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Notes
The National Archives (TNA), DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.
D.S. Senanayake, “Message,” Souvenir and Guide: Colombo Plan Exhibition (Colombo: Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952), preface, n.p.
Key works include Daniel Oakman, Facing Asia: A History of the Colombo Plan (Canberra, ANU Press, 2010); Shigeru Akita, Gerold Krozewski, and Shoichi Watanabe (eds), The Transformation of the International Order of Asia: Decolonization, The Cold War, and the Colombo Plan (London and New York, Routledge, 2015). On the plan’s origins, see Shoichi Watanabe, “The 1950 Commonwealth Foreign Ministers’ Meeting and the International Aid Programme for Asia” in ibid., pp. 15-33 and David Lowe, “Percy Spender and the Colombo Plan 1950”, The Australian Journal of Politics and History 40:2 (1994), pp. 162–176. Lowe has also written numerous articles on the Plan from a variety of perspectives.
See, for example, Joseph Morgan Hodge, Triumph of the Expert: Agrarian Doctrines of Development and the Legacies of British Colonialism (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2007) and Nick Cullather, The Hungry World: America’s Cold War Battle Against Poverty in Asia (Harvard, Harvard University Press, 2010).
Ruth Craggs and Claire Wintle (eds), Cultures of Decolonisation: Transnational Productions and Practices, 1945-70 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2016), p. 13. They are drawing on a very abundant literature on development. See, especially, Timothy Mitchell, Rule of Experts: Egypt, Techno-Politics, Modernity (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2002).
Here I am paraphrasing the insights of Craggs and Wintle, Cultures of Decolonisation, 9.
Junko Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies towards Southeast Asia, 1950-1951” in Akita et al., The Transformation of the International Order of Asia, pp. 159-73; Oakman, Facing Asia, and David Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan: Public Images of Australia’s Relations with Post-Colonial South and Southeast Asia in the 1950s,” South Asia 25 (2002), pp. 183–204. On soft power, see Joseph S. Nye, Jr. Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York, Public Affairs, 2004), p. x. and for elaborations, applications and critiques, see Naren Chitty, Li Ji, Gary D. Rawnsley and Craig Hayden, (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Soft Power (London and New York, Routledge, 2017).
In this article I use the term Ceylon rather than Sri Lanka since the nation still bore its colonial name, and early leaders consciously maintained this name until 1972.
For a discussion of the government’s nationalist political culture in Sri Lanka, see Nalani Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development in Postcolonial Sri Lanka (Lanham, Lexington Books, 2006) and Harshana Rambukwella, Politics and Poetics of Authenticity: A Cultural Genealogy of Sinhala Nationalism (London, UCL Press, 2018).
B.R. Tomlinson, “The Weapons of the Weakened: British Power, Sterling Balances, and the Origins of the Colombo Plan” in The Transformation of the International Order of Asia, pp. 34-49; Gerold Krozewski, “Britain and the Reordering of Overseas Aid, 1956-64: From Colonial Development Finance to Assistance to Sovereign States” in ibid., pp. 143-158; Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity”, and Nicholas Tarling, “The United Kingdom and the Origins of the Colombo Plan”, Journal of Commonwealth & Comparative Politics 24:1 (1986), pp. 3–34. France engaged in similar strategies. See Véronique Dimier, The Invention of European Development Aid Bureaucracy: Recycling Empire (Basingstroke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For other comparisons, see Laurent Dornel and Michael Parsons (eds), Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires (Pau, PUPPA, 2016).
For this phrasing and concept, see Robert Gildea, Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2019), p. 70.
For comparisons, see Sarah Stockwell, The British End of the British Empire (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2018) and Véronique Dimier and Sarah Stockwell (eds), The Business of Development in Post-Colonial Africa (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2020).
John Darwin, The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System 1830-1970 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 2009), p. 546.
The literature on exhibitions is now substantial. For a book that addresses tensions and collaborations within the British Empire, see Peter H. Hoffenberg, An Empire on Display: English, Indian, and Australian Exhibitions from the Crystal Palace to the Great War (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2001).
For imperial propaganda, see the seminal text by John M. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880-1960 (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1984); For a recent assessment, see John McAleer and John M. McKenzie (eds), Exhibiting the Empire: Cultures of Display and the British Empire (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2015).
Philip M. Taylor, The Projection of Britain: British Overseas Publicity and Propaganda, 1919-1939 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1981); Mariel Grant, Propaganda and the Role of the State in Inter-War Britain (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1994); Simon J. Potter, Broadcasting Empire: The BBC and the British World, 1922-1970 (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012). Among recent work on the British Council, see Alice Byrne, “The British Council and Cultural Propaganda in the United States, 1938-1945,” Journal of Transatlantic Studies 11:3 (2013), pp. 249–263.
