ABSTRACT
Rhodesia was the biggest problem throughout the 1970s at home, where it continued to arouse enormous controversy especially among Conservatives. It was Britain's last really big colonial burden. British civilisation was very much more resilient and sure of itself, the British exerted themselves to make sure they were not contaminated by other cultures, which was what all the nonsense about dressing for dinner in the African bush was about. Professor Max Beloff, a distinguished imperial historian, wrote the danger of a sudden and total revulsion against anything that reminds of past advantages and past glories, a sudden shift into an isolationist little-Englandism with unhealthy overtones of xenophobia and even racialism accompanying it. Racism directed at coloured immigrants or their descendants was a constant problem in Britain from the 1950s onwards, provoking two kinds of legislative response immigration controls, and anti-discrimination laws. In the late nineteenth-century British imperialism was both capitalist and anti-capitalist, at one and the same time.
