Decolonisation and the British Empire, 1775-1997

ISBN-13: 9780333621042 / Angielski / Miękka / 1999 / 317 str.

D George Boyce

Opis

This book combines an analysis of the ideas and policies that governed the British experience of decolonization. It shows how the British, perhaps more correctly the English, political tradition, with its emphasis on experience over abstract theory, was integral to the way in which the empire was regarded as being transformed rather than lost. This was a significant aspect of the relatively painless British loss of empire. It places the process of decolonization in its wider context, tracing the twentieth-century domestic and international conditions that hastened decolonization, and, through a close analysis of not only the policy choices but also the language of British imperialism, it throws new light on the British way of managing both the expansion and contraction of empire.

Spis treści

Introduction: Experience and Empire.- The Expansion of England.- North America, 1775-1850: Lessons from History?.- Rationalism and Empire, 1850-1914.- Pillars of Empire: Ireland and India.-The Context of Empire, 1939-1957.- The Concept of Empire from Attlee to Churchill, 1945-1955.- Pillars of Empire: The Middle East.- The Concept of Empire from Eden to Macmillan, 1956-1963.- Pillars of Empire: Africa.- Empire, Race and Citizenship.-The Contraction of England.- Conclusion: Experience and Decolonization.- Index.

O autorze

D. GEORGE BOYCE is Professor of Political Theory at the University of Wales, Swansea.