Sir Stephen Tallents, The Projection of England (1932; London, Film Center Ltd reissue, 1955), pp. 11. An important study of Tallents’ ideas and career is Scott Anthony, Public Relations and the Making of Modern Britain: Stephen Tallents and the Birth of a Progressive Media Profession (Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2012).
Sir Angus Gillan, “The Projection of Great Britain on the Colonial Empire,” Journal of the Royal Society of Arts, 91:4638 (December 11, 1942), p. 32.
Ian McLaine, Ministry of Morale: Home Front Morale and the Ministry of Information in World War II (London, George Allen and Unwin, 1980); Kate Morris, British Techniques of Public Relations and Propaganda for Mobilizing East and Central Africa (New York, The Edwin Mellen Press, 2000); Nicholas John Cull, The British Campaign against American ‘Neutrality’ in World War II (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1995); Susan A. Brewer, To Win the Peace: British Propaganda in the United States During World War II (Ithaca and London, Cornell University Press, 1997); Auriol Wiegold, Churchill, Roosevelt and India: Propaganda During World War II (New York and London, Routledge, 2008).
Caroline Ritter, Imperial Encore: The Cultural Project of the Late British Empire (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2021). This was especially the case in late and postcolonial British Africa. See, for example, Mélanie Torrent, “‘But always as friends’: British Cultural Diplomacy, Decolonisation and the Cold War in West Africa (1957-1964),” in Fins d’empires/Ends of Empires, pp. 93-118.
Gillan, “Projection,” p. 33.
Andrew Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, 1845-53: The Information Research Department (London and New York, Routledge, 2004), pp. 63-65. Also see, Brendan Maartens, “From Propaganda to ‘Information’: Reforming Government Communications in Britain,” Contemporary British History 30:4 (2016), pp. 542-562.
In addition to Defty, see John Jenks, British Propaganda and News Media in the Cold War (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), and TNA FO 1110/532, Policy: revised memorandum on the use of IRD material, 1953.
Calder Walton, Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War and the Twilight of Empire (London, Harper Press, 2013).
Defty, Britain, America and Anti-Communist Propaganda, p. 77.
Jenks, British Propaganda, 65. Paul Lashmar and James Oliver, Britian’s Secret Propaganda War, 1948-1977 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), xiv.
British Library, India Office Information Records, IOR/L/I/1/25, File no, 4/10, Minutes of Meeting of Cabinet Committee on Colonial Information Policy, 17 December 1948.
TNA FO 953/1636, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of Colombo Plan to combat propaganda put out by Soviet Union in South East Asia, 1956.”
Cmnd. 9138. Summary of the Report of the Independent Committee of Enquiry into Overseas Information Services (Hereafter Drogheda Report) (London, HMSO, 1954) p. 4.
Drogheda Report, p. 6.
This use of propaganda had started much earlier, however. See Milton Israel, Communications and Power: Propaganda and the Press in the Indian Nationalist Struggle, 1920-1947 (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1994); Susan Carruthers, Winning Hearts and Minds: British Governments, the Media and Colonial Counter Insurgency 1944-1960 (London, Leicester University Press, 1995); Kumar Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda: The Winning of Malayan Hearts and Minds, 1948-1958 (London and New York, Routledge, 2002); and Maria Hadjiathanasiou, Propaganda and the Cyprus Revolt: Rebellion, Counter-Insurgency and the Media, 1955-59 (London, I.B. Tauris, 2020).
Philip M. Taylor; British Propaganda in the 20th Century: Selling Democracy (Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press, 2010).
See, for example, Ramakrishna, Emergency Propaganda.
TNA FO 953/1636, 1637 and 1638, “Information work in Federation of Malaya and Singapore: Efforts of Colombo Plan to combat propaganda put out by Soviet Union in South East Asia, 1956.”
Oakman, Facing Asia, p. 67.
The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Nicholas Press Ltd for the Central Office of Information, 1961), p. 2.
David Lowe, “Australia’s Colombo Plans, Old and New: International Students as Foreign Relations,” International Journal of Cultural Policy 21:4 (2015), pp. 448–462; and David Lowe and Anna Kent, “Sponsored Students and the Rise of ‘The International’ in Australian Communities.” Journal of Australian Studies 43:4 (2019), pp. 479–494. For similar programs, see Alice Byrne, “The Commonwealth University Interchange Scheme: Promoting Exchanges in a Changing World,” in Global Exchanges: Scholarships and Transnational Circulations in the Modern World, Ludovic Tournès and Giles Scott-Smith (eds), (New York, Berghahn Books, 2018), pp. 65-78, and Catherine Manathunga, “Excavating Cultural Imperialism in Student Mobility Programs,” Discourse: Studies in the Cultural Politics of Education 39:4 (2018), pp. 564-574.
