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Reviewed by:
  • The Afterlife of Empire by Jordanna Bailkin, and: The White Man’s World by Bill Schwarz
  • Fiona Paisley
The Afterlife of Empire By Jordanna Bailkin. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2012.
The White Man’s World By Bill Schwarz. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.

These two excellent books are concerned with how empire and decolonization shaped the fabric of British life. Through an investigation of leading commentators, and the formation of the welfare state, Bailkin and Schwarz separately apply a remarkable array of skills and knowledge to refresh our understanding of mid-twentieth-century Britain in the context of its imperial past and present. They help us recognise anew the centrality of these pivotal decades, more often cast as heralding the “end” of empire, and establish them once and for all as a complex, incomplete and contingent era in which Britain changed forever due to the arrival of unprecedented numbers of its former colonised. On the one hand, they show us something of the breadth and depth of personal, cultural, and social memory as it was played out in the lives of White women and men, and their competing claims upon the history of empire and its contemporary legacies. On the other hand, they bring to the fore those interconnected counterclaims made by recently arrived non-White women and men upon the British welfare state. The result is two wonderfully erudite and thoughtful studies that each differently reveals the deeply relative constructions of Whiteness and non-Whiteness being variously codified, catalogued and enacted in metropolitan cities, homes and schools, and in the pages of the press, official studies, reports and social programs, in the context of decolonization.

Silences, omissions and exclusions are important to these histories, interested as they are in the ways that “the past” is never finished but always remains before us. In Schwarz’ exceptional study, the relationship between memory, history and decolonization takes centre stage. Here the author sets out to investigate the fascinating interweaving of forgetting and recollecting in the lives of key imperial figures, an uncanny process memorably illustrated in Schwarz’ own encounter with Enoch Powell in the late 1980s. As their ultimately chilling exchange underlines, regardless of political affiliation historical and personal memory has fluctuated across the generations in ways that continue into our present. Thus it matters that we better understand how people on the either side of history have formulated their ideas in part via their own biographies and then recorded them in publications or in speeches as official discourse. This presence yet absence of the past occupies an important place in Schwarz’ argument about the nature of memories and their significance to understanding the loss and anxiety endemic to the imperial White man and his world; “[m]emory is still live and active,” wrote Katharine Hodgkin and Susannah Radstone in their important 2006 collection, Memory History Nation, to which Schwarz contributed. Only by working within the complexities of memory, they argue, can historians or their readers begin to access the “charged” and contested nature of things past (1–2).

In The Afterlife of Empire, Bailkin adopts a similarly nuanced position in relation to post-war Britain, in this case by focusing on the historical and biographical relationship between authorities in the former colonies, British migrants to settler colonies (Australia) and the metropolitan worlds of immigrants to England. She shows brilliantly how, as post-war England became a destination for increasing numbers of postcolonial subjects, the ambitions of myriad non-White Britons were variously facilitated and/or hindered by social and cultural processes closely analysed by government authorities and public organisations. The new social sciences provided modern modes of interaction between the state and British migrant groups, including the Irish also cast as outsiders in British society. West Indians and Irish were understood inherently to be at risk of pathology because of their home culture coupled with their experience of geographical, social and cultural dislocation. In the name of managing these populations, a slew of case studies or types were documented, each requiring specific kinds of intervention or “support.” Those determined to be “success stories,” through their apparent adaptability, were promoted as evidence of the capacity of...

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