Historians have devoted entire libraries to specifying what that commonality was. There is a vast literature on the economics of empire. Today’s consensus, roughly speaking, is that the inflows and outflows of imperial products and services more or less canceled each other out over the first half of the century (O’Brien, 1988, 163-200; Davis, Huttenback, 1988; Offer, 1993, 215-238). British exploitation was a reality, but so was British indebtedness, the one sure reality of so much of British economic history in the twentieth century.

Historians have addressed the issue of the military and strategic relationships underlying imperial power. Here too the story is a mixed one. The British Empire in the first half of the twentieth century may have been a super power (Clayton, 1996), but it was one without the economic strength to sustain either its position or its dependencies. As Sir Michael Howard put it 30 years ago, Britain’s Continental Commitment was purchased at the expense of her imperial power (Howard, 1989c). The Atlantic Charter of 1941, announcing, at the low point of the Second World War, that Britain’s future would be secured by the shield of American power, transformed that conflict, and left Britain at its conclusion as a proud but faithful satellite of the United States.

Among the many other facets of imperial history, I would like to address problems raised by two which have received less attention, but which I believe are significant: imperial demography and imperial commemorations. My fundamental claim is that demography created the British Empire, and now by the end of the twentieth century, demography has laid it to rest. The project of peopling, in the euphemism of the time, “areas of white settlement” with British people was a remarkable one, with clear and visible outlines in the architecture and ambiance of Toronto, Melbourne, and Capetown. But deeper than the thoroughfares, the public schools, or the botanical gardens, what made the empire, the dominions, and the Commonwealth a reality were the family ties that bound core and periphery together.

The demography of the British diaspora created the late nineteenth-century British empire and dominions. But since the Second World War, the demography of migratory patterns has changed, and with it the ethnic and racial composition both of Britain and of her former dependencies have been transformed. In 1994, the city of Sydney won the right to host the summer Olympic Games of the year 2000. The head of the Sydney committee, in a jubilant mood, announced “we beat the Chinese”, the other major contender as host for the games. His broad Australian accent did not hide the fact that he, himself, was of Chinese extraction; his family had come to Sydney 30 years before. He spoke for a new Australia, one with an Asian and Pacific character and consciousness very different from that dominant a century before.

Some of these lasting cultural forms relate to the two world wars. In a way, remembering the terrible carnage of 1914-1918 and 1939-1945 has created a space in which imperial history could be written and re-written every 11 November. Here is a moment during which the bonds that tied together communities at the ends of the earth could be (and still are) made manifest, respected, and honored. This is why the imperial monuments to the dead of the Great War still draw pilgrims by the tens of thousands today.

Many of them come to the flatlands of the River Somme, where the British army launched a massive and futile campaign on 1 July 1916. On those fields today are thousands of war cemeteries. Adjacent to them are national monuments. At Longueval, there is a South African monument; at Beaumont Hamel, the Newfoundland monument, at Villers-Bretonneux, the Australian monument, and at Thiepval, the monument to the 73,000 missing soldiers of the British Empire, who died on the Somme but whose bodies were never interred. Their graves, the monument’s central plaque affirms, are known but to God. These are all sites where the memory of empire has been fixed in stone.

Even more powerful in its evocative and semi-sacred character is Gallipoli. Both there and in Australia, a dawn service is held commemorating the landing on the shores of Turkey on 25 April 1915. The public that attends these ceremonies is large and growing. And young. 25 April is at one and the same time Australia’s day of mourning and her independence day. It is a moment when history matters.

The commemoration of the two world wars, and of the sacrifices made in them, is the most visceral and living form in which the collective memory of a common history is expressed. But it is important to register the mixed message of these occasions. The men who died in the two world wars stood on the middle ground, captured in the Adelaide pledge of allegiance, between their countries and the British Empire. They died in an imperial effort; but they contributed not only to the survival of the Empire, but also to its supersession. The day Australians landed at Gallipoli is the day they mark the emergence of their separate and distinctive national identity. The Canadians whose deaths are commemorated at Vimy, near Arras, helped create a different kind of Canada, one with a more tenuous tie to the mother country. To remember the wars is to remember at one and the same time the apogee of imperial solidarity and the inexorable features of its demise.

