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Between the 1850s and the 1930s in Britain, women political writers and journalists saw a dramatic development in the opportunities available to them. As Victorian censorship laws changed in the mid century and as divorce and property laws became ever more contested and unjustifiable, political writing that linked women’s civil rights with their political rights abounded. The first titles for women that were not written by men or that were more than merely a lady’s column in a national newspaper emerged. The extent to which this writing was truly egalitarian and aimed at women of all social classes, not just ‘ladies’ was…
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In the inter war years both the British and French empires, the last two major colonial players after the First World War, struggled to contain economic and ideological storms that threatened to tear them apart. These sometimes allied, sometimes antagonistic imperial systems were fundamentally different from one another on an organisational and ideological level, watch the video below for more on how France’s empire operated:
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In 1947 British rule in India came to an end and the subcontinent was partitioned into a Muslim East and West Pakistan and a majority Hindu India. The British Judge who drew the new borders of these states was Cyril Radcliffe, a secretive and territorial figure who had no prior knowledge of India. The result was catastrophic bloodshed as communities were divided, ancestral lands were lost and millions had to flee ethnic violence or the prospect of being stranded in a state where they would be a minority. Conventional accounts of the end of the British Empire and Indian Nationalist…
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In August 1941, the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt met along with their top military and diplomatic advisors at Placentia Bay off the coast of Newfoundland. Their discussions shaped the western allied war aims and laid the foundations of a post war order based on the United Nations. American intervention in the war seemed increasingly likely following the introduction of lend-lease and the barely conceal naval war that was being waged between American warships and German U-boats in the Atlantic. The meeting at Placentia Bay was not simply a love-in for the two leaders but…
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At the end of the Second World War, the United States of America emerged as the wealthiest society in human history. The contrast from the 1930s was stark; Britain, France and Germany had emerged from the great depression between 1933 and 1934, whereas mass unemployment was still prevalent in America in 1939. New industries, massive government help in the guise of the GI Bill for returning servicemen and a youthful population that had been unique across the world in actually experiencing rising living standards during the war all created the conditions for an enormous post war boom. America’s competitors in…
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In the three years before the First World War, the Liberal Government, which had swept to power on a platform of social reform in 1906, faced unprecedented challenges and unrest. Foreign commentators saw the problems of Ireland, trade union militancy and the suffrage movement and assumed Britain might well be sliding towards a civil war. The First World War gave the Liberals a stay of execution, but the machinations of Chancellor David Lloyd George against the weak and indecisive Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, combined with the pressures that conscription and the Defence of the Realm Act placed on the basic…
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Throughout the Second World War, Winston Churchill favoured a ‘Mediterranean Strategy’, believing that the ‘soft underbelly’ of Hitler’s Europe was Italy, Greece and the Balkans. By 1945, as the German occupiers of Greece withdrew in the face of a possible Red Army invasion Winston Churchill prioritised a British occupation of Greece to ensure that there was no possibility of a communist takeover. He had agreed with Stalin that Greece would fall into a British sphere of influence when the two leaders met in Moscow in 1944. Stalin had little interest in Greece and was happy to keep to the agreement, knowing…
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The Watergate Scandal is the first thing most people think of when Richard Nixon’s name is mentioned. Whilst this was the defining point of his presidency, the shadow it casts blots out other important aspects of the years from 1968 to 1974. Nixon’s very own Cardinal Wolsey, Henry Kissinger, came to exert an enormous amount of power in the White House. He was able to bypass the normal channels of American diplomacy and attempted, with immense violence across much of Asia, to dig the USA out of a series of foreign policy quagmires. The Cold War was in deadlock, America…
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There had possibly been no president in American history as untested and unsure as Harry Truman. The death of Franklin D. Roosevelt came at a critical moment in the final stages of the Second World War and the emerging Cold War with the USSR. It also came as Roosevelt’s dream of a world organisation to regulate international affairs, the UN, was coming to fruition. Truman had virtually no experience in diplomacy, which Roosevelt himself had lived and breathed, but this didn’t mean that the new president had no understanding of how to deal with the USSR. His brusque, abrupt and…
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The First World War had pushed British rule in India close to collapse and had arguably made home rule or dominion status only a matter of time. During the Second World War the Quit India campaign manifested itself as open rebellion against Britain and the subsequent famine in Bengal discredited Churchill’s wartime government in the eyes of much of the population. By 1945 the pressures that Japan’s war against Britain’s Asian Empire had placed on the colonial rulers had made the end of empire an inevitability. Not only had the British failed to show their martial prowess against Japan, but…
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