In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • Taking the Measure of the Commonwealth:A review essay
  • Geoffrey Wandesforde-Smith
The Empire's New Clothes: The myth of the Commonwealth By Philip Murphy. London: Hurst and Company, 2018.
Commonwealth Now: Griffith Review 59 Edited by Julianne Schultz and Jane Camens. South Brisbane, Queensland: Griffith University, 2017.

The Empire's New Clothes is the most important book ever written about the Commonwealth and its history, and about the relationships that history has both to imperial and colonial history. Even though the form and presentation of the book may strike some readers as unconventionally personal, there is clear precedent for such an approach by a serious historian to an important subject of contemporary public interest,1 and they will not prevent the book from having a formative influence on future Commonwealth scholarship and, very possibly, an influence on the future of the Commonwealth, too.

The book is cleverly constructed, well-written, eminently readable, anchored to some of the major twists and turns over the last half century in how scholars have tried to think about the meaning and significance of the history of the former British Empire and its colonies for the modern Commonwealth,2 and displays here and there a quite delightful and often iconoclastic wit. The analysis in the book makes use of the Commonwealth Oral History Project, an online database of interviews with more than seventy people who have been leading figures in the development of the Commonwealth since 1965.3

This is also, as its title proclaims, a book that lays bare the myth that the Commonwealth has accomplished much of enduring significance since the end of the Second World War. And, as such, it is a book arguing that, if it maintains its present trajectory, the Commonwealth has no meaningful future, either as a happy, globe-spanning family of once colonial but now independent and freely associating nations, or as a beacon for the advance of humane and progressive values in the world. This deeply critical appraisal of the Commonwealth has earned the book and its author, Philip Murphy, some opprobrium.4

But nowhere in the book does Murphy say that the Commonwealth should be scrapped. Indeed, as will be noted below, the discerning reader can see Murphy suggesting that there is important and worthwhile work the Commonwealth could be doing in the world, and perhaps should be doing, and likely would be doing if it had a keener understanding of both its own past and of its future potential to shape human affairs.5

One cannot imagine, of course, that any rehabilitation of the Commonwealth as a significant international actor, or even and much less plausibly as a useful expression of British foreign policy, could be accomplished without both structural reform of the institution and a reallocation of the resources that support its work. These are both themes that David McIntyre, an earlier notable and serious historian of the Commonwealth, has repeatedly tried to drive home in works that look, perhaps against the odds, for a silver lining in the history of the Commonwealth.6 And depending on how Brexit unfolds there may be no appetite for either the kinds of structural reform or resource reallocation that would substantially benefit the Commonwealth and lay the groundwork for its viable future.7

These are not policy issues Murphy rehearses at length in this latest book,8 where there is a clear and consistent focus on understanding how the Commonwealth came to its present pass. But they are issues that quite naturally arise from a reading of the book.

It is, in fact, a book that makes such questions unavoidable. And that will stand as a remarkable achievement.

In the beginning, Murphy was struck by the air of unreality attaching to the depictions of the Commonwealth that found their way into public discussions of the desirability and feasibility of a British exit from the European Union. The policy suggestion was "that the Commonwealth had the potential to represent, for a free-trading UK, an alternative market to the EU" (x), and that the time was therefore right, particularly in the aftermath of the June 2016 Brexit referendum and with a Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting (CHOGM...

pdf

Share