Empires of the mind: the colonial past and the politics of the present

摘要

The title of this book comes from a speech made by Winston Churchill at Harvard on 9 September 1943 in the middle of World War Two. Churchill's speech indicated the increasingly defensive position of the British empire at a time when the Roosevelt administration in the US was putting considerable pressure on its ally to place its colonies under international trusteeship. For all his deep-seated commitment to retaining the British empire, Churchill tried to disassociate British policy from old-style imperialism, which he linked to conquest and 'exploitation.' He championed instead 'imperialism' as a form of positive force in world affairs if it was anchored in a continuing close association of Britain and the US after the war, bound as they apparently were by a common language and a Kiplingesque concern to enhance the rule of law over the forces of anarchy in global affairs. The empires of the future,' Churchill declared, 'are the empires of the mind', apparently exhorting his American student audience to take up a new and largely humanitarian form of white man's burden.~1