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

Publié le 15 juin 2024 Mis à jour le 6 janvier 2025

Workshop 3 - Republicanism in the Age of Independence (c.1931-to the present)

Date(s)

du 9 janvier 2025 au 10 janvier 2025

Lieu(x)

Bâtiment Max Weber (W)

Salle des Conférences
Plan d'accès

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 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).

PROGRAMME
Thursday January 9 

13.30 Welcome

13.45 Official opening
by Laurence DUBOIS and Charlotte GOULD (CREA-OAB)

14.00-15.30 Panel 1 - Commonwealth alternatives
Chair: Daniel FOLIARD (Paris Cité)
14.00-14.30  Hilary SAPIRE (Birkbeck, London): “Monarchism and Republicanism in interwar Southern Africa: Kingship, Chieftaincy and ”The People“‘
14:30-15.00  Virginie ROIRON (Strasbourg): “‘Not my king’ but still the Head of the ‘family’: accommodating republican and monarchical trends in the modern Commonwealth since the 1970s.”
15.00-15.30  Discussion

15.30-16.00 Tea and coffee break

16.00-16.45 Keynote 1
Jane BURBANK and Frederick COOPER (University of New York): “Empire, Republic, Federation: Remaking Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century” (abstract below)
Chair: Clément THIBAUT (EHESS) 
16.45-17.15 Discussion

19.30  Conference dinner

Friday January 10
 
8.45 Welcome
 
9.00-11.00  Panel 2 - Conceptualizing self-rule in anticolonial contexts
Chair: Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (Paris Nanterre)
9.00-9.30 Peter BRETT (Queen Mary, London): “Can republicanism explain the Irish Republic? The curious case of Seán MacBride”
9.30-10.00 Manjeet RAMGOTRA (SOAS): “ The languages of republicanism: swaraj and res publica.”
10.00-10.30 Discussion 
 
10.30-11.00 Tea and coffee break

11.00-11.45  Keynote 2
Cynthia BARROW-GILES (University of the West Indies): "From 1970 to 2024: Westminster Challenged in the Commonwealth Caribbean" (abstract below)
Chair: Banu TURNAOGLU (Sabancı University / Cambridge)
11.45-12.15   Discussion

12.15-13.45 Lunch

13.45-15.15  Panel 3-Transnational conceptions and practices of republicanism
Chair: Cornelius CROWLEY (Paris Nanterre)
13.45-14.15 Slimane HARGAS (Paris Nanterre): “Irish republican trans-imperial affinities with late colonial and postcolonial Algeria”
14.15-14.45 Adrian RODD (Versailles Saint-Quentin): “Labour politics and republicanism in Australia, Fiji and New Zealand.”
14.45-15.15 Nathaniel GEORGE (SOAS): Arab Jacobin? Kamal Junblat, the Lebanese National Movement, and the Republican Tradition
15.15-15.45 Discussion

15.45-16.00 Tea and coffee break

16.00-16.30 Concluding remarks about the Republicanism In Action Project

KEYNOTE ABSTRACTS

Jane BURBANK and Frederick COOPER (University of New York): “Empire, Republic, Federation: Remaking Sovereignty in the Twentieth Century”

The narrative of a grand transition from a world of empires to a world of nation-states leaves out many types of political formations that intellectuals and activists were striving for. Our talk looks at alternatives to both empire and nation-state in three historical contexts: Russia after the fall of the tsarist empire in 1917 and after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, and colonies of Britain and France after World War II. Russia became a “union” of national republics in 1922 and an explicitly named Federation after 1991. By the 2020s, the Russian Federation was trying to restore the boundaries of Russian empire, with power concentrated in Moscow. Great Britain experimented with ideas of federation in Malaya and the Caribbean in the 1940s and 1950s and hoped to modify the Commonwealth to accommodate territories that were becoming independent. India declared itself to be a republic in 1947, yet tried to negotiate a relationship with the Commonwealth consistent with its new status. Political leaders in French Africa sought to create a federation among French African territories that would be part of a confederation that included France and other parts of its former empire. France, starting in 1948, sought some kind of European union that would include overseas territories. When French officials focused on the more modest goal of a European Economic Community, they tried to persuade – unsuccessfully – their would-be partners in Europe to include French and Belgian colonies in Africa in the new entity. Those colonies ended up declaring themselves to be republics, a political form shared with France, India, and other states, formerly colonizing or formerly colonized. The routes out of empire were anything but linear, and the location of sovereignty was uncertain and contested.

Cynthia BARROW-GILES:  "From 1970 to 2024: Westminster Challenged in the Commonwealth Caribbean"

The British Commonwealth Caribbean represents a geographical space that has shown remarkable attachment to the inherited Westminster model. Though there were some minor ramblings in the pre-independence period concerning the suitability of the model to the region, political leaders were reluctant to entertain serious modifications of the Westminster/Whitehall model of governance for a variety of reasons.  The first major reform of the Westminster Constitutions was not undertaken until the second decade of independence (with the exception of Dominica), with the most marked changes occurring in Guyana. It would take another four decades for the remaining Commonwealth Caribbean countries to imagine a transition from the inherited model and the removal of the British crown from the political order. Divided by forty years, this paper will briefly review the undercurrents of the transitions, the changes to the existing political order and finally address the remarkable consistency of the relationship between Britain and the Commonwealth.

Partenaires :
  • University College London
  • SOAS, University of London
  • TransCrit, Paris 8-Vincennes St Denis
  • CREA, Université Paris Nanterre

Mis à jour le 06 janvier 2025