Out-migration in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was relatively modest: in those two hundred years, perhaps one million people left Britain for a new life abroad. That very rough average of 5,000 departures a year was dwarfed by later surges of out-migration. Between 1815 and 1850, perhaps 750,000 people left the British Isles permanently. This outflow of roughly 20,000 a year is almost certainly an underestimate. Migration statistics are a resultant of inflows and outflows. Many people chose to leave Britain for a better life, but first tried out nearby towns and then more distant cities. Internal migration prepared the way for more distant travel. Millions of people moved in a step-wise manner from country to town to city to an overseas destination. But then, sometimes years after arrival abroad, when things got hard, they came home again. And then restarted the cycle. That is, by 1900 international passenger traffic was both ways and repeated. Given the sharp decline in the later nineteenth century in the costs of transportation, overseas voyages became a normal part of the life cycle of a surprisingly large part of the population. How large a part it is difficult to say, but one passenger manifest from the turn of the twentieth century had it that a majority of the people on board had made the Atlantic journey at least twice in the preceding decade.

Thus the major period of out-migration from Britain in the nineteenth century, which helped people the Empire and dominions, was also a period of return traffic from those who couldn’t stand living abroad. That is why all migration statistics must be understood as registering multiple movements; double-counting in un-avoidable. That is another reason why we should attend to trends rather than absolute totals of immigrants whenever we address the subject of movement to and from the Empire.

One additional problem makes all British migration statistics hard to handle. To this day, the movement of Irishmen and women into and out of Britain is both substantial and impossible to estimate with any precision. Migration to the United States or the Empire from Ireland took place both directly and through British ports. Those who embarked on return journeys to the British Isles landed in Ireland and in England, whatever their final destination. This is hardly surprising before the Irish Free State came into being in 1922, but it is still true today. British migration bound Britain and Ireland together even when people were trying to escape from one or the other or both.

Another major headache in handling these data is that they consist of information on people who went to imperial or dominion territories, and those moving to the United States as well. Given the porous character of borders and the absence, prior to the First World War, of mandatory passports, we must treat overseas passenger traffic as capable of reaching a number of different destinations. In the 1880s, perhaps one-third of those who left Britain with the intention of residing abroad aimed to set up a new life in the Empire. The majority headed for America. After the turn of the century, a greater proportion of emigrants chose the Dominions over the United States (Constantine, 1990, 2).

Whichever way they headed, emigrants followed well-trodden pathways. They had pretty good information on where to go and how to get there, provided by relatives, kinsmen, workmates, friends, who had come and gone, and frequently come again. They were making rational choices, determined as much (if not more) by the chance of a prosperous life in the receiver destinations as by disquiet or despair over their future in Britain. What demographers call the “pull” factor outweighed the “push” factor in most calculations.

With these caveats in mind, we can still provide a rough sketch of the peopling of the British Empire and dominions over the last century or so. The data illustrated in Figure 1 are a summary measure of these demographic movements. They describe the pace and level of out-migration from Britain to extra-European destinations (in grey) and the movement back of in-migrants to Britain from these same non-European sources (in hachured). The difference between the two (in black) is the balance of population transfers out of Britain (measured by negative figures in black) or into Britain (measured by positive figures in black). As is evident in Figure 1, the net balance of migration was negative in all decades except the 1930s and 1980s. I shall return to this point in a moment.

Some significant trends began before the turn of the century, and therefore prior to the picture shown in Figure 1. There were two major surges of out-migration from Britain in 1879-1893 and 1903-1914. To give some idea of the magnitude of this movement of populations, we can use complete date for the years 1911-1914, years for which accurate passenger surveys are available. In those four years alone, more than 2.4 million people left Britain for extra-European destinations. But at the same time, over one million people came home from these very same foreign parts. That left the balance of out-migration as over 1.2 million. If two-thirds of these departing Britons reached imperial and dominion ports (Carrothers, 1929, 308-309), and stayed there, we can estimate the British population trying out the Empire and Dominions before the Great War as about 1.5 million. Of these people, half made their homes abroad.

These were exceptional years. The volume of this traffic was unparalleled. It was never matched later in the twentieth century. Given the eighteenth century average of about 5,000 out-migrants a year, and the mid-nineteenth-century average of about 20,000 out-migrants a year, we have reason to be impressed with the pre-First World War annual average of roughly 300,000 out-migrants.

