Caribbean migration to Britain brought many new things—new music, new foods, new styles. It brought new ways of thinking too. This book explores the intellectual ideas that the West Indians brought with them to Britain. It shows that, for more than a century, West Indians living in Britain developed a dazzling intellectual critique of the codes of Imperial Britain. Chapters discuss the influence of, amongst others, C. L. R. James, Una Marson, George Lamming, Jean Rhys, Claude McKay and V. S. Naipaul. The contributors draw from many different disciplines to bring alive the thought and personalities of the figures they discuss, providing a picture of intellectual developments in Britain from which we can still learn much. The introduction argues that the recovery of this Caribbean past, on the home territory of Britain itself, reveals much about the prospects of multiracial Britain.
Shortly after the Prince of Wales’ 1875–76 visit to India, Lord Lytton, Viceroy of India, wrote to Queen Victoria complaining that, hitherto, British rule had relied too heavily on ‘costly canals and irrigation works which have greatly embarrassed our finances, and are as yet so little appreciated by the Hindoo rustic that they do not pay the expense of making them’. 1
During the Depression and the Second World War the IODE’s vision for Canada was influenced by Britain’s weakening position in relation to a strengthening Canada. Although the influence of investments and popular culture from the USA was increasing at that time, British immigrants were still valued as superior to those of other races and the IODE promoted its own version of
8 The British ‘VAD’ Introduction: becoming a VAD The allied nursing workforce of the First World War was a complex, heterogeneous group of the trained, the semi-trained, and the almost completely untrained. In Britain, instruction for volunteer nurses (the so-called ‘VADs’) was administered by Voluntary Aid Detachments, acting under the auspices of the British Society of the Red Cross and the St John Ambulance Association, a branch of the Order of St John of Jerusalem. Most British VADs took courses, passed examinations, and obtained certificates in four
disease’ in the general population. Within discussions of chronic disease, diabetes assumed something of a symbolic position, providing a medium through which to discuss pathology and disease management. It was a position diabetes would retain, in various ways, for the rest of the century. The transformations of the health service, diabetes management, and concepts of chronicity over the first decades of the post-war period, therefore, had ramifications lasting into the new millennium. Within the fluid political contexts of post-war Britain, the
Ch a pter 1 The Representation of British Foreign Policy The English are divided in two categories, clearly identified by those who study zoology: the first one is represented by that famous Englishman who was marvelled not to find negroes in Calais, for, according to him, the Channel was the border of the civilised world. The second category is the one of types like Hervey, who [. . .] being in the Venetian Lagoon, tasted the water and concluded ‘ it is salty, hence it is ours!’ 1 What in the world is this famous English friendship? We want to see the proof! 2
4 In France with the British Expeditionary Force Introduction: the power of professional nursing In the second decade of the twentieth century, a British nursing reform movement, which had begun more than seventy years previously, was reaching its zenith. In the 1840s, small and isolated groups of British nurses, inspired by Continental examples and working under the patronage of the Church, had begun to demonstrate the value of a disciplined nursing workforce. Their achievements had been catapulted into the public consciousness by Florence Nightingale’s highly
3 Off-course betting, bookmaking and the British n 1923 an assistant mistress of a London County Council boys’ school reported that betting was fairly general in her class. While she and the head took this seriously, the boys treated it as nothing wrong, and her remonstrations as a joke. They were actually ‘encouraged by their parents’. She felt helpless. She could not go to the police because ‘in a poor neighbourhood it is a very dangerous thing to excite the animosity of the parents’.1 The popularity of betting in that particular culture was clear. His Majesty
Ch a pter 3 Appraisals of Britain’s Military Strength and War Propaganda [Britain] is convinced that the life of the British citizen is too precious to be risked in the petty fights among continental countries.1 F or Mussolini, war was the greatest test of nations and ideologies, and it was the pursuit of war and imperial expansion that led Fascist Italy down the path of hostility with Britain.2 However, war itself proved the doom of the Fascist experiment, mainly at the hands of the British Empire. The Italian Fascist representation of Great Britain from a
Ch a pter 2 British Politics, Economics and Culture in Fascist Discourse We think with pride to our Mussolinian discipline, which out of a people without an empire, without materials and without resources [coming from] old accumulated wealth, made an ordered and tempered nation, where there are not Laburisti, but everyone is a worker.1 W hile Renzo De Felice argued that Mussolini was convinced the corporative experiment was a long-term one, he also maintained that the Duce was sincerely convinced his new system was the way forward in order to avoid the