Part 1 of the book concludes by considering the paradoxical effects of two World Wars, at once harnessing an unprecedentedly vast emotional and material reservoir in the service of a common cause while at the same time ushering in a new era of ‘internationalism’ that would ultimately strip the British world-system of its effectiveness and fundamental rationale. Reformers in the interwar years sought to breathe new life into imperial Britishness ‘with a small “b”’ (in the words of Australia’s Keith Hancock) alluding to a more inclusive concept embracing a ‘diverse family of many kindreds and languages’ . By tracing interwar developments across three key interfaces - political thought, economic cooperation, and Indigenous rights advocacy - the shortcomings of this aspirational new Commonwealth are laid bare. Such was the long ascendancy of race in the hierarchy of Greater Britain that it could not easily be cast to one side.

The British world was not just an assortment of widely dispersed peoples but also an empire of trade goods. Over time, the goods themselves became freighted with the ‘moral economy’ of imperial partnership. As the empire unravelled and the verities of global Britishness were called into queston, therefore, humble trade commodities were not immune to the contingencies, unable to rely on older consumer loyalties in the face of tectonic shifts in the terms of trade and the attractions of new markets outside of the British orbit. Britain’s decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community in the early 1960s represented not just a major rupture in the traditional patterns of trade, but also an audit of the emotional balance sheet. Everyday consumer items with little in the way of obvious emotional ballast — wheat, butter, lamb, tinned fruits, and especially sugar — would play a crucial role in denaturalising Britain’s place in Commonwealth markets and vice versa. Viewed from the perspective of disparate communities heavily reliant on goods for export to the UK market, Britain’s European aspirations ignited passions and resentments that could not simply be explained in terms of lost export opportunities. That such appeals to a wider moral economy ultimately failed to prevent the UK from taking the plunge — albeit delayed by a decade of false starts and endemic ill-feeling — suggests that the diminishing returns of greater British goods was a reliable index of an imploding British world.

Copyright is a body of law that impacts upon the production and circulation of commodities that helped define Australian culture. The chapter provides an overview of Imperial copyright laws that conferred rights on British subjects living in British dominions. Australian colonial copyright laws and the first Federal law are then discussed in light of the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works (1886). Both before and after Federation, Australian copyright laws remained nested within the framework of Empire, until the passing of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth). How the placement of Australian law within Empire impacted upon Australian creators is explored in relation to the artist and illustrator, May Gibbs (1877-1965). Race is more difficult to account for in Australian copyright history. How Protection and Assimilation areas laws restricted artistic expression and the enjoyment of copyright is explored with reference to Aboriginal artist Albert Namatjira (1901-1959).