Untied Kingdom - A World History of the End of Britain.

For more than fifty years, historians and social scientists have identified possible links between the contraction of Britain’s empire and the fragile unity of the UK, with scholars of diverse leanings lending support to the idea: from J. G. A Pocock to Tom Nairn, Raphael Samuel, Linda Colley, Krishan Kumar, Norman Davies, and David Marquand. Yet remarkably, the link between imperial collapse abroad and post-imperial corrosion ‘at home’ has never been developed beyond a crude proposition, and remains remarkably under-researched. This book offers the first comprehensive analysis based on extensive empirical research, with a view to reconceptualizing the problem by integrating metropolitan and imperial perspectives.

The book is both a synthesis of a large and unwieldy subject as well as a novel empirical study in its own right, forging linkages between multiple crises of British selfhood at empire’s end. Rather than account for every manifestation in every corner of the globe, distinct choices have been made in terms of chronological, geographical and thematic emphasis, structured around the key registers of transcontinental British community that buckled under the pressures of post-war decolonization. The empirical material has been selected accordingly, taking in archive and manuscript collections in more than ten countries. The book’s thirteen chapters cumulatively build an argument based on connections and comparisons drawn between changing community sentiments in multiple hemispheres.