Sherene Seikaly, Men of Capital: Scarcity and Economy in Mandate Palestine (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2016).
Hideki Kan, “US Cold War Policy and the Colombo Plan: A Continuing Search for Regional Cooperation in Asia in the 1950s,” in Akita, Krozewski and Watanabe (eds), Transformation, pp. 177-198, 179. Also see, Robert J. McMahon, “Development Assistance as a Cold War Tool: The United States, International Institutions, and the Political Economy of Development, 1947-65,” in ibid, pp. 215-228.
Oakman, Facing Asia p. 37 and 60.
Oakman, Facing Asia, and Lowe, “Canberra’s Colombo Plan.”
Katsuhiko Yoki, “The Colombo Plan: The Cooperation for the Indian Institutes of Technology,” in Transformation of the International Order in Asia, pp. 50-71.
Tomaru, “The Colombo Plan and British Publicity Policies.”
TNA FO 953/1201, Office of the Commissioner General for South East Asia to the South East Asia Department of the Foreign Office, 14 August 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, “Note on Colombo Plan Publicity” and report from J.B. Hunt to Ian P. Bancroft at the Treasury, 20 July 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, “The Colombo Plan,” Malay Mail, July 3, 1951. Extract from 33rd Meeting of Joint Information and Propaganda Committee, 25 October 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” press statement No. JU. 51/224, 30 June 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, Letter from the Office of the High Commissioner General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, Singapore to the South East Asia Department, Foreign Office, 14 August 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, K.S. Chang, “Barmecide Feast,” Singapore Standard, 4 July 1951, p. 6.
TNA CO 825/89/4, “Colombo Plan,” Singapore Free Press, July 3, 1951.
TNA CO 825/89/4, Information Officer, Commissioner-General for the United Kingdom in South East Asia, 14 July 1951.
William Clark, “The Colombo Plan: Prospect and Retrospect,” The Listener, 19 July 1951.
TNA T277/200, “Note of a meeting of Information Officers to Discuss Colombo Plan Publicity,” 15 September 1952, p. 1.
TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 15 September 1952, p. 2.
TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 27 September 1952, pp.1-4. Also see, TNA DO 35/6223, A. H. Joyce to A. Gordon Hudson, Director of the U.K. Information Services in Ottawa, 20 November 1952 in which they discussed recycled films. Also see, TNA T 277/337, Malcom to A.H. Joyce at the CRO, December 1951. For a related topic, see Amit Sarwal, “‘A Kangaroo and Bradman’: Indian Journalists Visit to Australia Under the Colombo Plan, 1950-1957,” Journalism Studies 20:2 (2019): pp. 840-856.
TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 22 September 1952, pp. 1-2.
TNA T 277/200, CP Publicity Working Party Minutes, 6 October 1952, pp. 1-4.
TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.
TNA DO 35/6223, Secret brief, “Publicity for the Colombo Plan,” 1952.
TNA DO 35/6224. See for example, “Double Shift Dollars and Colombo,” Economic Record, 6 (September 1952), issued by the UK Information Office, Ottawa, Canada.
Hennayake, Culture, Politics and Development.
In addition to the Board of Trade, members of the group came from the Colonial Office, Commonwealth Relations Office, Foreign Office, Central Office of Information, and Ministry of Supply. TNA FO 953/1201, Colombo Plan Exhibition Working Group,” Note of 4th Meeting, 6 September 1951.
TNA FO 953/1201, Colombo Plan Exhibition Working Group, Note of 4th Meeting, 6 September 1951.
Jacquie L’Etang, Public Relations in Britain: A History of a Professional Practice in the Twentieth Century (Mahwah, NJ, Lawrence Erlbaum, 2004), p. 81 and Harriet Atkinson, “‘Lines of Becoming’: Misha Black and the Entanglements through Exhibition Design,” Journal of Design History 34:1 (2020), pp. 37-53.
Misha Black (ed.) Exhibition Design (London: The Architectural Press, 1950), p. 12.
“Colombo Plan Exhibition,” Official Architect (April 1952), pp. 175-176; Erika Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire: How Tea Shaped the Modern World (Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2017), pp. 355-360.
TNA FO 953/1201, Memorandum from G.M. Wilson, Director of Technical Co-Operation Bureau, on the Colombo Plan Exhibition Proposals for the Council’s Exhibit, 6 September 1951.
