 58–9; Dane Kennedy, Islands of White. Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, 1890–1939 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), 22–3, 44–72; C. J. D. Duder, ‘The Settler Response to the Indian Crisis of 1923 in Kenya: Brigadier-General Philip Wheatley and “Direct Action”’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 17/3 (1988–9), 349–73.

  26 J. C. Smuts, Africa and Some World Problems (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1930), 77–98; Darwin, The Empire Project, 457–60.

  27 Merlin to Sarraut, 26 Mar. 1921, cited in Conklin, A Mission to Civilize, 189.

  28 Albert Sarraut, La Mise en Valeur des Colonies Françaises (Paris: Payot, 1923), 101–4.

  29 William A. Hoisington, Lyautey and the Conquest of Morocco (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), 185–204.

  30 McDougall, History of Algeria, 154–74; Avner Ofrath, ‘Demarcating the cité française’, ch. 6.

  31 Susan Pedersen, The Guardians. The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford University Press, 2015).

  32 Michael Provence, The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2005), 109–29.

  33 Luizard, La Formation de l’Iraq, 390–414; Peter Sluglett, Britain in Iraq. Contriving King and Country (London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 2017), 34–47.

  34 Darwin, The Empire Project, 379–82; Michael J. Cohen, Palestine: Retreat from the Mandate. The Making of British Policy, 1936–1945 (London: Paul Elek, 1978), 10.

  35 Ayesha Jalal, Partisans of Allah. Jihad in South Asia (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 242–65.

  36 Brown, Modern India, 266–306.

  37 Spence, In Search of Modern China, 314–59.

  38 Pierre Brocheux and David Hémery, Indochina. An Ambiguous Colonization, 1858–1954 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2009), 308–19; Brocheux, Ho Chi Minh, 36–57.

  39 Rana Mitter, China’s War with Japan, 1937–1945. The Struggle for Survival (London: Allen Lane, 2013), 49–135; Susan Pedersen, ‘Empires, States and the League of Nations’, in Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin (eds.), Internationalisms. A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge University Press, 2017), 131–2.

  40 Dominique Leca, La Rupture de 1940 (Paris: Fayard, 1978), 235.

  41 www.winstonchurchill.org/resources/speeches/1940-the-finest-hour/their-finest-hour/.

  42 Myron Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts. The Tirailleurs sénégalais in French West Africa, 1857–1962 (Portsmouth, NH and London: Heinemann, 1991), 88; Raoul Salan, Mémoires. Fin d’un empire I: Le sens d’un engagement (Paris: Presses de la Cité, 1970), 11, 32, 76.

  43 Anthony Clayton, France, Soldiers and Africa (London: Brassey’s Defence Publishers, 1988), 255–6.

  44 Charles de Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets. Juin 1940–Juillet 1941 (Paris: Plon, 1981), 15.

  45 Eric Jennings, La France Libre fut africaine (Paris: Perrin, 2014), 25.

  46 De Gaulle, Lettres, Notes et Carnets, de Gaulle to his wife, 28 Sept. 1940, 127.

  47 Sébastien Verney, L’Indochine sous Vichy. Entre révolution nationale, collaboration et identités nationales, 1940–1945 (Paris: Riveneuve, 2012), 191–3.

  48 Marc Ferro, Pétain (Paris: Fayard, 1987), 312.

  49 James Barr, A Line in the Sand. Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 207–17.

  50 Jean-Louis Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre. De l’appel du 18 juin à la Libération (Paris: Gallimard, 1996), 156–61.

  51 Gamal Abdel Nasser, Philosophy of Revolution (Buffalo, NY: Economica Books, 1959), 30.

  52 Cited by Darwin, The Empire Project, 503.

  53 William Langer and S. Everet Gleason, The Undeclared War, 1940–1941 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1953), 687–8.

  54 Cited by Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper, Forgotten Armies. Britain’s Asian Empire and the War with Japan (London: Penguin, 2005), 142.

  55 Winston Churchill, The Second World War IV. The Hinge of Fate (London: Cassell, 1951), 81.

&
nbsp; 56 J. C. Smuts, Thoughts on the New World (London: Empire Parliamentary Association, 1943), 6–17.

  57 Amartya Sen, Poverty and Famines. An Essay on Entitlement and Deprivation (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 212, 215; Paul R. Greenough, Prosperity and Misery in Modern Bengal. The Famine of 1943–1944 (Oxford University Press, 1982), 237; Sri Manjari, Through War and Famine. Bengal 1939–45 (New Delhi: Orient Black Swan, 2009), 95–102, 161–8.

