Please note that the History Seminar Series will run in the Lectorial 1 (RSSS Building, Ground Floor) in Semester 1, 2023.

Right until his death last month at the age of 90, Tom Nairn remained upbeat about the approaching dawn of Scottish independence despite having waited more than forty years. ‘We’re making it up as we go along’ he recently enthused. ‘What was once Great Britain, the British Empire, we’re struggling along to replace that with something else, with something new’. Surveying the extraordinary changes that have occurred since the publication of his 1977 landmark, The Break-Up of Britain, there can be no denying that the gap between aspiration and fulfilment has narrowed considerably. But Nairn was surely wide of the mark in proclaiming: ‘No one has ever done this before’. This paper takes a wider view, tying the global history of British decline to the present-day emotional rift at the heart of the Union. It surveys a succession of little deaths of ‘Britain in the world’ since WWII, arguing that diverse peoples and cultures have indeed ‘done this before’ – relinquished the bonds of Britishness while ‘struggling to replace it with something else’. It argues that the travails of contemporary Britain are merely the latest instalment of a much wider reckoning for a global civic idea unable to withstand the unique pressures brought to bear in the post-imperial world.

Stuart Ward is Professor and Head of the Saxo institute at the University of Copenhagen, specializing in the history of the British imperial world at empire’s end. His latest book, Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain is published this month by Cambridge University Press.

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