The significance of the connection between the rise of separatism in the United Kingdom and the end of empire has been frequently asserted but not previously properly scrutinized. Stuart Ward's immensely erudite and engaging book more than succeeds in remedying this neglect. In nearly 500 pages of text and a further 200 of notes, acknowledgements, and bibliography, he demonstrates a causal link, drawing on evidence from archives and newspapers across the globe, the most powerful of which comprises individuals’ self-reflections on their own Britishness and its shifting purchase. Ward's account is not a simplistic story of “England's ‘last colonies’ … awaiting emancipation” (5). Rather, the key to “Britain's demise” lies in the “progressive rollback” of Britain's “imaginative frontiers,” as the constituent parts of Greater Britain in the United Kingdom and beyond became “swept up in the global dislocation of imperial decline” (5).

The book is divided into three parts and fifteen chapters plus an introduction and conclusion. Each chapter is elegantly constructed, opening with exemplary micro-histories which illustrate Ward's keen eye for the contradictions and paradoxes of British colonialism. Part one provides an essential starting point for the rest of the book. Here, Ward charts how the development of Britishness was inextricably bound up with imperial expansion and registers its inherent heterogeneity and latent contradictions, most conspicuously between its liberal claims and racial exclusivity. These were fault lines on which Britishness would eventually fracture.

Part two, the longest part of the book, explores the unravelling of Greater Britain over six chapters which, in Ward's words, each document a “‘little death’ of Britain-in-the-world” (14). Each adroitly foregrounds a different idiom or vocabulary of Britishness through a focus on a discreet episode or location. This structure enables Ward to capture the varied disposition of Britishness in its different local settings, while throughout the book exploring how each episode reverberated or resonated elsewhere in a British world. Common motifs emerge: of disappointed communities from very different corners of Greater Britain who found their investment in a common British identity challenged by developments associated with postwar decolonization; of nation-state formation and new human rights regimes amplifying the inherent tensions in contrasting tropes of Britishness; and by the rise of alternative imagined worlds to a global British one. Alongside the postwar weakness of the British center, and the emergence of new political movements and an international order, Ward places particular weight on the destabilizing effects of a modernizing globalization that brought distantly located individuals into greater virtual and sometimes lived proximity.

Part three shifts the focus. Over a further six chapters, Ward explores the repercussions of this faltering Britishness. The first two chapters home in on intimations of, and efforts to defy, decline in the very different guises of the Anglo-French military intervention in Egypt in 1956 and the domestic British 1967 “We're Backing Britain” campaign. But it is the next three chapters that lie at the heart of the book and on which Ward's thesis hinges. The first uses the issue of Kenyan Asian refugees in the late 1960s as a lens through which to examine Englishness after empire. In the following two, Ward's forensic analysis of speeches and media underpins a pioneering account of the Troubles and the connections between the rise of Scottish and Welsh separatism in the 1960s and the dynamics of decolonization and imperial decline. The final chapter in part three surveys a post-Greater British world through the forging of what (after Pocock) he characterizes as new “cosmologies” (450). This discussion encompasses the emergence of “Four Nations” history in the United Kingdom and the adoption of new national histories and symbols in the old Commonwealth. The latter was an uneven and halting process, handicapped on the one hand in the dominions by the absence of “coherent liberation struggles from which to structure a self-sufficient narrative” (453), and elsewhere in scattered locations like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands by a persistent, strategic Britishness.

This last chapter feels the most uneven. Ward acknowledges that the “evident failure of Britain to come to an end raises obvious complications” (465). Despite the travails in spring 2023 of the Scottish National Party, few would wager much on the long-term survival of the Union: the Orkney Islanders’ exploration of different national futures being one perhaps less predictable example of the centrifugal forces still in play. But the gesture here towards newer articulations of Britishness (and their limitations), particularly as these relate to different Black and minority ethnic Britons, is brief, especially in view of the length of the book and the extensive discussions of writers like J. R. Seeley, J. G. A. Pocock, and Tom Nairn. In this sense there is a disconnect between the book's overwhelming focus on the 1940s to the 1980s and its central premise of an ongoing transition towards a future “end of Britain” with its many twists and permutations.

This is a huge work of scholarship that brings the scattered existing literature on de-dominionization and weakening Britishness within the old Commonwealth fully into dialogue with that on postwar decolonization and Britain. In so doing Ward opens new ways of reading the latter: not through the customary prism of the dissolution of the colonial empire but as “the diminished resonance of Britain-in-the-world, affecting an extended chain of communities located variously offshore” (4). In this formidably impressive book Ward sets an agenda that will surely shape work on twentieth-century Britain, empire, and its aftermath for years to come.