The Great War ended this extraordinary chapter in the history of British migration. Indeed, the toll of human life in the war, as catastrophic as it was, was less than the total loss of population from Britain due to out-migration in the three years 1911-1914 (Winter, 1985, 267). There was a net inflow of population into Britain from extra-European ports during the war, reflecting a return of British-born men to join the army as much as the shortage of shipping to deliver out-migrants to distant destinations.

The column on the left of Figure 1 describes the peak of British out-migration to extra-European destinations. The post-1919 data which are summarized in the columns to its right are strikingly different. Out-migration in the 1920s diminished substantially, but in-migration fell even more sharply. Thus the net balance outwards in the 1920s was higher than in the decade of the war. In the 1930s, migratory movements shrink substantially, and net migration turns positive, that is towards increasing the home population. After the Second World War, out-migration picks up again, but in-migration grows faster still, until the 1980s, when once again, the British population is augmented by in-migrants. The break in the trend that peopled the Empire and Dominions is located in the decade of the 1914-1918 war.

What made the war so decisive in the history of international migration was its effects on the political and economic context in which it took place. First, the gates came down on American immigration. Through three changes in immigration law in 1920, 1924 and 1929, the era of essentially free entry to the United States came to an end. Secondly, the economic troubles of post-war adjustment and of the inter-war depression as a whole touched agricultural regions with particular force. These contractions made it difficult for receiver countries to absorb new immigrants, and for the prospective immigrants to calculate that they would do better in Auckland than in Accrington. Thirdly, the link between capital formation and migration in Britain and the United States, classically analyzed by Brinley Thomas thirty years ago (Thomas, 1973), began to unravel. The ties connecting the two sides of the Atlantic economy were transformed by the reversal of the creditor-debtor relationship as between Britain and the United States.

There were attempts after 1918 to restore immigrant pathways. An Overseas Settlement Committee (later Overseas Settlement Board) was established at the British Colonial Office in 1919. It oversaw emigration schemes, conducted publicity campaigns to advertise the virtues of settlement in the Dominions, brought together interested parties, such as philanthropic agencies, shipping companies and veterans’ organizations. These last were particularly important in the immediate post-war years, when the British government launched a Free Passage Scheme to assist ex-soldiers who wanted to start a new life in the Dominions. The Empire Settlement Act of 1922 provided £3 million a year to encourage British emigration. The Act was renewed in 1937 for a further 15 years, and dispensed a smaller budget, as did successor bodies empowered by post-1945 legislation to facilitate British migration to the Dominions.

These measures had some effect, and eased the passage of a steady, but diminishing migratory stream in the post-war decades. But on balance, the effort to revive earlier demographic trends was unsuccessful, for complex reasons located in the domestic history of the receiver countries as much as in the history of Britain itself. Many of the post-1918 schemes suffered from a surfeit of ideological conservatism. Some political leaders believed that people move across continents primarily for ideological reasons. Migrants had to follow the flag, so as to assure the defense of the mother country. Others voiced, in so many words, older notions about the merits of getting rid of as many working-class men and women as could be siphoned out of an overstocked domestic labor market.

There were political echoes on the receiving end too. British migrants were of the right ethnic stock. To some of those in power in the Dominions, these British emigrants, unwanted in Lancashire, were at least better than eastern and southern European immigrants (or later of African and Asian immigrants), who threatened to transform the ethnic character of Canada or Australia. Such notions were not unknown in Commonwealth Labor movements as well.

But what many proponents of British immigration to the Dominions ignored was that the interests of Britain and of the Dominions were not identical, their labor markets were not symmetrical, and political slogans would do little to ease the absorption of newcomers to environments which were very remote from Britain. The harsh realities of life on the Canadian prairies or on Australian farms were no secret; immigrants wrote home and came home. That is why, even during the worst years of the Depression in the period 1929-1932, emigration from Britain never approached even a fraction of its pre-1914 levels. Indeed, as Figure 1 shows, British out-migration in the period 1931-1938 turned negative. That is, more people were returning from extra-European destinations than embarking on journeys towards them.

The Second World War was a second trough in the pattern of twentieth-century migration from or to Britain. But after 1945, the pace of migratory movement picked up. This is disclosed in Figure 1. But what we cannot see in the graph is that migration changed color (Tranter, 1996, 30ff). The ethnic composition of In-migrants after 1945 (measured in the hachured columns) was strikingly different from that of earlier cohorts.

