BBC World Service

Gordon Johnston is Honorary Fellow at the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh, UK. He is the editor of Social History. Emma Robertson is Senior Lecturer in History at La Trobe University, Australia. She is the author of Chocolate, Women and Empire: A Social and Cultural History (2009) and co-author of Rhythms of Labour: Music at Work in Britain (2013).

“Johnston and Robertson have marshalled an almost overwhelming amount of archival material into a coherent whole, covering all five continents from 1932 to 2018, whilst still producing a very readable, knowledgeable and engaging account. Archival research is at the heart of this book, with a wide variety of sources fruitfully placed in conversation with each other. … this volume makes its fascinating history available to a new generation of scholars in an erudite and accessible form.” (Emily Oliver, Archives – The Journal of the British Records Association, Vol. 55 (2), 2020)

• 1.    1 From Empire to World Service: an introduction.- 2. The Empire Service and English Language Broadcasting.- 3. The BBC and Foreign Language Broadcasting.- 4. Overseas Broadcasting and the Second World War.- 5. The BBC and the Cold War.- 6. One Voice, Many Accents? The BBC and Empire after the Second World War.- 7. Security, Trust and the Future of the BBC World Service.-