Colonial naval culture and British imperialism, 1922-67

摘要

In the interwar years, the Royal Navy lacked the manpower, financial resources and vessels to fulfil its responsibilities across the globe. In spite of resistance, founded in a belief in white racial superiority, geopolitical pressure on multiple fronts from the Pacific to West Africa led the Admiralty to establish indigenous naval units throughout the 1930s, in territories including Kenya, Hong Kong, Singapore, the Gold Coast and Ceylon. In this impressive book, Daniel Owen Spence traces the creation and development of these volunteer forces across the British Empire and their subsequent fate after decolonisation. From the outset, Spence makes clear that he is concerned with the culture of the Royal Navy between 1922 and 1967, rather than the specifics of naval strategy which has hitherto dominated the literature on the period. As such he draws on the extensive scholarship on colonial cultural encounters and extends its horizons into new maritime territory with rich rewards. Spence persuasively demonstrates that the naval volunteer forces, which have rarely been addressed by historians, are a revealing prism through which to examine critical themes in imperial history, including race relations, colonial development policy, imperial overstretch and changing relations between metropole and periphery. With case studies from across the British Empire, Spence's monograph is a pioneering example of the important insights yielded by bringing literatures on the cultures of empire and the navy in the twentieth century into closer dialogue.