  58 Fred Saito and Tatsuo Hayashida, ‘To Delhi! To Delhi! 1943–1945’, in Sisir K. Bose (ed.), A Beacon across Asia. A Biography of Subhas Chandra Bose (New Delhi: Orient Longman, 1973), 148–9.

  59 Cited by Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, 146.

  60 Peter Clarke, The Cripps Version. The Life of Sir Stafford Cripps, 1889–1952 (London: Allen Lane, 2002), 305.

  61 Martin Thomas, ‘Imperial Backwater or Strategic Outpost? The British Takeover of Vichy Madagascar, 1942’, Historical Journal, 39/4 (1996), 1049–74; Eric Jennings, ‘Angleterre, que veux-tu à Madagascar, terre française? La propaganda vichyste, l’opinion publique et l’affaire anglaise sur Madagascar 1942’, Guerres mondiales et conflits contemporains, 246 (2012), 23–39.

  62 Cited by Siân Nicholas, ‘“Brushing up your Empire”: Dominion and Colonial Propaganda on the BBC’s Home Services, 1939–45’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 31/2 (2003), 215.

  63 Cited by William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 1941–1945. The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), 158.

  64 Life, 12 Oct. 1942, 34, partially cited by Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 198.

  65 Cited by Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 200.

  66 Cited by Louis, Imperialism at Bay, 164.

  67 Archives Nationales, Paris, 72AJ 220/1, testimony of Pierre Billotte, 4 and 11 July 1950.

  68 Tribune, 13 Nov. 1942; Michael Foot, Aneurin Bevan. A Biography I. 1887–1945 (London: MacGibbon & Lee, 1962), 404.

  69 British National Archives, REM 3/442/9, Roosevelt to Churchill, 17 Nov. 1942.

  70 Robert D. Murphy, Diplomat among Warriors (New York: Doubleday, 1964), 215–16.

  71 Scott L. Bills, Empire and Cold War. The Roots of US–Third World Antagonism, 1945–47 (London: Macmillan, 1990), 31.

  72 Ferhat Abbas, Guerre et Révolution d’Algérie (Paris: Julliard, 1962), 114, 135–9.

  73 Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 88; Julie Le Gac, Vaincre sans gloire. Le corps expéditionnaire français en Italie, novembre 1942–juillet 1944 (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 2013), 56.

  74 Robert Merle, Ahmed Ben Bella (Paris: Gallimard, 1965), 24–59.

  75 Jacques Frémeaux, ‘Les Contingents impériaux au cours de la guerre’, Histoire, économie et société, 23/2 (2004), 220.

  76 Barnaby Phillips, Another Man’s War. The Story of a Burma Boy in Britain’s Forgotten African Army (London: One World, 2014), 17–41; Rita Headrick, ‘African Soldiers in World War II’, Armed Forces and Society, 4/3 (1978), 508.

  77 Timothy Parsons, The African Rank-and-File. Social Implications of Colonial Military Service in the King’s African Rifles, 1902–1964 (Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann, 1999), 203–6.

  78 Ashley Jackson, Distant Drums. The Role of Colonies in British Imperial Warfare (Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2010), 203–18.

  79 La Conférence Africaine Française, Brazzaville (30 janvier–8 février 1944) (Algiers, 1944), 27, 35. See also Paul Isoart, ‘Les Aspects politiques, constitutionnels et administratifs des recommendations’, in Institut Charles de Gaulle/IHTP, Brazzaville, janvier–février 1944. Aux sources de la decolonisation (Paris: Plon, 1988), 81.

  80 Crémieux-Brilhac, La France libre, 836; Robert Gildea, ‘Myth, Memory and Policy in France since 1945’, in Jan-Werner Müller, Memory and Power in Postwar Europe (Cambridge University Press, 2002), 61.

  81 Churchill to General Ismay, 6 July 1944, cited by Andrew Buchanan, American Grand Strategy in the Mediterranean during World War II (Cambridge University Press, 2014), 188.

  82 Jennings, La France Libre, 155.

  83 Claire Miot, ‘Le retrait des tirailleurs sénégalais de la Première Armée française en 1944’, Vingtième Siècle, 125 (2015); Echenberg, Colonial Conscripts, 101–3; Julien Fargettas, ‘Le révolte des tirailleurs sénégalais de Tiaroye’, Vingtième Siècle, 92 (2006), 17–30.

  84 Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Tiaroye’, in Oeuvre poétique (Paris: Points, 2006), 91.

