Название: Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain
Автор: Stuart Ward
Издательство: Cambridge University Press
Год: 2023
Страниц: 703
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true)
Размер: 10.4 MB

How did Britain cease to be global? In Untied Kingdom, Stuart Ward tells the panoramic history of the end of Britain, tracing the ways in which Britishness has been imagined, experienced, disputed and ultimately discarded across the globe since the end of the Second World War. From Indian independence, West Indian immigration and African decolonization to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, he uncovers the demise of Britishness as a global civic idea and its impact on communities across the globe. He also shows the consequences of this diminished 'global reach' in Britain itself, from the Troubles in Northern Ireland to resurgent Englishness and the startling success of separatist political agendas in Scotland and Wales. Untied Kingdom puts the contemporary travails of the Union for the first time in their full global perspective as part of the much larger story of the progressive rollback of Britain's imaginative frontiers.

In the second act of Mike Bartlett’s ‘future history’ play King Charles III, an exasperated Prince Harry absconds from Buckingham Palace after a row with his newly crowned father. He drifts anonymously through London’s side streets in search of a midnight snack where he encounters Paul, a kebab vendor at a kerbside rotisserie, and the pair fall into a conversation about the troubled state of the nation. ‘It’s like this meat here, all pulled together’ ventures Paul, gesturing to the rotating spit – constantly turning and churning but becoming ‘smaller all the time’ with each slice of the chef’s blade. With long carving motions he prepares a shawarma for the incognito Prince, which brings him to the nub of the problem: ‘When does Britain get so cut down, that it’s not Britain anymore?’ The question is allowed to linger, unanswered – as though speaking for itself. In essentials, it is the same question that sets the agenda for this book.

Invoking the ‘end of Britain’ can seem like an exercise in gratuitous coat-trailing, inviting controversy before a single page is turned. But historians and political pundits have been confidently predicting Britain’s expiry date for more than half a century, ever since the first wave of support for separatist political parties in Scotland and Wales in the late 1960s. Speculation about the long-term viability of the Union acquired the weight of scholarly ballast with the publication of The Break-Up of Britain – Tom Nairn’s influential elegy from 1977 – and has become standard journalistic fare ever since. Though the early momentum stalled with the defeat of the 1979 devolution referendums, Welsh historian Gwyn Williams could nevertheless pronounce shortly afterwards that Britain had ‘begun its long march out of history’. In a similar vein, Linda Colley’s landmark 1992 study, Britons: Forging the Nation, was animated by a sense that ‘so many of the components of Britishness’ had faded and ‘a substantial rethinking of what it means to be British’ could no longer be avoided.

Since that time, a surfeit of opinion polls and social surveys have probed the strength of British sentiment, compared with English, Scottish, Welsh or Northern Irish attachments, with results tilting ever-more decisively towards sub-national loyalties.