About the Book
Broadcasting was born just as the British empire reached its greatest territorial extent, and matured while that empire began to unravel. Radio and television offered contemporaries the beguiling prospect that new technologies of mass communication might compensate for British imperial decline. In Broadcasting Empire, Simon J. Potter shows how, from the 1920s, the BBC used broadcasting to unite audiences at home with the British settler diaspora in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. High culture, royal ceremonial, sport, and even comedy were harnessed to this end, particularly on the BBC Empire Service, the predecessor of today's World Service. Belatedly, during the 1950s, the BBC also began to consider the role of broadcasting in Africa and Asia, as a means to encourage 'development' and to combat resistance to continued colonial rule. However, during the 1960s, as decolonization entered its final, accelerated phase, the BBC staged its own imperial retreat.
This is the first full-length, scholarly study to examine both the home and overseas aspects of the BBC's imperial mission. Drawing on new archival evidence, it demonstrates how the BBC's domestic and imperial roles, while seemingly distinct, in fact exerted a powerful influence over one another. Broadcasting Empire makes an important contribution to our understanding of the transnational history of broadcasting, emphasising geopolitical rivalries and tensions between British and American attempts to exert influence on the world's radio and television systems.
Table of Contents:
Introduction
1: Diversity, 1922-31
2: Discord, 1932-35
3: Integration, 1935-39
4: War, 1939-45
5: Continuities, 1945-59
6: Challenges, 1945-59
7: Disintegration? 1960-70
Conclusions
About the Author :
Simon J. Potter is the author of News and the British World: the Emergence of an Imperial Press System, 1876-1922 (2003), and has published widely on the history of the press and broadcasting in the British empire. He was formerly a Government of Ireland Research Fellow, a Rydon Fellow at the Menzies Centre for Australian Studies, London, and a Harold White Fellow at the National Library of Australia.
Review :
a staggering achievement on the whole, worthy of attention by scholars of popular culture and British imperialism, in addition to those interested in the business of radio and television.
this is an excellent study that deserves a readership in multiple fields and is a worthy successor to Potters previous volume for Oxford: News and the British World: the emergence of an imperial press system, 18761922 (2003).
The depth of research and analysis which have gone into Broadcasting Empire represents a significant accomplishment ... It will be a key reference point for scholars working on media, the empire and British identity for years to come.
Potter writes lucid, accessible prose and wears his erudition and hours labouring in the documentary archives lightly. The book should appeal not only to those who are interested in the history of the BBC's external activities but also to all of us who are still engaged in the ongoing arguments about the purposes of broadcasting and the appropriate financial and governmental systems needed to secure these purposes.
For readers interested in radio history, and in media studies more generally, much of Potters narrative will be familiar, but his attempt to weave imperial considerations into the history of the BBC will offer a refreshing perspective. Likewise, for historians of imperialism, the outlines of Potters narrative will be known, and yet his resourceful use of extensive media archives shows how organizations with an uncertain relationship to the nation-state took on the mantle of British imperialism.
Simon Potter has given us is a wider view, in which we are able for the first time to consider both the home and overseas aspects of the BBC's imperial mission. In doing so, he has provided a text which adds greatly to our understanding of the transnational history of broadcasting.
in bringing evidence from a detailed reading of the BBC archives together with that from collaborating broadcasters to explore efforts to unite audiences across the British world, this book should be of considerable interest to historians of both broadcasting and Britishness.
Potter effectively maps out the evolution of the British Broadcasting Corporation from a near-dictatorial entity to a leader of commonwealth partners.
a fascinating account ... Potter's valuable book is more than just a narrative of the differences between senior managers of broadcasting organisations. Rather, it is a careful study of how the BBC sought to be the cornerstone in forging social and political links within the Empire (later the Commonwealth).
He [Simon J. Potter] has thereby filled a significant gap in both national and international broadcasting history.
This deceptively slim volume packs a powerful punch ... Broadcasting Empire is a perceptive and exhaustive analysis ... imperial and media historians alike can benefit from and build on this solid and scholarly foundation.
Recommended.
an important book, which will be of interest to historians of the British world and to media scholars ... [Potter] skilfully plots the evolution of an idea, public service broadcasting, that emerged throughout the British world in opposition to commercial broadcasting ... Like all high-quality research, Broadcasting Empire has stimulated rather than closed down debate.
Scripting Empire juxtaposes the work of a wide range of authors and artists in a fresh and thought-provoking fashion: Una Marson and Langston Hughes, to explore transatlantic connections; Louise Bennett and Wole Soyinka, to shed light on the use of the dramatic monologue as a literary and radio form; Amos Tutuola and Derek Walcott, to consider the impact of audio hardware on writing and broadcasting; and also considers connections among members of wider networks who used literature and radio to advance their varied agendas...Procter shows why we need to pay more attention to programmes, to what they contained and how they sounded, including how accent, dialect, and idiom were deployed on-air to create a sense of community and identity and to win over listeners.
