How British was the British World? The Case of South Africa
Year: 2009
Type: article
Abstract: This paper discusses the utility of the term ‘Britishness’ in the context of the ‘British World’ conference series. It suggests reasons why the ‘British world’ idea as presently understood was relatively slow to emerge out of traditional nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial and commonwealth history. Ranging over more than a century from the 1870s to the present, it surveys uses of the term ‘British’ in imperial historiography and draws most of its empirical evidence from the unusual case of South Africa. The paper eschews ‘ethnic’ or ‘racial’ definitions of Britishness and proposes instead a more capacious formulation capable of including elective, hyphenated forms of belonging. It suggests that there are advantages in thinking of the British Empire less in the possessive sense – the empire that belonged to Britain – and more in the adjectival mode as a mode of description capable of taking into account self-declared affinities and values.
Author: Saul Dubow
Language: English
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2133104993