National Servicemen, late colonial wars and ideas of 'race' 1945-1960

My project sits at the junction of various existing fields of literature: histories of national service; work on Britain's
late colonial wars; and a broader field investigating empire, its end and its racial legacy. There is a gap at this
intersection where my project will add original research, providing new insights in all these fields. National Service
has been documented in popular novels, TV, films and many autobiographies and memoirs. These have often
focused on comedic or nostalgic aspects of 'the call-up'. The small academic literature on National Service has not
especially engaged with its imperial, colonial and racialised aspects. The most comprehensive study of National
Service (Vinen 2014), devotes a chapter to 'Imperial Emergencies' and one to 'Suez'. Most of other book-length
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accounts follow a similar pattern of giving a chapter to the colonial wars of the late 1940s and '50s. (Broad 2006;
Hickman 2005; Royle 1996). These colonial 'emergencies' are in themselves somewhat forgotten conflicts. In
recent years some of them, especially the counterinsurgency in Kenya, have received renewed attention focusing
on their brutality and use of illegal techniques (Elkins 2014). Despite this, and some intriguing references in
Anderson (2016) to a "disloyal minority", there has been little attempt to draw out the experience of conscripts in
these campaigns. Similarly, despite a large and growing literature, including many popular titles, attempting to
dissect the legacy of empire and trace its connections to 'race' in modern Britain (e.g. Sanghera 2021; Riley 2023),
almost no attention has been paid to the unique role of conscription in the post-war years.
Both Schwarz (2011) and Webster (2007) have tried to draw together some of these themes to consider the impact
of imperial decline, colonial wars and the beginnings of 'New Commonwealth' immigration in a single frame.
Schwarz, drawing on the theoretical legacy of Stuart Hall and the Birmingham Centre for Contemporary Cultural
Studies, has argued that post-war immigration to the UK led to a newly heightened consciousness of 'race' among
the white population, drawing on old imperial mythologies as well as the rhetoric of settler populations across the
empire. Thus, he suggests that Britain experienced a 're-racialisation' in the 1950s and '60s. Building on the work
of scholars like Schwarz and Webster, my study will use the experiences of the thousands of National Servicemen
who served in colonial wars overseas and investigate the traffic in ideas and people between metropole and
colony in this critical moment. My key research questions are: What impact did the experience of colonial wars have
on how conscripts thought about 'race' and empire? How did these experiences circulate within British discourses
on 'race' and empire at the time? What is the longer term legacy of these experiences? Was National Service a
vector of the suggested 're-racialisation' of British society?
I am well-placed to be able to carry out this research programme. My thesis builds on the work that I did for my MA
dissertation on 'The League of Empire Loyalists, the Movement for Colonial Freedom and the emergence of
postcolonial Britain, 1954-1967'. This won the Martin Wight prize for best MA history dissertation. It used original
archival research to follow the course of pro- and anti- empire politics in the 1950s and '60s and their intersection
with the developing racial politics of post-war Britain. I have sought to supplement the critical skills and research
experience I acquired on my MA with additional training for the PhD. I completed introductory postgraduate archival
skills training at the National Archives and have scheduled more in-depth training on specific military records. I will
obtain additional training in the methodology and current best practice of oral history work through the Oral History
Society and life history specialists.