Broadcasting Empire Hardcover

Simon J. Potter

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.

0199568960

9780199568963

English

OUP Oxford

5-Jul-2012

272

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.