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Overseas broadcasting has been an integral part of the BBC’s remit since the creation of its Empire Service in 1932. Throughout its history, the BBC has consistently argued that its services for overseas listeners should not be classified as a form of British propaganda, but instead understood as a fundamentally benevolent undertaking, providing objective, impartial, and trustworthy news and information to hundreds of millions of listeners worldwide. In the post-imperial era, the World Service increasingly depicted itself as not just a ‘global public service broadcaster’, but also as a kind of humanitarian endeavour, an ‘Oxfam of the Mind’ which made a significant contribution to Britain’s wider efforts in the field of overseas development. This article critically evaluates this vision of the BBC World Service as a post-imperial ‘gift to the world’. It outlines how, in the early 1990s, the World Service created the first BBC-branded overseas development NGO, the Marshall Plan of the Mind (MPM), which used both UK government and external philanthropic funding to help promote British commercial and diplomatic interests in post-communist Eastern Europe. MPM is then contextualized in relation to the World Service’s longer (and largely overlooked) history of overseas development work and its relationship with the NGO sector, both before and after the end of the Cold War. By exploring how and why the World Service inserted itself into the NGO sphere, this work contributes to ongoing historical debates regarding the BBC’s relationship with the state and the role(s) that global development NGOs have played in shaping Britain’s post-imperial ‘place in the world’.

Building the BBC-branded NGO: Overseas Development, the World Service, and the Marshall Plan of the Mind, c.1965–99