In the immediate post-war years, 1946-50, both out-migration and in-migration were constricted by the shortage of shipping, the stickiness of the labor market in Britain and variations in demands for labor in receiver states. After 1950, migratory flows increased in both directions, while the net balance of out-migration fell in a stepwise manner, so that by the 1980s, in-migration was greater than out-migration. In sum, Figure 1 discloses two trends: the first is the closure of the pre-1914 immigrant wave; the second is the transformation of Britain from being a net supplier to a net receiver of extra-European populations.

After 1945, American developments lay behind British trends. The Mc Carran-Walter Act of 1952 further restricted the right of entry of groups not already well-represented in the American population. Among them were West Indians, who increasingly saw Britain as their primary destination. In 1948, roughly 500 West Indians immigrated to Britain. In 1954, the number rose to 9,000. Between 1952 and 1961, about 300,000 West Indians came to Britain to stay.

By that time, they had been joined by a substantial inflow of immigrants from the Indian sub-continent. In the early 1960s, between 70,000 and 100,000 people arrived in Britain from India and Pakistan. Then came 111,000 Asian immigrants from Kenya and Uganda, fleeing from political disorder and persecution between 1968 and 1975. Successive Commonwealth Immigration Acts in 1962, 1968, 1971 established controls for this inflow. Alongside these queues of newcomers were Europeans, many from eastern and southern Europe, and the perennial Irishmen. Their right to settle in Britain became entangled in the politics of European integration. By the late 1980s, the share in overall immigration of people from the old Dominions had been reduced substantially, to about 36 percent of all newcomers. As in all other domains, British history had entered European history, and by doing so, a chapter had closed both in the story of population movements from and to Britain, and in the story of the overlapping history of Britain, the Empire and the Dominions.

The data in Figure 1 summarize these trends. There is a linear decline of out-migration in the three decades between 1911 and 1938. After the Second World War, out-migration to extra-European destinations rose again, but so did in-migration. Indeed the gap between the two continued to close, so that by the 1980s, there was a net balance inward. Given the strength of in-migration from Continental Europe over the same period, it is fair to say that by the end of the twentieth century, Britain had become a receiver state for a wide array of people born elsewhere who chose to make it their home. The political economy of out-migration, so evident on the left of figure one was over.

This is an essential part of the story, but not the only one. There is a countervailing, and to a degree, contradictory story that works the other way. The Great War, and to a lesser though similar degree, the Second World War, were periods when the linkages between the mother country and the diaspora grew stronger. That strength is reflected in Table 1, enumerating the contribution of Empire and Dominions to the two wars in the stark category of loss of life. The table provides information on pre-war population totals, totals of military losses, as well as a rough comparison of these losses as a percentage of the total population.

A
First World War

Country	Estimate Pop. in 1914 (millions)	Estimate Killed Thousands	% pop. killed	Killed per 1000
Australia	4,9	60	1,22	12
Canada	8,1	61	0,75	8
India	321,8	54	0,00	0
New Zealand	1,1	16	1,45	15
South Africa	6,3	7	0,11	11
UK	45,2	723	1,60	16
Total	387,4	921

B
Second World War

Country	Estimate Pop. in 1939	Estimate Killed	% pop. killed	Killed per 1000	Killed as % of losses in 1914-18
Australia	7,7	21	0,27	3	35
Canada	11,5	41	0,36	4	67
India	380	36	0,00	0	67
New Zealand	1,7	13	0,76	8	82
South Africa	11,4	3,9	0,03	3	55
UK	46	254	0,55	6	35
Total	458,3	368,9			40

I would like to draw your attention to two totals in this table. As you can see in the second column of numbers, nearly 1.3 million men died on military service from these six countries in the two world wars. Over 900,000 died in the 1914-1918 war. Whereas the total population of the six allies rose from about 387 million in 1914 to 458 million in 1939, an increase of 18 percent, the loss of life in the Second World War was less than half as great as in the Great War. I will return to this contrast in a moment.

For our purposes, it is perhaps most important to underscore the total losses of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, India, and South Africa in the two wars. Over 300,000 men from what might be termed the “British diaspora” died on active service. In the remainder of the time available to me today, I want to chart that heavy, perhaps decisive, contribution to victory in the two world wars, and then turn to its commemoration as a subject which discloses the work of collective memory in creating another, still living, history of the empire. After 1918, when the political, demographic and economic ties holding Britain and her dependencies together were beginning to coming apart, tens of thousands of families recovered those bonds through commemorative practices. Those sites of memory are well known, but perhaps less acknowledged is their power in turning the history of the Empire into family history, and family history of a tragic kind.

