REPUBLICANISM IN ACTION IN THE BRITISH EMPIRE AND THE COMMONWEALTH (c. 1750-to the present)

WORKSHOP 3: Republicanism in the Age of Independence (c.1931 to the present)

This is the third and final of a series of workshops held in Paris and London that have been exploring ideas and practices of republicanism in the British Empire and Commonwealth, and how they have fuelled aspirations to independence from the American Revolution onwards. This workshop focuses on world-making from the final decades of the British Empire to the present day. We seek to examine how the language and concepts of republican liberty, self-determination, popular sovereignty, and civic participation informed anti-colonial movements in the critical decades of World War II and decolonisation. We are further interested in how Britain recast its monarchical empire as an organization that welcomed a majority of republics. As the 1949 London Declaration allowed republics to be members of the Commonwealth of Nations to account for the developments in India, many newly independent countries that became republics right at the moment of independence also acknowledged the British monarch as head of the Commonwealth. Finally, we are interested in challenges to the Commonwealth including the republican resurgence of the 1970s that led to several Commonwealth realms contemplating or adopting a republican form of government long after independence, as well as recent decolonial movements that contest the coloniality of the Commonwealth.

We will welcome papers that address the following topics and take a diversity of approaches to:

• The circulation of republican theories in Britain its empire and its former colonies, including (but not limited to) Australasia, Asia, Africa, Canada, the Caribbean and Ireland.
• The transformative influence of anti-colonial movements on conceptions of republicanism.
• The importance of new ideas of Commonwealth and popular constitutional monarchy, which followed from earlier ideas of dominion, self-government, and imperial federation.
• Debates over republicanism and the creation of republican regimes in Commonwealth realms, and hence the compatibility of republicanism with the British monarch’s leadership of the Commonwealth (e.g. Australia, Fiji, West Indies, Rhodesia/Zimbabwe, Ireland).