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Abstract

This chapter, though focused on a specific Chatham House initiative on ‘race relations’, provides a lens to analyse a number of matters that help understand Chatham House more broadly as a think tank and political actor, with its major networks, activities, and influence. This includes close relations with the policy world (especially the Foreign Office and Colonial Office), shaping élite opinion (through links with the major newspapers, BBC, universities, etc.), and unofficial diplomacy (such as British Commonwealth Relations conferences, among others, including Chatham House’s dominion, ‘new’ Commonwealth, and American think tank counterparts). Chatham House and its allies also helped establish the new academic field of ‘race relations’ via the Rhodes chair of race relations at Oxford, for example, as well as through links with SOAS, LSE, and Bristol, among others. This chapter therefore enables exploration of Chatham House’s linkages with Britain’s post-1945 strategies for continued world influence. Race helps provide one lens that unifies and illuminates key aspects of British strategy in the Cold War, though the issue of race was recognised as independent of Cold War competition, and highlights in turn the closeness of Chatham House’s governing intellectual concepts to those of the British foreign and colonial policy establishment. Chatham House was highly integrated into that establishment, as well as being embedded in a transnational ‘Anglosphere’ network that included its US cousin (the Council on Foreign Relations), their Australian, New Zealand, Canadian, and South African counterparts, and links with the India, Ceylon, and Pakistan institutes of international affairs modelled on Chatham House.

Publication Type:	Book Section
Additional Information:	Parmar, I. & Nouri, B. Race and class in the Cold War: Chatham House and the Board of Race Relations. In: Hill, C. J., Cox, M., Soper, C. & May, A. (Eds.), Chatham House: The First 100 Years. . Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press https://global.oup.com/academic/booksellers/ecatalogue/?cc=gb&lang=en&. For permission to re-use this material, please visit https://global.oup.com/academic/rights.
Subjects:	D History General and Old World > D History (General) > D839 Post-war History, 1945 on H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe)
Departments:	School of Policy & Global Affairs School of Policy & Global Affairs > International Politics
SWORD Depositor:	Symplectic Administrator

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