What commemoration succeeded in doing is to transform the history of nations into the narrative of thousands of family units. In the field of commemorative practice, small-scale activities usually last longer than large-scale ones, though there are exceptions to this rule (Winter, Sivan, 1999). Memorial services, pilgrimages, and other signifying practices on the local as much as the national level annually recreate families small and large; they even “recreate” the British empire, understood in the fullest sense as a family of nations with a common history, if not a common future. That family remembers its dead anew each 11 November, and in Australia and New Zealand, each 25 April. In recent years, more and more young people have flocked to the ceremonies. Not for them any recollection of the Empire’s mission civilatrice; not for them any Churchillian rhetoric on the empire as bulwark against communism. Their memory of empire is rooted in the experience of war and dominated by the shadow of bereavement.

The rush to the colors in Britain in 1914 was matched by a surge of voluntary enlistment in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa. And this was hardly surprising. Half of the men who joined up in Australia had been born in Britain. That comma in the 1904 pledge of allegiance described the link between the two sides of their double identity, British and Australian. And an unstable identity it was. Return migration was a well-traveled path in the pre-war period. Joining up in 1914 was a reflection of demographic realities. It described who the newcomers to the Dominions were: the bulk was young British-born men of military ages.

Enlistment statistics tell us who these men were in 1914, but not who they were to become in the subsequent four years of combat and beyond. And that is the great irony of the war. Military service began as a natural outcome of the geographical dispersion of the British population. But by 1918, the armies of the Dominions had, as it were, left behind the comma—and the imperial past it embodied. In Australia, New Zealand, and Canada a separate national identity emerged out of imperial military service and sacrifice. The men who returned from the field were less British than those who had gone off to fight. The tie to Britain was still there, though palpably and permanently transformed.

The statistics in Table 1 describe aspects of the heavy contribution the Empire and Dominions made to the war. The figures are incomplete, since they do not incorporate data on other dependencies, for instance Newfoundland or the West Indies, which also put men in uniform during the war. In addition, thousands of men from the Dominions served in British forces. Fuller statistics would only reinforce the impression left here. In Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, over 1.3 million men enlisted. Of this total, 144,000 men were killed. This proportion of one man killed for every nine who served is about the same as the British figure. Another one million men served in the Indian army, and of these men, 54,000 were killed.

These soldiers, and the war economies behind them, made a difference—some would say a decisive difference—in the outcome of the war. They provided the back-up that the German army never had (Winter, 1988, 132). The shadow of empire mattered. And not only in terms of numbers. About one-third of all those who served as pilots in British forces came from Canada. Australian engineers got the knack of the artillery war—and the crucial element of counter-battery operations—at least as rapidly as (and some would say much faster than) their British brethren. The Dominions and Empire not only sent men, they provided the cash to equip them, the wheat to feed them, and the loans that the mother country needed to finance the exponential growth in transport, communication and services. The Empire helped in crucial ways to put these armies in the field and keep them there.

These Dominion troops are known by their role in particular military operations. The Anzacs, I have already noted, landed on Gallipoli in the early hours of 25 April 1915. The expedition failed, and the landing force was ultimately withdrawn eight months later. But to most Australians, their landing was a victory. The defeat was a British, not an Australian, affair. Canadians, South Africans, New Zealanders, and Australians also separate the dignity of their men who fought and died on the Somme in 1916 or at the Third battle of Ypres in 1917—both defeats—from the indignity of British military thinking and the incompetence of British military leadership.

That is one reason why those who believed in Empire or in a modified form of British hegemony through her Dominions could look back with pride on this moment of solidarity. But if there ever was a Pyrrhic victory, this was it. For the very defense of Empire helped ensure its demise. The toll in lives was too great ever to repeat; the costs were too high in every other sense to enable a weakened British economy even to contemplate a military effort on the scale of that of the Great War. What price victory? One answer was the unraveling of the British alliance of motherland, Dominions and Empire.

