As the French empire expanded throughout northern and western Africa and from Pondicherry in India east to Royal Vietnam, a new secular mission came into being, one married to the contradictions of aggressive imperialism, a revolutionary past, and democratic governance. Civilisation was elevated to the rarefied realms of imperial law. French colonial administrators and jurists equipped with the prejudices of the metropole carried with them a powerful vision of republican empire to the Mekong, the great river system that lies at the proverbial heart of mainland South East Asia. Yet republican colonialism was undermined by below. In Indo-China, young radicals, jurists, politicians, journalists and scholars engaged in bitter fighting with the creation of a panoptic model of state surveillance, economic exploitation, political repression, racism and the ambiguities of French republicanism. From the creation of the Indo-Chinese Union in 1887 to its demise in 1954, the multiple transformations of legal boundaries in Indo-China reflected the evolving international relations and anti-colonial agitations in Asia. They formed a crucial conjecture in the history of international law.

The introductory chapter presents an overview of the classical doctrine of civil war and discusses some of the reasons for studying them. It argues that some doctrine of civil war is an inevitable component of any international legal system. Observing how the doctrine of civil war that existed in the age of sail and steam has come to seem rather opaque and remote in the present day, this study aims to offer modern readers a valuable review of that past tradition and to help them remember how such a doctrine once came to be and what happened to it. At the same time, the purpose of the book is not to argue for a revival of or return to the classical law, but rather to better understand the aspirations and limitations of the law of past generations, which may not be too unlike those of our own times.

This chapter concludes the historical story arc of the book by identifying the final surrender of the classical doctrine of civil war in international law during the twentieth century. First, it examines the rise of the concept of non-international armed conflicts in the work of the International Committee of the Red Cross and its breakthrough in the Geneva Conference of 1949. As the conference rejected the option of framing Common Article 3 in the conceptual language of the classical doctrine, it in fact abandoned the classical law of civil war by choice. The chapter then shows that many international lawyers soon realised the significance of the event, but notes how the classical concepts nevertheless continued to persist in academic writings, especially in Europe. Finally, the chapter discusses the meetings of the Institut de droit international in 1973 and 1975, where academic lawyers as well accepted the end of the classical doctrine.

The 1970s and 1980s were important decades as the League of Red Cross Societies became one of the world’s largest and most influential humanitarian organisations for disaster relief and prevention. This chapter examines the League’s involvement in Sudan and Ethiopia during these years, when the two countries struggled with drought, famine, and protracted armed conflict. Both National Societies were members of the League prior to the 1960s and could trace their roots to before the Second World War. These examples offer critical insights into how their relationships with the League shaped the relief collaborations, and explore a core concern of the League to build capacity and strong relationships with its member Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies. They confirm that the League’s relations across national borders were often unstable, buffeted by the variously shifting power relations through decolonisation and the Cold War.

One of the main objectives of the League of Red Cross Societies from the 1960s to the 1980s was to improve the systems and methods of its member Red Cross and Red Crescent National Societies. These decades saw an enormous growth in membership with new National Societies emerging in the wake of decolonisation in Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. This chapter explores how the League responded to the challenges posed by the vastly different capabilities of National Societies. It provides a nuanced examination of the motivations and actions of the League, and addresses the complexities of an international humanitarian body that represented so many different countries, cultures, and systems. The chapter discusses how these issues were tackled in the League’s Development Programme established in 1963. It explores the external challenges that eroded the impact of the Development Programme, and how the League modified its approach as the global economic crisis of the 1970s slowed and even reversed some of the progress made.

Chapter 2 reviews John Merryman’s ‘two ways of thinking’ about cultural property, rooted in an eighteenth-century dispute about the respective merits of particularism and cosmopolitanism, which continues to the present. A new section has been added on material looted from Benin.

The Introduction opens with a (personal) precursor to the writing of the book. It discusses the methodological, normative, and theoretical basis of the book. It offers an overview of the argument and the chapters, and outlines sources employed in the research.

The Introduction outlines the book’s central concern with the practice and abolition of the death penalty in British colonies from the 1960s to the 1990s. It traces the development of the royal prerogative of mercy during the first half of the twentieth century and explains factors that influenced the colonial clemency process prior to abolition of the death penalty in Britain in 1965. It also introduces the competing pressures imposed on British death penalty policy by decolonisation and the development of capital punishment as a global human rights concern in the late twentieth century. Finally, it discusses the primary sources on which the study is based, explains the scope of the research and summarises each chapter.

The ‘logic’ of charity in modern Britain has been understood as ‘complex’ and ‘varied’: ‘a loose and baggy monster’. Charity after Empire takes this complexity as the basis for a new interpretation. First, the indeterminacy of the role and function of charity lay behind its popularity and growth. With no fixed notions of what they should be or what they should do, charities and NGOs have expanded because they have been many things to many people. Second, the messy practices of aid meant success could always be claimed amidst uncertain objectives and outcomes, triggering further expansion. Third, just as charity was welcomed as a solution to poverty overseas, its scope and potential were contained by powerful political actors who restricted its campaigning and advocacy work. Fourth, racial injustice, especially apartheid, shaped not only humanitarianism overseas but also the domestic governance of charity in Britain. It all resulted not only in the massive expansion of charity but also limitations placed on its role and remit.

