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war. ‘Connie and the Crocodile’ in the Girl Annual of 1959 makes some interesting connections between economic change and the imperial legacy Connie is trying to save her family business from the ‘bright, gaudy new self service store’ which has opened nearby. She has an idea that the famous explorer Professor Packer can help her with a publicity stunt to help sell crocodile skin articles she has
British culture after empire is the first collection of its kind to explore the intertwined social, cultural and political aftermath of empire in Britain from 1945 up to and beyond the Brexit referendum of 2016, combining approaches from experts in history, literature, anthropology, cultural studies and theatre studies. Against those who would deny, downplay or attempt to forget Britain's imperial legacy, these contributions expose and explore how the British Empire and the consequences of its end continue to shape Britain at the local, national and international level. As an important and urgent intervention in a field of increasing relevance within and beyond the academy, the book offers fresh perspectives on the colonial hangovers in postcolonial Britain from up-and-coming as well as established scholars.
Britain’s role in the world. Despite the disappointment over Europe, the withdrawal from east of Suez, the failure to reach an agreement on Southern Rhodesia, and the ongoing realisation that Britain’s relative economic decline meant that it could not return to the days when Britain really was a great power, Wilson continued to present himself as a major player on the world stage. Indeed, his attachment to Britain’s world role and its imperial legacy prevented him from accepting sooner what many in his party argued, namely that Britain should retreat from its old
economy was dependent upon the legacy of imperialism both for its organisational infrastructure and for the promulgation of cultural fantasies of exotic travel. For example, visitors to Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s might have given less thought to the country’s colonial past than to wildlife safaris; nevertheless there could be no better example of the imperial legacy in post-imperial tourism than the
93 3 The empire of the mind and medical migration It is important, in order to understand how the NHS and British general practice were able to draw on the labour of South Asian doctors, to appreciate, as was shown in the previous chapter, how British immigration and medical registration policies remained defined by imperial legacies for much of this period. It is also crucial to appreciate that these legacies continued to shape medicine in the Indian subcontinent and the thought processes of doctors—as is apparent in their oral history interviews and in
so easily reframed as philanthropy – as an unequal relationship in which Britain had more to give than to gain – tells us something important about how middle-class Britons imagined their responsibilities to the decolonising world. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the imperial legacies that shaped this humanitarian impulse and the types of philanthropic international engagement in which members of associational life participated. Notes 1
the colonising state itself (to the extent this was distinct in any case from the companies in question). Second, and aside from whether the revenues might be used for the benefit of the population, the forms of taxation chosen were typically antagonistic to the idea of fairly shared contributions. While taxation was an important feature of European colonisation and extraction – the colonial ‘drain’ – it has largely not been central to research on imperial legacies. 15 Tax was used in
extolled the virtues of trust and duty and he hoped that it was an opportunity to ‘clean up the city’.31 The imperial legacy and the preservation of reputation were intimately linked. For example, in 1907 the Bribery and Secret Commissions Prevention 02_Peter_Ch-1.indd 23 7/30/2013 10:39:15 AM MUP FINAL PROOF – <STAGE>, 07/30/2013, SPi 24 from virtue to venality League had been founded. Its major supporters were businessmen and aristocrats who linked the problems of corruption and secret commissions (payments) with problems of international trade and the
The NHS is traditionally viewed as a typically British institution; a symbol of national identity. It has however always been dependent on a migrant workforce whose role has until recently received little attention from historians. Migrant Architects draws on 45 oral history interviews (40 with South Asian GPs who worked through this period) and extensive archival research to offer a radical reappraisal of how the National Health Service was made.
This book is the first history of the first generation of South Asian doctors who became GPs in the National Health Service. Their story is key to understanding the post-war history of British general practice and therefore the development of a British healthcare system where GPs play essential roles in controlling access to hospitals and providing care in community settings.
Imperial legacies, professional discrimination and an exodus of British-trained doctors combined to direct a large proportion of migrant doctors towards work as GPs in industrial areas. In some parts of Britain they made up more than half of the GP workforce. This book documents the structural dependency of British general practice on South Asian doctors. It also focuses on the agency of migrant practitioners and their transformative roles in British society and medicine.
Once it became clear in the early 1980s that sovereignty over Hong Kong would revert to China, commentators argued over the meaning of the “handover” and Britain’s imperial legacy. While Foreign Office “China hands” emphasised that little would change, politicians such Margaret Thatcher and Governor Christopher Patten insisted that Britain was exiting with dignity, leaving behind a free society with a vibrant capitalist economy. They further insisted that the Sino-British Joint Declaration (1984) secured Hong Kong’s future. At the same time, much popular commentary—especially in a spate of 1990s novels including Stephen Leather’s The Vets, Paul Theroux’s Kowloon Tong, and John Burdett’s The Last Six Million Seconds—portrayed the future in apocalyptic terms. Following the Tiananmen Square killings of 1989, moreover, many commentators accused a “perfidious” Britain of cravenly abandoning the people of Hong Kong.