A reflection of that change may be found in the statistics we have already surveyed of diminishing emigration from Britain to the Dominions in the inter-war years. But another element in the story of what was lost in 1914-1918 may be discerned in the nature and dimensions of the war effort the second time around in 1939-1945. The initial difference is that when Britain went to war on 3 September 1939, the Dominions took the news in, reflected on it, and then made their own decisions. Canada deliberated for a week, and then went to war. So did Australia and New Zealand. And so (with a bit more difficulty) did South Africa, then led by the veteran Imperial statesman, Jan Christiaan Smuts, who ordered the arrest of some Afrikaners who preferred the Nazis to the British. It is to Smuts, by the way, that we owe the phrase “the Commonwealth of Nations”, which he used in 1917 to describe the British alliance in the First World War. The term “the Commonwealth” was officially sanctioned in the Statute of Westminster in 1931.

The war the Commonwealth fought in 1939-1945 was strikingly different from that of 1914-1918. Statistics of military participation reflect this contrast. The population mobilized was greater, and the death toll was lower. This lesser degree of lethality in warfare had three sources. The first was the conviction in 1939, shared by leaders and public opinion alike, that the kind of bloodshed that arose from the stalemate of the Western Front could not be permitted again. When the Soviet Union entered the war in 1941, that carnage was repeated throughout Eastern Europe, but not in those theaters of military operations in which British and allied forces operated. British and German soldiers did not use gas weapons against each other in 1939-1945 as they had done in 1914-1918. The Germans saved the gas for the Jews. Secondly, military medicine had advanced so substantially that the chances of surviving a battlefield wound in the Second World War were much greater than in the First. And thirdly, the 1939-1945 conflict was much more a naval war than the 1914-1918 one. Supplying armies in both the European and Asian theaters required an even greater emphasis on naval and shipping power than had been evident 25 years earlier. And naval war is less lethal than land war.

Again, a caveat is in order when surveying the data in Table 1. These data are incomplete, and illustrate only very rough estimates of casualty levels. They make no mention of the approximately 60,000 British civilians who died in the Blitz. The absolute values registered here matters less than what they tell us about the comparative toll in human lives taken by the two world wars. Approximately 80,000 Australian, New Zealand, Canadian and South African men lost their lives in the Second World War; this was approximately half the total of the First World War. There were variations: the total killed among New Zealanders who served in 1939-1945 was roughly 82 percent of the total killed in 1914-1918. But both British and Australian losses were roughly a third of those suffered in the Great War, as indicated in the final column on the right of the presentation of statistics of the Second World War.

In general, British and Dominion forces fought together and saw their efforts as unified in the Second World War. But some military operations opened a yawning gap between and among Allies. When Singapore was taken on 15 February 1942, 122,000 men surrendered. Some of the Australian men captured blamed the British for the disaster, and for the hardships of the next three years of incarceration at Changi prison camp or further north in Burma. The Canadian Second Division led the probe on German defenses at Dieppe in August 1942. This commando raid turned into a disaster: total British losses in the raid—132; total Canadian losses 2,853. Canadian bitterness about the Dieppe raid has still not abated.

As in the Great War, the economic element in the Allied victory was decisive. Here too the Dominions (alongside the United States) shored up a British economy unable to bear the costs of war alone. If the Great War substantially weakened the British economy, the Second World War impoverished it. Once the Atlantic Alliance was cemented—prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor—the time when Britain could claim to be a “superpower” was at an end.

And so was the dependent status of former Dominions and Imperial possessions. Once more, the immigration statistics after 1945 prove the point. The ties between Britain and the Dominions were maintained, but the human flow that had created them diminished and changed in both character and color. From the mid-1950s, immigration to Britain from the West Indies and the Indian sub-continent outpaced emigration from Britain to the old Dominions.

The Second World War was a critical moment in this transition. India became independent in 1947, and after the fiasco of Suez in 1956, when the overwhelming weight of American power forced Britain to retreat from an imperialist venture to “protect” the Suez Canal, the notion that British power was reflected in her power to act anywhere in the world had to be abandoned. The use of military force against the Argentine army in the Falkland Islands in 1982 was like a nova—a brief glimpse of a world that had exploded long ago.

There is an abundant literature surrounding the theme of imperialism in British popular culture. My own view of the subject is that its significance has been greatly exaggerated. The Empire did matter in the vernacular of working-class life. It was there in music hall songs and vaudeville acts. But it did not have the hold on either the imagination or the political beliefs that some historians have supposed.