A key challenge in addressing race ideas and racialisation today lies in educating the public about race-related structural inequalities and exclusionary ideologies. Anti-racist educators employing Critical Race Pedagogy (CRP) are increasingly rejecting so-called ‘colourblind’ and universalist views of racial harmony, to instead argue that racial inequality is rooted in institutions, ideologies, and norms, and possesses a certain permanence. From a critical realist perspective, the chapter argues that such explanations may overlook certain aspects of racism, overlooking the complex interplay between systems and lifeworld phenomena (Layder, 2018) in relation to global and transnational racial dynamics. Drawing from Layder’s Domain Theory, the chapter presents a CR-based alternative for the conceptualisation, design, and delivery of an English for Liberal Arts Content and Language Integrated Learning (CLIL) course in Japan created to raise awareness of the global sociology of race ideas and racialisation. The benefits of this critical realist-informed, well-situated, and culturally responsive course design are highlighted.

The final decade of Sarah Wambaugh’s life would see her appointed technical advisor to the allied-run mission to observe the sensitive Greek elections of 1946, as well as to the soon abandoned plebiscite in Kashmir several years later. However, in Greece Wambaugh’s expertise now stood in contrast to new scientific sampling techniques, while she would keep silent about the fact that women were not allowed to vote, in a bid to support the anti-communists who won the election. Meanwhile her normative rules for the plebiscite would be dispensed with as not culturally relevant by those planning the vote in Kashmir. The chapter ends with an examination of the first UN plebiscite actually held, in British Togoland in 1956, and with the 1955 referendum on the proposal to turn the Saar into a Europeanised territory. Both operations eschewed many of the heavy normative principles which Wambaugh had developed for the plebiscite.

Folk music discourses have long held a complex relationship to colonialism. Definitions of colonialism – or the occupation and exploitation of one land by a dominant power – have usually been formulated through the voices of Western colonisers (or those educated within their intellectual traditions). Discourses on folk music have likewise shied away from post-colonial studies, reinforcing Victorian ideas of folk music as a natural art form that somehow exists separately from other, less static or rooted, musical ecosystems. This chapter explores the themes of (1) folk music as a post-colonial alternative to ‘cancel culture’, (2) folk music as a racialised category, and (3) strategies and possibilities for folk music’s decolonial futures. Focusing on British ideologies around the folk, I advocate for placing folk music into a critical dialogue with decolonial and Indigenous systems of knowledge that have the capacity to shift the power dynamics of these discussions away from racialized hierarchies.

This chapter offers a utopian reading of the British science fiction subgenre of the cosy catastrophe. Coined by Brian Aldiss in 1973 as a pejorative term, the cosy catastrophe names a distinct group of English fictions written after World War II. Writers such as John Wyndham, John Christpher, Rose Macauley, J. G. Ballard, and Charles Eric Maine imagined apocalyptic disasters in which middle-class male protagonists ‘have a pretty good time (a girl, free suites at the Savoy, automobiles for the taking) while everyone else is dying off’, as Aldiss put it. Whilst Aldiss dismissed such fictions as ‘devoid of ideas’, the chapter presents an alternative reading, arguing that cosy catastrophes offer powerful allegories of a distinctively English postwar sensibility. Within this curious narrative pleasure of a masochistic embrace of decline we can identify a paradoxical utopian longing for the dystopian smashing of systems. The chapter concludes that the cosy catastrophe is best understood as a cultural articulation of English declinism at the moment when decolonisation confronts postwar Britain.

This chapter, which introduces the collection, maps a distinctively British utopian impulse in literature and culture from the end of World War II to the present. Drawing on philosophical works by Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, Herbert Marcuse, and Ernst Bloch, the chapter explores the utopian impulse in literary works, films, zines, poetry, art, and music. It situates these works in their materialist contexts, from the swinging 1960s and more apocalyptic 1970s to the political riots of 1980s British cities and blistering critiques of Thatcherite neoliberalism that persisted into the 1990s and early 2000s, concluding with the utopian turn in the 2010s and 2020s as financial, ecological, and political crises gripped the British state. Taking its inspiration from the Welsh cultural materialist Raymond Williams and British postcolonial scholars Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, the chapter argues that British countercultures and subcultures have yielded a powerful utopian surplus that persists into the present. Like an explosive, the image Bloch privileges for utopian rupture, the texts, novelists, filmmakers, poets, zine-makers, and playwrights explored in this collection rip through the prevailing discourse to reveal a utopian surplus; ‘that which is not yet fulfilled’.