Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization

Bonds of Empire: West Indians and Britishness from Victoria to Decolonization

Anne Spry Rush

Language: English

Pages: 320

ISBN: 0199588554

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


In the first half of the twentieth century Britishness was an integral part of the culture that pervaded life in the colonial Caribbean. Caribbean peoples were encouraged to identify with social structures and cultural values touted as intrinsically British. Many middle-class West Indians of colour duly adopted Britishness as part of their own identity. Yet, as Anne Spry Rush explains in Bonds of Empire, even as they re-fashioned themselves, West Indians recast Britishness in their own image, basing it on hierarchical ideas of respectability that were traditionally British, but also on more modern expectations of racial and geographical inclusiveness. Britain became the focus of an imperial British identity, an identity which stood separate from, and yet intimately related to, their strong feelings for their tropical homelands.

Moving from the heights of empire in 1900 to the independence era of the 1960s, Rush argues that middle-class West Indians used their understanding of Britishness first to establish a place for themselves in the British imperial world, and then to negotiate the challenges of decolonization. Through a focus on education, voluntary organization, the challenges of war, radio broadcasting, and British royalty, she explores how this process worked in the daily lives of West Indians in both the Caribbean and the British Isles. Bonds of Empire thus traces West Indians' participation in a complex process of cultural transition as they manipulated Britishness and their relationship to it not only as colonial peoples but also as Britons.

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Services, 357 of these assigned to the core of all overseas services—the Empire Service.30 During the war, the state, for the first time, provided the BBC with grants to offset the additional expenses incurred by such rapid expansion. Yet there is little evidence to suggest that these unprecedented government grants encroached on the Corporation’s independence. BBC officials insisted—and government officials agreed—that the Corporation’s reputation as an objective truth-telling organization was.

System and a history of the Boy Scouts—at the time a quintessentially British organization—in Barbados. A discussion between literary scholar John Figueroa and educator Philip Sherlock about how to develop West Indian schools focused primarily on Sherlock’s recent tour of Adult Education Centres in Britain. On Newsletter, along with scores of West Indian high school sports events, announcer Ulrich Cross, reporting on the West Indian contribution to the British Industries Fair of 1947, focused.

From the 1870s Island Scholars were almost always persons of color.23 Other state scholarships, such as the College Exhibitions in Trinidad, paid for those who had not the means, but did have the brains, to attend the most prestigious secondary schools in the region.24 Secondary schools also began establishing their own scholarships, to some degree out of a sense of duty toward the less 21 E. Martin Noble. Jamaica Airman: A Black Airman in Britain 1943 and After (London, Port of Spain: New Beacon.

Color bar in his early attempts to find housing, but its effects were initially muted by his religious connections. The London secretary of the Colonial Missionary Society, to which Moody was affiliated, spared him much grief by introducing him to helpful persons who did not, at least overtly, discriminate on the basis of race. Upon completing his physician’s training at King’s College, London the young colonial began to realize the extent of white Britons’ racism. Despite being eminently qualified,.

Neglect, and manpower shortages were more significant than racial prejudice in creating bad conditions for West Indians at the front. Yet institutionalized racism did play a major role in making their lives miserable. As he points out, in Italy most British soldiers returning to camp after leave could voluntarily undergo disinfection for venereal disease, but for the BWIR it was compulsory. Howe, Race, War and Nationalism, 145–9. This concern about dangers posed by the sexuality of colonials of.

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