Enoch Powell and the Making of Postcolonial Britain

In this radically revisionist reading of the life and political career of Enoch Powell, Camilla Schofield follows Powell's trajectory from an officer in the British Raj to the centre of British politics and then his turn to Ulster Unionism. She argues that Powell and the mass movement against black immigration that he inspired shed important new light on Britain's Second World War generation, popular understandings of the welfare state and the significance of memories of war and empire in the making of postcolonial Britain. Using Powell's own papers and correspondence, she sets Powell within a political generation who had witnessed or were affected by the hardships of the interwar years, the bombing of cities at war as well as the last gasps of British imperial power. Through Powell's life in politics, she illuminates the complex relationship between British social democracy, racism and the domestic politics of imperial decline in Britain.