This section sets out the key aims, argument, and methodology of the book, concluding with a comprehensive chapter summary.

Traditional accounts of the Allied grand strategic debates during World War II stress the divergence between the American and British approaches to waging war against the Axis. In these interpretations, Roosevelt, Churchill, and their military chiefs were the primary shapers of grand strategy and policy. However, this chapter argues these studies have focused too much on certain figures and have relatively marginalized others who played crucial roles in shaping these debates. One of those comparatively overlooked figures was Henry Stimson, who was a vital player on the American side in influencing the politics of US strategy and pushing it toward launching a cross-Channel invasion of France. The Joint Chiefs of Staff were often internally divided over how to win the war and struggled to influence policy accordingly. The lack of focused political coordination between the War Department and the JCS made it difficult to convince Roosevelt to open a second front in Western Europe, which opened the door to following the British Mediterranean strategy for defeating Germany, starting with the Anglo-American invasion of North Africa.

This chapter examines how US officials responded to their ultimately unsuccessful attempts to shape Anglo-American grand strategy during 1942 by changing their approach to these debates in 1943. It argues that War Department civilian and military officials led this effort by overhauling US strategic planning processes and forcefully criticizing British strategy and policy as antithetical to American political objectives. Army planners tactically used their position within the US foreign policy process to craft a hostile narrative about British military aims to shape how their superiors approached US–UK strategy formation and to prioritize their own conceptions of America’s geopolitical ambitions. These efforts hardened US officials’ determination to advance Washington’s wartime goals above London’s and helped forge a strong level of political coordination between the War Department and the JCS for ensuring this occurred. The result was that American defense officials were able to convince President Roosevelt to back their strategic views and to shun Britain’s Mediterranean approach for defeating Germany.

The national populism of the Brexit movement builds up its political worldview on the basis of an ethnocentric myth of continuous homogeneous British nationhood. This was a construct of the imagination that included nostalgia for lost British empire. It was tightly bound up with the Brexiters’ concept of ‘the people’, which brought into their campaign rhetoric the idea of ‘the will of the people’ and ‘the mandate of the people’, as well as ideas from social contract theory. ‘The will of the people’ was a phrase that ran throughout Brexitspeak, deployed by the ex-Remainer Theresa May and ardent Leavers alike, and backed up by the populist press. Brexitspeakers knew what the people’s will was, by implication at least. And the claim that this ‘will’ gave the government an unquestionable mandate followed automatically, despite the narrow margin by which the Leavers had won, and despite the fact that before it the result had been defined as ‘advisory’ only. There was also the question of who precisely constituted ‘the people’ at the referendum, for there were important groups of potential voters who were excluded by the Brexiter-influenced Referendum Act.

Hong Kong’s Handover from British to Chinese sovereignty in 1997 could have brought about rapid and momentous changes to Hong Kong’s language regime. Change, however, has for the most part been incremental, and much of the British-era’s language regime remains largely intact today, including the salience of English in many domains. At the same time, language policy changes did occur, mainly through the educational policy of biliteracy and trilingualism, which added Mandarin to the de facto English-Cantonese bilingual regime. However, nearly half-way through the transition period, Mandarin use has made few notable inroads in Hong Kong society, though there are signs that this may be about to change - perhaps drastically so. This paper analyzes the evolution of Hong Kong’s language regime from its unique perspective as a city connected to the global community like few others, and located between two state traditions - one marked by pluralist, laissez-faire capitalism, and the other by Communism and totalitarian state nationalism. Overall, this case study of Hong Kong contributes to our understanding of colonial legacies, competing mobilizations, incremental change, and multilevel governance as it helps to expand the STLR framework.

This chapter delves into Anglo-Dutch relations and negotiations in the period before the Seven Years’ War and during the war itself. It provides the background for the first two Dutch cases to come before the Court of Prize Appeal, that of the Maria Theresa and the America. The main thrust of the chapter is that, in order to understand Anglo-Dutch relations during the war, it is important to examine the interpersonal relationships between the members of the British government, the government’s relationships with the representatives of the Dutch Republic, the government’s relationships with the privateers who helped carry out commerce predation, and the government’s relationship with the Court of Prize Appeal. Through an examination of these interpersonal relations, the chapter argues that they were critical to the successes and failures of Anglo-Dutch negotiations over neutrality and critical to being able to influence decisions taken by the Court of Prize Appeal.

This chapter explores the tensions produced by Vaughan Williams’s desire to make a significant contribution to English cultural life as a leading composer while also not discussing his compositions in any detail in a public forum. Vaughan Williams conceived a path for himself as a musical activist, leading practical amateur music-making, while creating new works that reflected his community. Yet the experience of his first large-scale premiere, A Sea Symphony, at the Leeds Musical Festival in 1910, revealed that public attention, while necessary, could also be discomforting.

In private, Vaughan Williams was more relaxed: he was the centre of attention at parties and enjoyed the company of younger women, with whom he sometimes flirted under the nickname of ‘Uncle Ralph’. He was also deeply committed to his composition pupils, supporting them in ways that went far beyond any contractual responsibility, and often enjoyed working with conductors preparing his new works. Yet public scrutiny was always a source of anxiety, even in his final years. Coping strategies, including avoidance and deflection, enabled Vaughan Williams to navigate the public demands of his role while focusing on the process of composition.