Empire Day is a case in point. It was established in 1896 on 24 May, Queen Victoria’s birthday, to celebrate her realm and the imperial vision it embodied. The work of elites in broadcasting this message is evident. Empire Day became a national holiday in Canada in 1897, in Australia in 1905, in New Zealand and South Africa in 1910, and in India in 1923. There were Empire Shopping Weeks, proclaiming the virtues of goods from the Dominions, and an active Empire Marketing Board, with exports also in mind in the inter-war years. The right-wing newspaper Daily Express, owned by the Canadian magnate Lord Beaverbrook, organized Pageants of Empire, and sponsored song fests in Hyde Park to celebrate the Empire and Dominions. In 1924 there was a massive Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London. The King spoke at its opening, and the BBC broadcast the address. Its Director General Sir John Reith was a fervent sponsor of this campaign. These broadcasts went on until the late 1950s when Empire Day became Commonwealth Day (Mangan, MacKenzie, Constantine, 1986, 113-140, 165-191, 192-231).

Now it is just a memory. When asked a year ago, none of my students at Cambridge knew when Commonwealth Day was. To them the Commonwealth is a grant-giving body that subsidizes students coming to Britain; nothing less and nothing more. Imperial propaganda from on high has not left lasting traces, and (though it would be difficult to prove) it is my view that it had little effect even during its hay-day. The reason is that when the demographic links tying together families scattered throughout the Dominions began to fade, when the apogee of emigration had passed, the empire was only a marginal part of family history. Of much greater and lasting significance was (and is) war and the remembrance of the fallen.

This is why war memorials matter still. They convert world history into the history of the household. Ceremonies surrounding them bring the past into the rhythms of the present. They represent what the Australian historian Ken Inglis has called a semi-sacred space, a place where people remote from the churches can meditate on sacred themes (Inglis, 1998).

In the nineteenth century, core and periphery retained elements of a loosely-defined Christian culture (Thorne, 1999). By the mid- to late-twentieth century, those forms had atrophied. It is not that a sense of the sacred is absent from British or Dominions cultural life; it is rather than it is no longer sought within the churches. Instead, commemorative forms redefine sacred space in a way more palatable to a non-church-going, more heterogeneous, multi-ethnic population.

Many war memorials adopt an allegorical style, fashioning figures or symbols of heroism, solidarity, and sacrifice, in a wide array of images and structures. Figurative art is much more prominent in First World War than in later monuments. Styles change and so do commemorative forms. Christian notation is common in many war memorials located in churches and schools. But in civic space, more ecumenical messages were cast in stone. The most prominent of them all is Sir Edwin Lutyens’s Cenotaph in London. It is a Greek form; an empty tomb. It bears a medieval sword in the shape of a cross, but the design was so clearly non-Christian that the Dean of Westminster nearly went apoplectic at its unveiling in 1919. Dean Inge’s objection was not felt by millions of pilgrims who came to that spot and paid their respects to the dead in subsequent years. Lutyens’s sculpture, to everyone’s surprise, became both the British and the imperial war memorial. It announced that remembering the dead went beyond Christianity, since the Empire had lost sons who were of many faiths and of none. When the time came to recall those who had died in the 1939-1945 war, it was obvious that the Cenotaph was the place to do so.

Cenotaphs are to be found throughout the Dominions. Other monumental forms repeat Lutyens’s message. Sir Herbert Baker’s Indian motifs in his facades surrounding the Indian Memorial at Neuve Chapelle created spaces for Hindu and Muslim alike. The cemeteries of the Imperial (now Commonwealth) War Graves Commission all bear an altar of sacrifice with words chosen by Rudyard Kipling from the apocryphal book of Ecclesiasticus, “There names liveth for evermore”. But the cemeteries are hardly Christian in character, resembling a scattering of small to medium-sized English country gardens in the countryside of Picardy and Flanders. Indeed, the war cemeteries of Republican France are more Christian, with row upon row of crosses, than are those of the Commonwealth, where each grave is marked by a headstone, not a cross.

Instead of providing a framework for a specifically Christian message, war memorials provided another kind of reference. Here the local took the place of the imperial, as if to remind visitors that those who died did so in the belief that they were defending very local landscapes. That is why the garden setting and floral displays matter so much; they are so evidently British in a stylized, bucolic way. Other local symbols reinforce the point in different ways. There is a caribou atop a rock on the Newfoundland memorial at Beaumont-Hamel. There is an Ulster tower near Thiepval, and a complete South African blockhouse at Longueval.

