Ezequiel Mercau. The Falklands War: An Imperial History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 264 pp. $39.99 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-48329-2.
Reviewed by Aaron Coy Moulton (Stephen F. Austin State University)
Published on H-LatAm (December, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
The British Falklands or Argentine Malvinas islands occupy a rather odd space in both the British Empire and Latin America. On one hand, the islands remain a product of early nineteenth-century British imperialism at the same time as Argentine nationalists seek the lands’ transferal. On the other hand, the islands have very little economic or strategic value, with a total population of less than two thousand settlers throughout the twentieth century. In 1982, Argentina’s military junta sought to reinforce its domestic credentials by invading the territories, resulting in an unexpectedly quick military response from Margaret Thatcher’s government. Historians have identified this as a pivotal factor undermining the junta’s legitimacy and contributing to its downfall. For those seeking a thorough examination of the conflict or overarching construction of the islands’ history within the empire, Ezequiel Mercau’s The Falklands War: An Imperial History might have a slightly misleading title. The author’s work is not in any sense an “imperial history” of the war; rather, as Mercau admits, “this book focuses on Britishness” (p. 201). Casting his gaze upon the islanders, England, and even Anglo-Argentines, Mercau attempts to trace how these various communities understood their relationship to a Greater Britain.
After an introduction outlining the historiographies and methodologies underpinning his analytical concept of Greater Britain, Mercau opens his first chapter with the tensions erupting in the 1940s and 1960s. Growing political and ideological conflicts emerged surrounding the transnational connections between the islanders and the British Empire in the midst of decolonization and Argentine pressure on the islands’ future. Whereas the literature on decolonization in the global Cold War has centered on those who sought to break the bonds of colonialism, Mercau finds that those on the islands evoked a transnational idea of “kith and kin” to reinforce their relationship with England. Witnessing debates over India or the rise of the United Nations, islanders summoned their “loyalty to the Crown” and “100% white” composition to demand England’s support and attention (p. 26). When worried about being excluded from the idea of Greater Britain and the United Kingdom itself with the Immigration Act, islanders sought autonomy and representative voices within the British Empire, rather than independence. Here, Mercau contrasts residents’ vocal boasts of their “Britishness” against the empire’s seeming disinterest. Due to the author’s reliance on secondary sources or primary source compilations to reconstruct islanders’ worldviews before the 1960s, some readers might wish for more nuance that would have come from an in-depth examination of the islands’ newspapers, one beyond the materials in the National Archives at Kew, that would have allowed Mercau to dig deeper into the complicated nature of the islanders’ understanding of the British Empire during these crucial years of global decolonization.
Fortunately, Mercau’s analysis ramps up as his examination turns to the 1970s and 1980s in the second chapter. Following the leak of secret England-Argentina sovereignty transfer plans, the islands’ inhabitants escalated their efforts to retain their “Britishness” beginning in 1968. Clinging to that transnational kith and kin link to Greater Britain, residents, newspapers, and an organized lobby petitioned London in hopes of bolstering public sentiment against any suggestions to hand the islands over. This was despite the Foreign Office’s repeated mocking of the islands’ strategic and economic use as it was preoccupied with more valuable territories and regions. The Foreign Office was also working with Argentina to set into motion a “sovereignty umbrella” or “hearts and minds” campaign to lay the groundwork for a future transferal. That transnational bond, though, frayed as islanders deployed “Keep the Falkland Islands British” signs and boasted of their Britishness but saw their calls fall upon deaf ears. It would be the Argentine invasion in 1982, though, that reignited this kith and kin bond. Parliament, British public opinion, conservative Scots, and even Irish unionists tapped into this idea of Britishness to justify an aggressive response to retake the islands.
Within Britain, this idea of Britishness and defending Greater Britain soon saw militant defenses of a reinvigorated empire. Newspapers and pundits evoked sometimes historical and sometimes exaggerated imperial memories as they cheered Thatcher’s decision to rebuke the Argentine junta and retake the islands. As Mercau argues, an “imperial memory gradually became more established, alongside the idea of defending ‘kith and kin,’ as a framework to explain and justify (or indeed condemn) Britain’s actions in the South Atlantic” (p. 105). This framework even excluded Anglo-Argentines who tried to summon an idea of a Greater Britain to discourage Thatcher’s forceful response to the islands’ invasion. With a wide lens, Mercau traces how these various debates, revolving around frequently competing transnational discourses of Britishness, often diverged over questions of race and civic belonging due to the conflict.
The result was a heated popular discourse of gunboats, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and decolonization that simultaneously championed the remaining legacies of Britain’s global power and unleashed debates over imperial atavism and the empire’s future. Figures on the British Right such as Thatcher and her fellow Conservatives invoked the “Falklands factor” and that sense of Britishness to boast that Britain’s patriotism, self-sacrifice, “old pride,” and “greatness” had returned (pp. 153-154). From Marxist historians to Social Democrats, the Left feared jingoistic politics and aspired to a vision of Greater Britain independent of its colonies. Initially, the islanders themselves capitalized upon the entire affair, from the military conflict to Thatcher’s 1983 surprise visit, to reaffirm their Britishness. With an increased British presence and revised political relationships, islanders also feared losing their “dream island” and their original relationship with England as new anxieties about their future replaced their old ones of the mid-1900s.
Although this text is clearly intended for specialists of the British Empire, Latin Americanists can benefit from the author’s transnational approach. By recreating and pinpointing the nuances and tensions of imperial linkages across the Atlantic going into and coming out of the 1982 crisis, Mercau reminds readers that ideologies, even those built upon narrow conceptions of race or civic pride within a seemingly monolithic empire, remain fluid and everchanging. Scholars examining colonialism in British Honduras/Belize and British Guiana/Guyana might appreciate this text while focusing their attention upon the disputes over self-determination and imperial linkages that sometimes dovetailed with global currents of decolonization, as in the latter case, but other times took their own pattern, as in the former. After all, the islanders’ efforts to retain their association with the British Empire against any absorption into Argentina might be a fascinating case study for comparative work regarding those in the Central American territory who dreaded Guatemalan claims.
Aaron Coy Moulton is Assistant Professor of Latin American History at Stephen F. Austin State University where he is completing his manuscript, Caribbean Blood Pact: The Negotiated Cold War Against the Guatemalan Revolution, 1944-1954, which reveals how Guatemalan dissidents, Caribbean Basin dictators, transnational corporations, and British intelligence put into motion what would become the United States government’s Operation PBSUCCESS that overthrew Guatemala’s democratically elected government.
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Citation:
Aaron Coy Moulton. Review of Mercau, Ezequiel, The Falklands War: An Imperial History.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
December, 2020.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55914
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