The Untied Kingdom: A World History of the End of Britain

At each juncture, there has been a pronounced tendency in media, scholarly and political commentary to presume some kind of causal connection between the decline of the British empire and the inward corrosion of the Union – much as the present-day Brexit conundrum is frequently ascribed to a species of imperial nostalgia.

This lecture subjects these ideas to critical scrutiny, examining various possible ways of putting meat on the bones. Rather than consider the empire and metropolitan Britain as distinct and separate realms of historical experience, with the fate of the one somehow determining the other, the approach here is to reconceptualise Britain and Britishness as global categories of analysis – indeed, as ideas that were radically adapted to the global dispersal of British people, capital, goods and culture from the 18th to the 20th centuries. If Britain was the world’s first global civic idea, one that was required to do more identity work across unprecedented distances than anything before (or since?), it is worth asking what unique pressures were brought to bear when ‘Greater Britain’ struck heavy weather in the age of global decolonization. In particular, it is worth considering how loss of confidence in Britishness abroad influenced (and was influenced by) contemporaneous developments in the United Kingdom – in short, by recourse to a world history of the end of Britain that examines the present-day constitutional conundrum in terms of the eclipse of ‘global Britain’.