Chapter 2 considers the context faced by the Conservative Party upon entering opposition in 1997, following the degeneration of John Major’s government and landslide election defeat. This unfavourable environment is explored through the problems faced by the Conservatives on both the electoral and ideational dimensions. The electoral context is considered in terms of the party’s opinion poll rating and public image, particularly with regard to the key issue of management of the economy. The work of three Conservative thinkers (John Gray, Ian Gilmour, and David Willetts) is used to consider the intellectual response of conservatism to the Thatcherite legacy. This ideological uncertainty over the direction of Conservative politics after Thatcher is an important frame of the debates in the party post-1997, from Hague through to Cameron.

In the aftermath of the Falklands War, the role of newspapers in imperialism needs re-examination. Douglas Lorimer, in his analysis of racialism in mid-Victorian Britain, wrote that 'the press, indulging in senationalism to arouse readers' interest, gives us an exaggerated, distorted view of racial attitudes'. And, at the opposite pole, there is the recent assertion by H. John Field, that the Daily Mail and G.W. Steevens in particular, 'co-opted the Masses' to imperialism. As the story of Peter Lobengula demonstrates, newspapers can give us a uniquely vivid sense of the texture of popular imperialism. Peter Lobengula's experiences among the white working-class of Salford can only be extrapolated from other contemporary accounts, notably Britons Through Negro Spectacles by the West African A. B. C. Merriman Labor.

In this chapter the author situates Peau noire within the broader post-war reassessment of race and the human condition. The last pages of Peau noire are a hymn to disalienation, authenticity and freedom which could have been written by a pure disciple of Paul Sartre. Sartre's Réflexions sur la question juive is itself a powerful exposé of the trap for the Jew posed by the universalising and particularising mechanisms at work in modern French society. However, Frantz Fanon is aware of the drawbacks of Sartre's approach. In his discussion of Sartre's 'Orphée noir' he objects bitterly to the way in which Sartre devalues blackness by defining it as simply oppositional to whiteness. Fanon is also intensely aware of the universalist foundations of Sartre's Hegelianism whose master narrative, the dialectical unfolding of history, situates 'race' as simply a stage on the path of progress towards a disalienated society.

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the nature of that presence, particularly the semi-autonomous status of the settler communities on the China coast. It identifies the processes by which Sino-British relations were brought under the control of the British state by 1943. The book offers an analysis of the creation and maintenance of the new identities acquired by Britons in China. It argues that the problems faced by the British state in China stemmed from the pseudo-colonial presence. The book concerns with identifying both the singularity of Britain in China and at the same time the incorporation of 'China' into Britain-abroad. It focuses on the structure and workings of the establishment in the decades before the Pacific War. The book also examines the formation of British settler societies and British settler mentalities.

This chapter examines what may have been encountered by those in Britain searching for information about China, or by those merely searching for relaxation. It looks at the fictional works of Sax Rohmer, Louise Jordan Miln and W. Somerset Maugham. Arthur H. Smith's object was to analyse defects in the Chinese that Protestantism would remedy. The discourse of Chinese characteristics offered a dismissive and distancing vocabulary for articulating experience. Rodney Gilbert set out to describe China's faults. Hailed after her death as Pearl Buck's 'nearest literary parallel', Miln specialised in tales of the wealthy and aristocratic in China. Wembley's Hong Kong street was also a deliberately pointed appeal to the popularity of Limehouse. The obvious contradiction was that it was on Chinese themselves that most Britons in most fields actually relied for information, in trade, or in evangelical mission work.

This chapter presents the published interview of Georg Lukács by Filmkùltura concerning some Hungarian films and issues related to technique, content, and the problems of language. The interview took place in Lukács' home and the questions were posed by reporters Yvette Biró and Szillárd Ujhelyi.

Valentine Chirol's observations, made when significant numbers of Indian troops were fighting in France at the start of the First World War, highlight the dilemma facing Britain. The war impacted on the government-press relations in two distinct and different ways. First, at an official level, the press became subject to an organised process of propaganda and censorship. Second, and unofficially, the press became a forum in which political controversy could be played out. India occupied a strategic place in the imperial war effort, and was, accordingly, subject to similar pressures making for the formalisation of government propaganda. The war provided Reuters with the most extensive platform to demonstrate its imperial credentials, since no other agency had the staff or infrastructure to assure the simultaneous publication of news all over the empire.

In Australia and Canada reconciliation has become a pre-eminent framework for promoting the rights of indigenous peoples. Testimony about child removal has become a powerful resource in the construction of indigenous cultural memory. In federal and provincial archives in Canada there are numerous First Nations' petitions protesting about the schools. In Australia signs of indigenous resistance almost coincide with proposals for the institutionalised separation of Aboriginal children from their families. Leigh Gilmore has suggested that memoir became the genre of choice in the skittish period around the turn of the millennium. Memoir and testimony read together indicated the deeply subjective and personal ways that discourses of reconciliation and reparation shape connections between settler subjects and indigenous and First Nations' peoples. Evidence of memoir suggests that reconciliation discourses are themselves freighted with anxiety, desire and longing in settler cultures.