The Routledge Concise History of Twentieth-Century British Literature by Ashley Dawson

Author:Ashley Dawson [Dawson, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Nonfiction, History, European General, Modern, 20th Century, Fiction & Literature, Literary Theory & Criticism
ISBN: 9781135123024
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2012-12-12T05:00:00+00:00

The setting imperial sun

Despite popular perceptions of the Victorian Age as the zenith of imperialism, the British Empire in fact continued to grow in the first half of the twentieth century, particularly after the Mandate system established following the First World War placed large swathes of the former Ottoman Empire under British control. As we have seen, however, the Second World War, seen as a people’s war against fascism culminating in the Atlantic Charter’s promise of democracy, raised questions about liberty for Britain’s many colonies around the world. In addition, shattered by the war, Britain was forced in 1946 to agree to the terms of the Anglo-American Loan agreement through which reconstruction funds were made available as an interest-bearing loan with heavy strings attached rather than as a grant, sealing the post-war economic hegemony of the United States. The US’s anti-colonial rhetoric of popular self-determination, while often serving as a convenient cloak to facilitate American access to previously protected British colonial markets, made the British Empire seem an increasingly unjust hangover from a bygone age. Most important, however, in dismantling the empire were the courageous efforts of anti-colonial nationalist movements across Asia, Africa, and the Caribbean. At midnight on August 15, 1947, India and Pakistan, the jewels in Britain’s imperial crown, were declared independent. Other important colonies across the world were soon to follow. The sun was beginning to set on the British Empire.

How would Britons react to this decline? One way was to simply ignore it. This strategy was particularly evident in popular literature, where imperial nostalgia became a prominent trait. The imperial adventure narrative, made popular by H. Rider Haggard during the late Victorian Age and sustained by the interwar fame of T.E. Lawrence (a.k.a. Lawrence of Arabia), was retooled and updated for the Cold War era with the publication of Ian Fleming’s Casino Royale (1953). An instant hit in Britain, Fleming’s novel introduced James Bond, secret agent 007, the handsome, worldly ladies’ man and smooth killer who would become famous in Fleming’s many sequels and the massively popular film adaptations of subsequent decades. Casino Royale unfolds in the elite northern French resort of Royale-Les-Eaux, where Bond is sent by British intelligence to beat an ethnically polyglot (with “Jewish blood”) Soviet agent appropriately named Le Chiffre (the cypher) at the gambling tables, thereby forcing the spymasters for whom he works to “retire” him and neutralize his influence on the Communist-aligned French trades unions from which he has embezzled a fortune (13). Bond is joined in this hazardous enterprise by a suitably winsome female agent named Vesper Lynd, as well as by his counterparts in the French and US secret services. After beating Le Chiffre at the baccarat tables, he survives torture and succeeds in his mission, and of course also seduces Lynd along the way. Although none of the novel’s action takes place in the colonies, Bond’s cover in Royale-Les-Eaux is as a “Jamaican plantocrat” whose father “had made his pile in tobacco and sugar and whose son

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