INF 10/336/15, Photograph # ZZZ 48860 H. Ceylon [Sri Lanka]. ‘Colombo Plan Exhibition Site, 1950.
Nihal Perera, Society and Space: Colonialism, Nationalism, and Postcolonial Identity in Sri Lanka (Boulder, CO, Westview Press 1998), p. 38
Souvenir and Guide to the Colombo Exhibition (Colombo, Ceylon Government Information Office, 1952), pp. 44-45.
For comparative examples see, for example, Andrew Apter, The Pan African Nation: Oil and the Spectacle of Culture in Nigeria (Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 2005) and Bianca Murillo, Market Encounters: Consumer Cultures in Twentieth-Century Ghana (Athens, Ohio, Ohio University Press, 2017), pp. 115-136.
Pieris, Architecture and Nationalism in Sri Lanka, p. 161.
Colombo Plan Exhibition Prospectus, 1951.
H.A. Hulugalle, “Steps to Democracy: Twenty-One Years of Adult Franchise,” Souvenir and Guide to the Colombo Exhibition, p. 12.
K.M. de Silva, “Sri Lanka in 1948” in John Clifford Holt (ed)., The Sri Lanka Reader: History, Culture, Politics (Durham and London, Duke University Press, 2011). This essay was first published in the Ceylon Journal of Historical and Social Studies 4 (new series, 1974), p. 107.
Nira Wickramasinghe, Ethnic Politics in Colonial Sri Lanka, 1927-1947, A Historical Perspective, (New Delhi, Vikas, 1995) and Rappaport, A Thirst for Empire, pp. 339-40.
Nira Wickramasinghe, Sri Lanka in the Modern Age: A History of Contested Identities (Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press 2006), pp. 171-78; 212-17.
J.R. Jayewardene, “The Colombo Plan,” Souvenir and Guide, p. 8.
Ceylon Food Plan (Colombo: Government Department of Information for the Ministry of Food and Co-operative Undertakings, 1950)
Hennayake, Culture, Politics, and Development, p. 51.
Ibid, pp. 64-65. Among the large body of scholarship on the film, see Jon Hoare, “‘Go the Way the Material Calls You’: Basil Wright and The Song of Ceylon’ in Scott Anthony and James G. Mansell (eds.) The Projection of Britain: A History of the GPO Film Unit (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), pp. 233-43.
“Faith in Commonwealth,” Ceylon Today (December 1953), p. 153.
“Philippines and Indonesia,” Ceylon Today (March 1954), p. 8.
Cindy Ewing, “The Colombo Powers: Crafting Diplomacy in the Third World and Launching Afro-Asia at Bandung,” Cold War History 19:1 (2019), pp. 1-19.
Tomaru, “British Publicity Policies,” pp. 163-68. Examples of such literature include The Colombo Plan: Cooperative Economic Development in South and South-East Asia (Colombo, Colombo Plan Information Unit, 1956); The Colombo Plan: Britain’s Part (London, Central Office of Information, 1961) and The Colombo Plan (London, Central Office Information Office, 1961).
D.G. Bridson, Progress in Asia: The Colombo Plan in Action (London, HMSO, 1953), verso page.
Bridson, Progress in Asia, 7. Guy Wint What is the Colombo Plan? (London, Batchworth Press, 1952) and John Lyons “The Colombo Plan,” Current Affairs (London, The Bureau of Current Affairs, 1951) were also widely circulated sponsored publications.
Bridson, Progress in Asia, pp. 22-23.
Progress in Asia, p. 34.
See, for example, the image in A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (The Colombo Plan Secretariat, 2014). One of the two project directors of this book was Dato’ Patricia Chia, who I quoted in the introduction.
The Colombo Plan, Vol. 1, no 4 (June 1956), p. 3.
TNA DO 35/6223, Letter to Mr. A.R. Swinnerton, UK High Commission, Karachi, 25 June 1953.
TNA DO 35/6223, J.D. Murray to Symon, 10 November 1952.
Simon Faulker and Anandi Ramamurthy (eds), Visual Culture and Decolonisation (London and New York, Routledge, 2018 [2006]), pp. 12-14.
See https://colombo-plan.org/ and the sponsored book, A Legacy of Excellence: The Story of the Colombo Plan (Colombo, The Colombo Plan Secretariat, 2014 [2010]).
Dato’ Patricia Yoon-Moi Chia, Welcome Speech, 60th Anniversary of the Colombo Plan, 1 July 2011, https://colombo-plan.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/03/5dc3d8afdc6c0c18b8f81d98_OpeningSpeech60ATCP_01072011.pdf [Consulted 6 January 2023]
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