  85 W. E. B. Du Bois, Color and Democracy. Colonies and Peace (New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co, 1945), 4.

  86 Glenda Sluga, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001), 89.

  87 Sluga, Internationalism, 91.

  88 Quoted by Charles-Robert Ageron, ‘La survivance d’un mythe: La puissance par l’Empire colonial, 1944–1947’, in René Girault and Robert Frank (eds.), La Puissance française en question, 1945–1949 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1988), 32.

  89 McDougall, History of Algeria, 180.

  90 L’Humanité, 11 May 1945, cited in Grégoire Madjarian, La Question coloniale et la politique du Parti Communiste Français, 1944–1947 (Paris: Maspéro, 1977), 103.

  91 Bills, Empire and Cold War, 38. Letter forwarded by US Consulate in Algiers, 3 July 1945.

  92 Journal officiel de la République Française. Débats de l’Assemblée Consultative provisoire. Séance du mardi 19 juin 1945 (Paris, 1945), 1114, 1138, 1143.

  93 Charles de Gaulle, Mémoires de Guerre III. Le Salut, 1944–1946 (Paris: Plon, 1959), 189, 196–7; Barr, A Line in the Sand, 305–6.

  94 Alan Bullock, Ernest Bevin. A Biography (London: Politico’s, 2002), 432.

  95 Shabtai Teveth, Ben Gurion. The Burning Ground, 1886–1948 (London: Robert Hale, 1987), 872.

  96 William Roger Louis and Robert Wilson Stookey (eds.), The End of the Palestine Mandate (New York and London: I. B. Tauris, 1986), 83.

  97 Ho Chi Minh, Selected Works, vol. 3 (Hanoi: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1960–2), 17–21.

  98 Archimedes Patti, Why Vietnam? Prelude to the American Albatross (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1980), 307–17.

  3 The Imperialism of Decolonisation

  1 Quoted in Donald Moggridge, Maynard Keynes. An Economist’s Biography (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 774; M. W. Kirby, The Decline of British Economic Power since 1870 (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1981), 93.

  2 New York Times Magazine, 3 Mar. 1946, in S. Gopal and U. Iyengar (eds.), The Essential Writings of Jawaharlal Nehru II (Oxford University Press, 2003), 222–4.

  3 George Padmore, Gold Coast Revolution (London: Dobson, 1953), 62; Kwame Nkrumah, Autobiography (Edinburgh: Nelson, 1959), 20–8, 40–5.

  4 https://lematin.ma/journal/2003/56e-anniversaire-du-voyage-historique-de-S-M–Mohammed-V-a-Tanger–un-tournant-majeur-dans-l-et-8217Histoire-du-Maroc/27817.html.

  5 D. A Low and John Lonsdale, ‘East Africa: Towards the New Order, 1945–1963’, in D. A. Low (ed.), Eclipse of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 1991), 198; William Roger Louis and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonization’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, 22/3 (1994), 462–511; John Darwin, ‘Was There a Fourth British Empire?’ in Martyn Lynn (ed.), Empire in the 1950s. Rethink or Renewal? (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2006), 16–31; A. G. Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, Past & Present, 200/1 (2008), 211–47.

  6 Randall Hansen, ‘The Politics of Citizenship in 1940s Britain: The British Nationality Act’, Twentieth Century British History, 10/1 (1999), 67–95.

  7 Darwin, ‘Was There a Fourth British Empire?’, 26.

  8 Reg Appleyeard, The Ten Pound Immigrants (London: Boxtree, 1988), 27–31, 160; A. James Hammerton and Alistair Thomson, Ten Pound Poms. Australia’s Invisible Migrants (Manchester University Press, 2005).

  9 Hopkins, ‘Rethinking Decolonization’, 224–5.

  10 Quoted in Stuart Ward, Australia and the British Embrace. The Demise of the Imperial Ideal (Melbourne Univers
ity Press, 2001), 20–7.

  11 R. J. Moore, Escape from Empire. The Attlee Government and the Indian Problem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 86–9.

  12 Joya Chatterji, Bengal Divided. Hindu Communalism and Partition, 1933–1947 (Cambridge University Press, 1994), 227–65.

  13 John Darwin, ‘Memory of Empire in Britain’, in Dieter Rothermund (ed.), Memories of Post-Imperial Nations. The Aftermath of Decolonisation, 1945–2013 (Cambridge University Press, 2015), 23–4.

  14 Camilla Schofield, Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain (Cambridge University Press, 2013), 70.