British theatre’s post-war cultural impact would be hard to deny, having produced generations of actors, writers, directors, and designers who have populated the world’s stages and screens. This vitality has often been explained in aesthetic terms, in the successive waves of generational artistic renewal in British theatre (from the ‘angry young men’ onwards). The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre since 1945 seeks to outline the discursive and material changes that have made this theatre possible; that is, the economic, infrastructural, and legislative structures that underpin what can and cannot be done in theatre and the structures and habits of discourse that govern what can and cannot be said about the theatre. Hence the book focuses on the working conditions of actors, writers, and directors; the economics of the West End, subsidised sector, and fringe; the theatre’s interaction with the British nation-state at the level of policy, theatre buildings, and in its nations and regions; finally, the book considers the theatre’s civic function, its changing engagement with audiences and the development of Black British and Queer theatre.

I introduce the geographical and chronological frames of the book in terms of the current historiography of the transition from Mughal to British rule and of music history. I lay out the book’s conceptual framework: 1) the use of musicians’ stories to illuminate the changes wrought in the transition; 2) the examination of several types of Indian and European writing on music prominent at this time, most of which have been overlooked, that reveal these changes; and 3) my deeper interest in why writers tried to capture music in words when they knew it was impossible. I contextualise the sources on which my history is based within a consideration of the concept of paracolonial knowledge systems and social networks. And I introduce my overarching philosophical question: whether it is ever possible for Orpheus (writing on music) to bring Eurydice (music and its experience) back from the dead.

England was probably the first country in Europe to construct a sense of itself as a nation state, but even as it did so the boundaries of native tradition remained uncertain. In the sixteenth century two competing narratives of nationhood are visible, one British and the other Anglo-Saxon (Warner, Spenser, Drayton), and it is the second, more specifically English narrative that comes to supersede the British story (Shakespeare’s histories). Those narratives are complemented in the field of verse form by a further competition between art, represented by classical metres, and nature, represented by native English ‘rhyme’, in which the latter asserts its claims to literary status and value, and history and prosody then converge in the idea of the long line. The achievement of a sense of English national identity in literature is finally constructed as a triumph of nature over art (Daniel).

Devoted to issues of change and continuity, Chapter 6 considers the social reproduction of families, particularly the ways in which ‘change’ and ‘continuity’ (understood as tradition) are drawn upon as tropes in moral economies of transnational kinship. In examining each generation of migrants in turn, I suggest that younger migrants assert ‘continuity through change’, a moral claim with important historical resonances, while older women generate ‘change through continuity’ in familial practices. ‘Change’ emerges as a form of social betrayal, complicating ideas of change as understood in narratives of modernity and in Christianity, particularly its presumed desirability. What is at stake in ‘having changed’, an accusation non-migrants level at migrant kin, are existential questions of personhood and belonging, along with potential access to symbolic and material resources.

The British colonisation of Van Diemen’s Land (later Tasmania) began in 1803. There was an estimated 6,000 Aborigines (Palawa) living on the island with a history dating back over 40,000 years. By 1835, there were just over 100 Palawa living in forced exile on one of Tasmania’s smaller offshore islands. Only two residents remained when the government closed the Aboriginal Settlement in 1871. This chapter traces the history of Tasmania’s colonisation from 1803 to 1871 and finds that the British committed acts against the Palawa that meet the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide: killings, child removals, and creating conditions unconducive to sustaining life. Tasmania has been cited as one the ‘classical’ cases of genocide, but the finding has also stirred debate. This chapter surveys the historiography of Tasmanian genocide including Raphael Lemkin’s 1940s finding of a clear case of genocide; Henry Reynolds’ 2001 counter evidence of gubernatorial humanitarianism; and the subsequent histories that recognise genocide within the structure of settler colonialism. This chapter concludes that the British committed genocide in Tasmania with intent, but reported and framed that crime within the rhetoric, and even the guidelines, of contemporaneous humanitarian policies.

By 1837 the British government had been sending convicts, soldiers, and livestock entrepreneurs to Australia for almost fifty years. A committee of its own House of Commons, inspired by humanitarian principles, now reported the devastating effects on the indigenous inhabitants. Evidence of ‘extermination’ and ‘extirpation’ meant that the best minds of the Colonial Office were already exercised by the devastation of indigenous peoples inflicted by settlers who might have no clear aim of damaging them. When British government was extended to New Zealand, it was soon evident that Māori, for centuries sharing a largely common language and history, had a more effective capacity to resist than Aboriginal Australians, for millennia divided into hundreds of separate peoples and languages. In all Australian colonies and New Zealand, the determination of immigrants to ‘make productive’ land they knew belonged to others created disaster. Within twenty years of settlement, the Aboriginal population of Victoria declined by eighty percent. As the British spread over the whole continent, countless nations were extinguished. Across the Tasman the indigenous population was halved and the ‘passing of the Māori’ was still openly discussed even as adaptation, intermarriage and parliamentary representation saved it from genocide.

The canon of British First World War poetry seems well established and beyond dispute with a set of key ‘representative’ poets referenced continuously. Yet these poets have been selected and promoted over the decades for various reasons. Moreover, how representative were they of the British experience and reaction to the events 1914–1918? Using a quantitative study of the poets and poems appearing in anthologies during and after the war, this essay reconsiders the true canon of the British poetical response to the war charting the rise (and fall) of certain poets and why this might be so. It also considers the hidden canon of poetry that focuses on other theatres of war, at sea and in the air.