Memories of Empire is a trilogy which explores the complex,
subterranean political currents which emerged in English society
during the years of postwar decolonization. Bill Schwarz shows
that, through the medium of memory, the empire was to continue to
possess strange afterlives long after imperial rule itself had
vanished. The White Man's World, the first volume in the trilogy,
explores ideas of the white man as they evolved during the time of
the British Empire, from the mid-nineteenth century to the
mid-twentieth century, looking particularly at the transactions
between the colonies and the home society of England. The story
works back from the popular response to Enoch Powell's 'Rivers of
Blood' speech in 1968, in which identifications with racial
whiteness came to be highly charged. Driving this new racial
politics, Bill Schwarz proposes, were unappeased memories of
Britain's imperial past. The White Man's World surveys the founding
of the so-called white colonies, looking in particular at
Australia, South Africa, and Rhodesia, and argues that it was in
this experience that contemporary meanings of racial whiteness
first cohered. These colonial nations - 'white men's countries', as
they were popularly known - embodied the conviction that the future
of humankind lay in the hands of white men. The systems of thought
which underwrote the ideas of the white man, and of the white man's
country, worked as a form of ethnic populism, which gave life to
the concept of Greater Britain. But if during the Victorian and
Edwardian period the empire was largely narrated in heroic terms,
in the masculine mode, by the time of decolonization in the 1960s
racial whiteness had come to signify defeat and desperation, not
only in the colonies but in the metropole too. Identifications with
racial whiteness did not disappear in England in the moment of
decolonization: they came alive again, fuelled by memories of what
whiteness had once represented, recalling the empire as a lost
racial utopia.
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