In Englishness and Empire, Wendy Webster asks what impact the loss of empire had in shaping national identity after 1939. In order to answer this and related questions, she creatively quarries a rich media archive including the press, radio, feature films, and television to build on recent scholarship that examines the cultural legacy of empire in postimperial Britain. Like Bill Schwarz, Stephen Howe, and most recently Stuart Ward, Webster also seeks to question the “minimal impact thesis” propounded, by among others, David Cannadine, Bernard Porter, and D. George Boyce.

Webster tracks popular narratives of nation within the mainstream media, focusing on themes including immigration, colonial wars, and key historical moments such as the coronation, the conquest of Everest, and Winston Churchill's funeral. In chapter 2 Webster examines the narratives of “peoples war” and “people's empire,” which marked media representation of the Second World War. The concept of the people's war highlighted an inclusive image of Britishness propagated by documentaries on the war effort, both on the home front and in the British Empire. The theme of class-gender unity in the “people's war” was matched by multiracial unity in the people's empire, shown in wartime newsreels. The radio also acted as a metaphor of imperial unity drawing listeners from across the empire into an imperial family of listeners. The emphasis on imperial unity was motivated by the need to foster loyalty among colonial troops and cater to diverse audiences. However, after the war the contributions of women and African and Indian troops were, Webster argues, erased. In fact, the popularity of films about Second World War heroines, such as Odette (1950) and Carve Her Name in Pride (1958), based on the lives of Odette Sanson and Violette Szabo, suggests the activities of some women, if not colonial troops, were recognized.

In chapter 3 Webster shows how in the aftermath of empire ideals of equal racial partnership were in conflict with the prioritization of former white settler colonies. Key events in the process of decolonization were recorded on film, where images were orchestrated. The newsreels representing Britain's orderly withdrawal from India, overseen by Lord Mountbatten, masked the violence of Partition. Indeed violence is shown to be endemic to India rather than the result of British actions. The year 1947 was also when the film Black Narcissus was released, providing one of the most enduring and critically acclaimed wide-screen images of the Indian subcontinent. Webster's argument that the film breaks away from the masculinity of empire and acts as a metaphor for British withdrawal from India as feminine failure is a compelling one, although the wider theme of the seductive power of the east is a familiar one in literature. Female hysteria is racialized and dealt with very differently in the film Bhowani Junction (1956). Representation of Africa in postwar Britain was dominated by the twin themes of welfare and technological expertise.

Chapter 4 focuses on the significant of the dual celebrations of coronation of Elizabeth II and the conquest of Everest and the way that both events looked backed to an imperial past and forward to a multiracial partnership within the Commonwealth. Webster discusses how coronation year threw up two unlikely people's heroes, Tenzing Norgay and Queen Salote of Tonga. As Webster argues, “Imagery of Tenzing and Salote in the British Media was volatile and shifting with a tendency to represent them differently in the context of `home' and `away’” (110). While Tensing journeyed away from intrepid hero to bewildered child, Salote's smile could not shield her from the British press, which cast her as a cannibal.

The chapter on colonial wars focuses on the contradictory narrative of empire and Englishness under threat from colonial insurgency in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus. Although geographically remote from the metropolitan audience, attachment to a racial community of Britishness drove interest in the fate of white civilians. Insurgency shows competing gendered accounts of renegade masculinity, where, Webster argues, the Mau Mau were represented as target practice for colonial authorities and violators of domestic sanctuaries that harbored female white settlers. Hollywood used this hunting metaphor in films like Safari (1956) and Mogambo (1953). Like American westerns, the settler homestead was the site to be defended. Treacherous servants and plucky white women were symbols of “little England” under siege.

By the 1960s commonwealth immigration or what was widely called the “colour problem” was seen as a domestic issue and a subject of media interest. Parallels can be drawn between besieged white settlers defending their homesteads against attack and similar discourses in anti-immigration rhetoric in the metropolis, where the colonial insurgent had rematerialized into the black “immigrant.” Common to both discourses was the domestic sanctuary and its white female guardians. Little England was set against the multiracial commonwealth. The media focused on fears of miscegenation. Webster has unearthed some interesting television documentaries such as Black Marries White: The Last Barrier (1964) and The Negro Next Door (1965). She demonstrates how documentary realism was seen as the most effective medium for representing immigration but not white racism, which has recently been depicted in television comedies such as “Little Britain.” Chapter 7 focuses on the impact of the loss of empire on British masculinity in films such as Bridge over the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and plays such as Look Back in Anger (1956). Finally, the study concludes by connecting Margaret Thatcher's inheritance of the imperial mantle from Winston Churchill, which brings the study up to date.

While some of the themes Webster unearths have been explored by others including Ian Baucom, Peter Hansen, and Ward, nevertheless locating these themes within postwar media does add significantly to our understanding of postimperial Britain. Englishness and Empire represents a thoroughly researched and thought-provoking monograph, which will prove invaluable to students and researchers across the humanities.