For readers who hope to better understand the unfolding disaster that is Brexit, Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce's Shadows of Empire offers a timely perspective. Kenny and Pearce trace the nineteenth- and twentieth-century political antecedents to the debate over whether the United Kingdom would remain in the European Union, examining the ideas and actions of such figures as Winston Churchill, Enoch Powell, and Margaret Thatcher. At the heart of the book's argument is the concept of the Anglosphere, a loosely networked imagined community made up of the United Kingdom and former settler colonies New Zealand, Australia, Canada, and the United States. The idea of the Anglosphere has, Kenny and Pearce show, played a crucial rhetorical role in discussions of Britain's place in the world since the late Victorian era, primarily because of its flexibility. Leveraged by people across the political spectrum, the Anglosphere is often staged as a seemingly viable alternative to European integration. Most recently, proponents of Anglosphere thinking maintain that greater connection between the United Kingdom and these other English-speaking countries holds out the possibility of more lucrative free-trade agreements while securing the United Kingdom's sovereignty.
The importance of the Anglosphere in political discussions has waxed and waned over the course of the twentieth century, changing with economic and political circumstances. As Kenny and Pearce show, the idea of an Anglo-Saxon global community—then called “Greater Britain”—emerged in the late nineteenth-century political conversation on imperial federation. Though federating the white settler empire was never a serious possibility, the powerful idea of a Greater Britain sharing race, language, culture, and values delivered very real political, military, and economic advantages. As the British Empire disintegrated in the twentieth century, this idea more expansively included the United States, which has always played a troubled part in the history of the Anglosphere, sometimes cast as rival and sometimes ally. An Anglo-American “special relationship,” as Churchill called it, was necessary if Britain wanted to retain any global power, though Churchill also advocated for closer ties to the European bloc. Though these two positions—close ties to the United States and close ties to Europe—are set in opposition to one another in the works of later thinkers, Kenny and Pearce show that for Churchill in the 1940s, the United Kingdom was uniquely positioned to act as a bridge between the United States and Europe, while also continuing to cultivate Commonwealth ties.
By the 1960s, Britain's global economic power had declined to such a degree that European integration became a much more attractive prospect. Kenny and Pearce further note the economic and political costs of the Commonwealth and the United Kingdom's clear subordinate position relative to the United States, both of which eroded faith in the Anglosphere and made the European Economic Community more desirable. Still, the core ideas of the Anglosphere held purchase even in the work of Enoch Powell, proponent of English national culture and sovereignty, who modified its elements in service of his xenophobic nationalism. The Anglosphere attained further strength among Conservatives under the premiership of Thatcher when the two major political parties reversed their positions on European union, with Conservatives ultimately opposing union. In the twenty-first century, economic downturn and influxes of immigrants from Eastern Europe have again bolstered rhetorical appeals to the Anglosphere as a preferable alternative to the European Union. What impresses most in Kenny and Pearce's account is Anglosphere thinking's malleability, adaptable as it is to a wide variety of political and economic conditions.
Kenny and Pearce render the views of key historical figures in full complexity, examining the evolution of their thinking over time, as well as contradictions inherent in their views. Thatcher, for one, initially supported European integration and protested against isolationists who did not recognize the importance of sustaining British power through collaboration with other European countries, especially in light of loosening ties with Commonwealth countries. Over time, however, she became more and more of a Eurosceptic, and her ideas, Kenny and Pearce show, planted ideas reaped later during Vote Leave campaign. After leaving office, she instead emphasized the greater importance of Anglo-American connections, returning to the late Victorian language of affinities between English-speaking peoples.
Kenny and Pearce's approach is complex and nuanced, attentive to the evolutions of Anglosphere ideas, contingent as they are on prevailing economic and political winds. Shadows of Empire also critiques problematic iterations of Anglosphere rhetoric, from Powell's reworking of its implicit nationalist sentiment to the ways Brexit supporters indulge in imperial nostalgia, envisioning a return to greater geopolitical power through Anglosphere alliances and neoliberalism. The book's primary focus is on British politics, yet one of its marked strengths is its analysis of the racial politics of the Anglosphere, premised as it is on the erasure of the indigenous peoples of settler countries and the exclusion of nonwhite countries like India from it (or at least until it is economically convenient to include them).
The narrative Kenny and Pearce have crafted is compelling, and the impression left by Shadows of Empire is one of a country in the midst of an identity crisis. The language of the Anglosphere is part of an effort to articulate a sovereign identity independent of Europe and yet globally important. In the end, though, Kenny and Pearce suggest that this identity may be unattainable. They conclude that other Anglosphere countries are far less invested in this imagined community and that the most likely outcome of Brexit will not be an invigorated Anglosphere, but the United Kingdom's “diminished geo-political influence and standing” (182).
