John Concagh
Email: j.concagh@qmul.ac.uk
PhD project
"Promises Made In Adversity" - Practice, Culture and the role of the Second World War in shaping British West Indian Political Identity, 1935-1958
The project is an assessment of how political identities and cultures were practiced in the British Caribbean between the Abyssinian War (1935) and the establishment of the West Indies Federation (1958). It considers how practices of identity and agency evolved among the Caribbean diaspora, specifically in relation to service and widers ideas of non-organised anticolonial activity.
Supervisors
Leslie James, Queen Mary University of London
Rob Waters, Queen Mary University of London
Research Interests
Empire in the 20th Century, The Caribbean, Anticolonialism & The Second World War
Academic Background
John completed his undergraduate degree at the University of Edinburgh between 2018-2022, and his master's degree at King's College London between 2023 and 2024, where the final dissertation was on “Britain’s African and Caribbean Empire, Anti-Colonialism, and the Atlantic Charter ‘From Below’”.
Publications
Conference presentations
Forgotten Veterans: A Returning Soldier Network Symposium, 9th April 2026: "We are King George VI’s soldiers, not Roosevelt’s little black boys": Reflections on Identity and Britishness amongst West Indian Ex-Airmen.’
Second World War Research Group Conference 2025: “Now Britain is in trouble she needs us, but when it is all over, we shall be as before.” ‘Conditional Loyalism’ and representations of African and Caribbean Service in Wartime Press Material.
British Conference on Military History New Researchers Conference 2024: Paper on “’Fighting for the Empire? ‘Propaganda in British Africa, 1939-1945”
Other
National Army Museum: Talk on “Fighting for the Empire? The Mobilisation of British Africa, 1939-1945” - YouTube link