Enoch Powell, in his infamous 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, recounts a conversation with a man from Wolverhampton who worries that within a generation the blacks of Britain will have “the whip hand.” He purportedly tells Powell that he hopes his children manage to escape this terrible future by emigrating “overseas.” The construction and elaboration of this both real and mythical “overseas,” and its relationship to metropolitan Britons' sense of themselves and their nation in the era of decolonization, is the focus of Bill Schwarz's White Man's World, the first of three volumes in a series, Memories of Empire. Schwarz argues that the settler colonies were central to the creation of whiteness: a congeries of attributes that are the possession of the civilized but which can most easily be recognized as Anglo-Saxon masculinity. He challenges the notion that in the course of the British empire's expansion and the establishment of the settler colonies, an ideal of whiteness was exported from the metropole to the imperial periphery. Rather, as the series title suggests, he asserts that the centrality of race in general, and whiteness in particular, to the British metropolitan population's self-identification as Britons, is a process of strategic remembering and forgetting that began in earnest just as the empire was in decline and was not, prior to decolonization, a particularly active component in metropolitan identity. It did not need to be; whiteness was, therefore, a product of the colonial frontier.

Schwarz starts by closely examining the response to Powell's speech in 1968. The overwhelming support that Powell received (according to the most recent and reliable analysis, within a fortnight he had received 43,000 letters, 800 of which were negative [40]) leads Schwarz to ask: what was it that these letter writers were responding to, and why at this moment in time? He suggests that what Powell tapped into was an anxiety that the end of an undifferentiated British identity of masculine whiteness was, for many, an end to identity itself. Schwarz takes great pains to examine the psychic mechanisms by which a substantial portion of the British public saw itself emasculated and, therefore, stripped of its whiteness. In large part, this is a result of the origins of the Anglo-Saxon racial myth as being located first and foremost in men of action and knowledge who were equally authoritative in the metropole as they were in the imperial arena. Lords Curzon, Cromer, and Milner figure prominently in this pantheon, suggesting, through their biographies as well as their rhetoric, that even as settler populations were annihilated in the colonies—whether literally, culturally, or both—in the name of a pathological fear of otherness, the paragon of Greater Britain was the man who “knew” the native, even as he effortlessly navigated the highly civilized halls of metropolitan power.

Schwarz's discussion of these men in the early chapters seems to pull the discussion decidedly into the Victorian and Edwardian eras. This is where arguments about the creation of imperial ideologies seem so often located. But Schwarz wants our sojourn there to be an act of remembering, undertaken by “Wolverhampton Man” in the 1950s, 1960s, or 1970s. It is the very contracting of Greater Britain, and the inward migration of its nonwhite populations, that prompts this “ethnic populism,” whereby the whites of Britain seemingly remember an era where, not only could the proper order of things be found “overseas,” but because the settler colonies could be imagined as the children of the metropole, Britons must have authored this racial rightness from home.

In the last three chapters, Schwarz focuses his gaze squarely on Africa in order to bring his argument back to the decolonizing and postcolonial metropole. He begins by asserting that there existed an uneasy but strongly argued relationship between racial exclusion and British liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century. As the ever-popular Jan Smuts promised the British public, the expansive promises of democracy could be and were reconcilable with the assumption of white supremacy.

In the penultimate and then in the final chapter the demise of the briefly lived Central African Federation and the protracted vicious war in Rhodesia are examined as catalysts for post-Suez political radicalization in Britain. This first happens on the level of factionalism within the Conservative Party itself, with the rise in influence of the Monday Club, and subsequent policy shifts drawing a line from Enoch Powell to Margaret Thatcher. Then it happens in the psyches of the wider nation, as the demise of Ian Smith's Rhodesia, dragged out over so many years, became a distorting template for metropolitan “memories” of an imperial myth that was mourned as a lost history. This use of exclusively African and white settler minority examples to take his story into the era of decolonization is, perhaps, the only significant weakness in the volume, but one that may well be remedied in the two volumes to follow. All of the former settler colonies have negotiated very different paths through decolonization toward a postcolonial present, and their evolving conversations with the metropole about race have been equally as varied.

White Man's World traverses three spheres of current scholarship. In each case, Schwarz's mastery of the historiography is impressive. He explicitly puts his work across the divide from Bernard Porter and others who argue that there was minimal popular metropolitan awareness of, or impact from, imperialism. He shares the current fascination with memory as a simultaneously personal and collective creator of history and shows how the cultural and psychological processes of decolonization have proved to be fecund territory for its deployment. It is in his discussion of race, however, that this volume will likely prove most useful. His careful delineation of whiteness as a possessive rather than existential condition, an accretion of associations and values beyond anything purely relational and attributive, is persuasive. In the subsequent volumes, The Caribbean Comes to England and Postcolonial England, Schwarz proposes to continue along all of these fronts as he first observes the last decades of the British empire through the eyes of one of its many colonized populations and then returns to the metropole for the decades of decolonization.