Graduate Student, History
Thesis Title: Local, National, and Global networks: Voluntary Public Engagement with the British Empire and Commonwealth During an Era of Decolonisation
|
Elizabeth Buettner
|
About
My research concerns the ways in which the British public engaged with the Empire and Commonwealth during decolonization, largely focusing on the 1960s. Though the study of the domestic impact of decolonization has developed into a substantial field in the last two decades, very little account has been taken of the agency of the public itself - of the ways in which active participation simultaneously responded to and determined the impact of British decolonization. By taking account of the shifting transnational and intra-national networks through which organizations and individuals involved themselves in the Empire and Commonwealth, my research aims to provide a means of assessing the domestic impact of decolonization that avoids overemphasis of the national paradigm. It asks if the end of the Empire mattered to the British public, identifies a number of groups and individuals who instigated public interaction with the Commonwealth, and analyses at what depths and through which methods this interaction occurred.
I argue that the British public was neither as forgetful about empire in the 1960s nor as insular as some scholars have suggested; that the Commonwealth served an important function as a buffer against some of the potentially traumatic implications of decolonization; and that developing discourses of internationalism deeply affected the ways in which the British public interacted with their declining empire.
In my thesis I address these issues through five overlapping case studies each of which approached the declining empire through different frameworks. These are the Royal Commonwealth Society, the British Women’s Institute, the UN Freedom from Hunger Campaign, Christian Aid and Charles Chislett, an amateur filmmaker from Rotherham in Yorkshire. These case studies allow me to assess the relative importance of frameworks of education, philanthropy, and entertainment as means of engaging with the ex-empire.
Contact Information
| Address: | abw502@york.ac.uk |
