Australia And The British Embrace

An interpretation of the demise of the traditional ties between Australia and Great Britain during the 1960s. Until a generation ago 'Britishness' lay at the heart of Australian political culture. This text gives a viewpoint of how the idea of Britishness lost its meaning for Australians and their political institutions. Argues that the transformation was due not to the traditional view of Australia's growing nationalism, but rather to Britain's move away from 'Empire' towards the European Economic Community. Includes notes, bibliography and index. Author is a lecturer in history at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, King's College, London, and at the University of Southern Denmark. He previously wrote 'Courting the Common Market' and 'British Culture at the End of Empire'.

Australia's Empire is the first collaborative evaluation of Australia's imperial experience in more than a generation. Bringing together poltical, cultural, and aboriginal understandings of the past, it argues that the legacies of empire continue to influence the fabric of modern Australian society.

This book brings together recent and original work to illuminate comparisons and contrasts between two former colonies of the British Empire. The contributors include some of the top names in history and political science in Canada and Australia. They cover the entire twentieth century and examine different aspects of Canadian-Australian relations, including trade, civil aviation, and military, constitutional, imperial, and diplomatic relations. The comparisons include Aboriginal rights, nation building, middle powers, and attitudes toward the Empire. This timely volume is well situated in the field of comparative studies, a new and growing area. It will be of interest to students and scholars of foreign affairs, the British Commonwealth and its dismantling, constitutional history, and international relations.

This title available in eBook format. Click here for more information. Visit our eBookstore at: www.ebookstore.tandf.co.uk.

In 1788 Britain founded a tiny new colony half a world away. For the next two centuries millions of young men and women from all over the British Isles - but mostly from England - settled in Australia. They brought with them the best traditions of the "mother country", believing that their manifest destiny was to create a new and better Britannia. Yet for the last forty years the cultural fire that these young pioneers carried with them from the British Isles hearth has been assailed from all sides. Whether Anglo-Australia eventually survives or succumbs, its fate may well be a microcosm of what awaits the rest of the British diaspora.

An account of British decolonization and its aftermath. It discusses its implications for Australian policies in the key areas of defence in Southeast Asia, the politics of the Commonwealth, the European Union, Australia's own colonial policy and the bilateral relationship with Britain itself.

Sir John Seeley once wrote that the British Empire was acquired in “a fit of absence of mind.” Whatever the truth of this comment, it is certainly arguable that the Empire was dismantled in such a fit. This collection deals with a neglected subject in post-Confederation Canadian history – the implications to Canada and Canadians of British decolonization and the end of empire. Canada and the End of Empire looks at Canadian diplomatic relations with the United Kingdom and the United States, the Suez crisis, the changing economic relationship with Great Britain in the 1950s and 1960s, the role of educational and cultural institutions in maintaining the British connection, the royal tour of 1959, the decision to adopt a new flag in 1964, the efforts to find a formula for repatriating the constitution, the Canadianization of the Royal Canadian Navy, and the attitude of First Nations to the changed nature of the Anglo-Canadian relationship. Historians in Commonwealth countries tend to view the end of British rule from a nationalist perspective. Canada and the End of Empire challenges this view and demonstrates the centrality of imperial history in Canadian historiography. An important addition to the growing canon of empire studies and imperial history, this book will be of interest to historians of the Commonwealth, and to scholars and students interested in the relationship between colonialism and nationalism.