Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

The Wind of Change

Cambridge Imperial and Post-Colonial Studies Series

The Wind of Change Harold Macmillan and British Decolonization Edited by L.J. Butler Reader in Imperial History, University of East Anglia and Sarah Stockwell Senior Lecturer in Imperial and Commonwealth History, King s College London

Editorial matter, selection and introduction L.J. Butler & Sarah Stockwell 2013 Remaining chapters Respective authors 2013 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2013 978-0-230-36103-4 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No portion of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, Saffron House, 6 10 Kirby Street, London EC1N 8TS. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author(s) has/have asserted his/her/their right(s) to be identified as the author(s) of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2013 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Palgrave Macmillan in the UK is an imprint of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan in the US is a division of St Martin s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave and Macmillan are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN 978-1-349-34826-8 ISBN 978-1-137-31800-8 (ebook) DOI 10.1057/9781137318008 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental regulations of the country of origin. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Contents Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors vii viii Introduction 1 Sarah Stockwell and L.J. Butler 1 Macmillan, Verwoerd and the 1960 Wind of Change Speech 20 Saul Dubow 2 Whirlwind, Hurricane, Howling Tempest: The Wind of Change and the British World 48 Stuart Ward 3 White Man in a Wood Pile : Race and the Limits of Macmillan s Great Wind of Change in Africa 70 J.E. Lewis 4 The Wind of Change as Generational Drama 96 Simon Ball 5 Four Straws in the Wind: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, January February 1960 116 Nicholas Owen 6 Words of Change: the Rhetoric of Commonwealth, Common Market and Cold War, 1961 3 140 Richard Toye 7 A Path not Taken? British Perspectives on French Colonial Violence after 1945 159 Martin Thomas 8 The Wind of Change and the Tides of History: de Gaulle, Macmillan and the Beginnings of the French Decolonizing Endgame 180 Martin Shipway 9 The US and Decolonization in Central Africa, 1957 64 195 John Kent v

vi Contents 10 Resistance to Winds of Change : The Emergence of the Unholy Alliance between Southern Rhodesia, Portugal and South Africa, 1964 5 215 Sue Onslow 11 The Wind that Failed to Blow: British Policy and the End of Empire in the Gulf 235 Simon C. Smith 12 Crosswinds and Countercurrents: Macmillan s Africa in the Long View of Decolonization 252 Stephen Howe Index 267

Acknowledgements The chapters in this book are based on papers originally delivered at a conference held at the University of East Anglia in 2010 and jointly organised by UEA and King s College London. The editors would like to record their thanks to both institutions for assistance with the funding and organisation of this event, as well as to all those who attended and contributed so much to the conference. Special thanks go to Professor John Charmley at UEA for his encouragement, advice and support. The editors would also like to thank the anonymous reviewers to whom the proposal for this book was sent for their helpful comments and suggestions. Above all, the editors would like to express their warmest thanks to their contributors and to the editorial staff at Palgrave, especially Jen McCall and Holly Tyler, and also, in Sarah Stockwell s case, to Arthur Burns for his support and encouragement. Saul Dubow s chapter first appeared as Macmillan, Verwoerd, and the 1960 Wind of Change Speech, The Historical Journal, 54/4, pp. 1087 1114 (2011), Cambridge University Press. The publisher and editors are grateful to Cambridge University Press for permission to reproduce a slightly amended version of this article. The editors are also grateful to the editors of Geschichte und Gesellschaft for permission to include a revised and updated version of Stuart Ward s essay Run Before the Tempest : The Wind of Change and the British World, published in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, 37, 2 (2011), pp. 198 219. Extracts from Sue Onslow s article appeared in her A Question of Timing: South Africa and Rhodesia s Unilateral Declaration of Independence, 1964 65, Cold War History, 5/2 (2005), pp. 129 59, reprinted by kind permission of Taylor & Francis. The photograph on the front cover is supplied courtesy of Mary Evans Picture Library. vii

Notes on Contributors Simon Ball is Professor of International History & Politics at the University of Leeds. He is the author of The Guardsmen (2004), a study of the Macmillan generation. L.J. Butler is Reader in Imperial History at the University of East Anglia. His books include Industrialisation and the British Colonial State: West Africa 1939 1951 (1997), Britain and Empire: Adjusting to a Post-Imperial World (2002) and Copper Empire: Mining and the Colonial State in Northern Rhodesia, c.1930 64 (2007). Saul Dubow is Professor of African History at Queen Mary, University of London. He was educated at the Universities of Cape Town and Oxford. He has written extensively on modern South African history and is currently completing a book on the history of apartheid for Oxford University Press. Born in Cape Town, three months before the Wind of Change Speech, his chapter is in part spurred by his interest in understanding that moment. Stephen Howe is Senior Research Fellow in History at the University of Bristol, and co-editor of The Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History. Author of several books on both British and comparative imperial histories, his most recent is the 2008 edited collection New Imperial Histories. The Intellectual Consequences of Decolonisation is forthcoming from Oxford. John Kent has written on the Cold War and the end of the British and French Empires in the Middle East and Africa and was a BDEEP editor. He is currently working on US policy towards colonialism in tropical Africa under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Joanna Lewis is a lecturer in the British empire and Africa in the Department of International History, LSE. She has researched and written on colonial rule in Kenya, Mau Mau, the British press and the end of empire. Her latest publication is Rivers of white: Livingstone and the 1955 settler commemorations in the lost Henley-upon-Thames of central Africa, in J.B. Gewald et al. (eds.), Living the End of Empire: Politics and Society in Late Colonial Zambia (2011). She is currently finishing a book on the death and memorialisation of David Livingstone. Sue Onslow is currently Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies, on the Institute s Oral History of the Modern viii

Notes on Contributors ix Commonwealth project. She previously lectured and taught at the London School of Economics between 1994 and 2012. She has published extensively on South Africa and the Rhodesia UDI era 1960 80. Nicholas Owen is University Lecturer in Politics at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of The Queen s College. He is the author of The British Left and India: Metropolitan Anti-Imperialism, 1885 1947 (2007). Martin Shipway teaches Twentieth-Century French Studies, and is former Head of the Department of European Cultures and Languages, at Birkbeck, University of London. He is the author of The Road to War: France and Vietnam, 1944 1947 (1996) and Decolonization and its Impact: A Comparative Approach to the End of the Colonial Empires (2008), and has written extensively on French colonialism and decolonization in Indochina, Algeria, sub-saharan Africa and Madagascar, as well as on comparative approaches to decolonization. He is currently working on French and British discourses of decolonization in the late colonial state. Simon C. Smith teaches history at the University of Hull. His publications include Ending Empire in the Middle East: Britain, the United States and Post-war Decolonization, 1945 73 (2012). Sarah Stockwell is a Senior Lecturer at King s College London. Her publications include The Business of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (2000) and the edited collection The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (2008). She is currently writing about the preparation for, and experience of, decolonization across a range of domestic British institutions. Martin Thomas is Professor of European Imperial History and Director of the Centre for War, State and Society at the University of Exeter. A French Empire specialist, his most recent book is Violence and Colonial Order: Police, Workers and Protest in the European Colonial Empires, 1918 1940 (2012). Richard Toye is Professor of Modern History at the University of Exeter. His books include The Labour Party and the Planned Economy, 1931 1951 (2003), Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness (2007), and Churchill s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (2010). Together with Martin Thomas he is currently working on a Leverhulme Trust-funded project which compares British and French imperial rhetoric from the late nineteenth century to the decolonization period.