When we leave the battlefields and visit the tens of thousands of war memorials in towns and villages throughout the Dominions, this sense of place is stronger still. In the Australian city of Perth there is an avenue of oak and plane trees, planted in 1920 by relatives of the men of Western Australia who died in the war. It is a surrogate cemetery; the men who left this port city to go off to war and who died abroad lie 8,000 miles away. The names of the dead soldier and of the relative who planted each sappling are listed together on each tree in the Avenue of Honour, as if their bonds would be preserved by the spread of these ample trees, which form a majestic promenade today. “I do not know where the body of my boy lies”, said a Perth woman in mourning for her son, “but his soul is here”.

In the vast majority of cases, Second World War memorials on the local level were affixed to those built to commemorate the dead of the Great War. The names were fewer, and the sense of the overlap between the two conflicts justified their elision in stone. More prominent regimental and national monuments to the dead of the Second World War were built, but it is to the local sites of memory that most commemorative practices are attached. That is where the names are.

Kipling was right. The names are what matter most. In the Antipodes, Canada, South Africa, or India, where distance makes pilgrimage very arduous, the names are indeed all that remain. Every one of them is inscribed on the walls of the Australian War Memorial in Canberra. But names matter just as much in Britain: two-thirds of all men who died on active service in British forces in the Great War have no known grave. The practice of naming on local war memorials is therefore profoundly significant (Laqueur, 1996, 123-144). It enabled ordinary people to locate within their own family narratives this monumental moment in the history of the empire. The names help them to return to the family units that created the Empire and Dominions. In a sense, touching the names, or just visiting the war memorials and placing on them a poppy are vital elements in the preservation of the memory of empire. Collective memory never exists in a vacuum; it is created by action, in this case by over 80 years of commemorative activity.

What did people understand by the term “Empire”, when located in this context? My belief is that when people spoke of the Empire at war memorials, they meant less a political or racial project, than a collection of towns and villages scattered throughout the world, but which still had something in common. There is an element of distortion in this view, to be sure. But in analyzing the way terms were used in the past, in exploring the vernacular, we all too frequently miss the particular in the general. I always tell the story of one soldier of the London regiment, who was asked in 1915 if he was fighting for the Empire, he answered with a robust yes. He later explained to a buddy that what he meant was that he was fighting for the Empire Music Hall in Hackney (Winter, Robert, 1999, 6).

Now that the Empire is virtually a memory, what remains of it are the shadows of its history, shadows which are cast on many parts of the world. And yet this shared history is surprisingly alive today. For elites from the Commonwealth, a couple of years at a British university are still part of the breeding that up and coming men and women should enjoy. But there is a more popular, more diffuse, bond between Britain and her former dependencies, arising out of a common history. Fiction returns to it. In Australia it is to be found in the novels of David Malouf, Fly away Peter or The Big World, the first about the 1914-1918 war; the second about the Changi prisoner-of-war camp in the Second World War. In Britain, it is located in the novels of Sebastian Faulks: Birdsong about the Great War, and Charlotte Grey about the Second World War, with a glace back to the trauma of the First.

In recent years, too, young people in Australia and Britain have taken up older commemorative forms and have breathed new life into them. Australia’s Unknown Soldier was buried in Canberra with full military honors in 1996. Here was a symbol of independence: no longer would the Unknown Soldier buried in Westminster Abbey stand for Australians who had died; but the tenor of the event was not anti-British. It reinforced the ties that led these men to fight alongside Britain. Those in attendance were of all age groups, and disproportionately young. The dawn service at Gallipoli draws increasing numbers of people. The campaign in Britain to restore the commemoration of Armistice day to 11 November and not leave it to the Sunday nearest to that date is surprisingly strong, and according to some, likely to succeed. Why does it matter still? Because, to reiterate my point, collective memory is still built into family history. That memory requires a time and place at which it can be expressed. Without a place, collective memory vanishes. War memorials create such a focus of attention, a site where a past can be evoked, recreated, perhaps misinterpreted, but in any event, kept alive. If you want to find remains of the history of the Empire today, you should look beyond Hackney. They are present in thousands of villages and towns, in the countries of the Commonwealth, where the names of the fallen still face passers-by in market squares and before town halls. The family of nations that was the empire is there; expressed not in grandiose rhetoric but in the local, the small-scale, the ordinary: just names. Those names disclose a moment when family history collided with world history, leaving traces, indelible traces we can see to this day.

Jay Winter

Department of History

Yale University

PO Box 208324

New Haven,Connecticut

USA 06520

jay.winter@ yale.edu