ABSTRACT
In a strictly legalistic sense, Britain still had overseas colonies in the mid-1970s. Rhodesia was the biggest problem throughout the 1970s – at home, where it continued to arouse enormous controversy especially among Conservatives; in the Third World, where its non-resolution provoked great bad feeling; and of course in Rhodesia itself. Dean Acheson, a former US Secretary of State, described her predicament in 1962 as having ‘lost an empire and not yet found a role’. 1992, Margaret Thatcher staked a claim for ‘enterprise’ and ‘anti-socialism’ as the defining British characteristics, but that was a partisan view, at best. Professor Max Beloff, a distinguished imperial historian, warned of this in 1969. ‘We now face,’ he wrote, ‘the danger of a sudden and total revulsion against anything that reminds us of past advantages and past glories, a sudden shift into an isolationist little-Englandism with unhealthy overtones of xenophobia and even racialism accompanying it.’.
