The break-up of Greater Britain

Stuart Ward, Christian Pedersen, Stuart Ward, Christian D. Pedersen, Andrew S. Thompson

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781526147424
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526147417
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Modern British History
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This is the first major attempt to view the break-up of Britain as a global phenomenon, incorporating peoples and cultures of all races and creeds that became embroiled in the liquidation of the British Empire in the decades after the Second World War. A team of leading historians are assembled here to view a familiar problem through an unfamiliar lens, ranging from India, to China, Southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, the Falklands, Gibraltar and the United Kingdom itself. At a time when trace-elements of Greater Britain have resurfaced in British politics, animating the febrile polemics of Brexit, these essays offer a sober historical perspective. More than perhaps at any other time since the empire's precipitate demise, it is imperative to gain a fresh purchase on the global challenges to British identities in the twentieth century.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Figures
• Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: The anatomy of break-up
• 1 Maintaining racial boundaries: Greater Britain in the Second World War and beyond
• 2 Cut loose: the British in China and the aftermath of empire
• 3 Entangled citizens: the afterlives of empire in the Indian Citizenship Act (1947–55)
• 4 ‘How come England did not know me?’: the ‘rude awakenings’ of the Windrush era
• 5 Indians of Durban, South Africa and the break-up of Greater Britain
• 6 The birth of ‘white’ republics and the demise of Greater Britain: the republican referendums in South Africa and Rhodesia
• 7 ‘King’s men’, ‘Queen’s rebels’ and ‘last outposts’: Ulster and Rhodesia in an age of imperial retreat
• 8 The tale of two Commonwealths? The (British) Commonwealth of Nations, decolonisation and the break-up of Greater Britain
• 9 Greater Britain and its decline: the view from Lambeth
• 10 From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana? The end of empire and the collapse of Australia’s Cold War policy
• 11 Boundaries of belonging: differential fees for overseas students in Britain, c. 1967
• 12 Persistence and privilege: mass migration from Britain to the Commonwealth, 1945–2000
• 13 ‘The mouse that roared’: the Falklands and Gibraltar in Thatcher’s (Greater) Britain
• 14 Falling Rhodes, building bridges, finding paths: decoloniality from Cape Town to Oxford, and back
• Index