The 1860s marked a change of attitude toward myth. Formerly dismissed as falsehood, it now became a way to meditate on origins and identity at a time when orthodox religious belief was coming into question and Britons began to think of their colonies as an Empire. Inspired by the linguist Max Müller’s [GK17]theories of Aryan heritage, and his own dislike of John Henry Newman’s Romanism, Charles Kingsley claimed that the British people’s race and culture were Teutonic. Similar ideas about the British character were allegorized in poetry. Focusing on poetic reenvisionings of classical, medieval, and Arthurian stories by Tennyson, Thomas Westwood, and William Morris, this chapter explores how these poems reflected, but also helped to create, a myth of Britishness.

Germany’s wartime engagement with Shakespeare spurred the British to issue their own, aggressive claims to the exclusive ownership of the playwright. These claims aimed to boost the nation’s morale, unity, and steadfastness against external and internal enemies. Many public outlets presented Shakespeare as Britain’s national poet, characterised by muscular patriotism and anti-German sentiment. However, provincial Tercentenary celebrations reveal that this was not the only version of Shakespeare and nationhood in 1916. In places like Burnley and Manchester, Shakespearean enthusiasts presented local versions of patriotism, which encompassed working-class, northern, Catholic, and industrial identities, different from the official, homogenising notion of Britishness, rooted in an idealised vision of the English countryside. Meanwhile, some Welsh and Scottish commentators questioned the notion that Englishness should be seen as the dominant element of British culture. The range of Shakespeare Tercentenary responses from England, Scotland, and Wales demonstrates that British national identity in 1916 was riven with numerous fractures and self-contradictions.

This chapter focuses on the British community in pre-war Hong Kong and explores how Britishness as a non-European identity translated to a colonial setting. Drawing from laws, social practices, and press debates, this chapter explores how white Britons viewed colonial British subjects and other non-British Europeans in Hong Kong. Many white Britons clearly saw ‘British’ as a racial category, and they worked hard to maintain the arbitrary boundary of the ‘British race’. But by the 1930s the latest, hostility towards other Europeans became visible as international relations deteriorated in Europe. Amidst talks of ‘Buy British’ and ‘Britons First’ were also vocal appeals to include colonial subjects as part of being British. Findings of this chapter uncovered in the British community in 1910–45 Hong Kong not only an increasingly inclusive attitude towards British subjects of colour, but also a determination to define Britishness as not only a race, but also a national identity.

This chapter lays out the legal framework that enabled Hong Kong’s multiracial residents to engage with Britishness. It explains how the British nationality law enabled multiracial inhabitants in pre-war Hong Kong to make claims to Britishness. Using immigration cases, guidebooks, and census reports, this chapter shows when, by whom, and to what extent this inclusive legal status was recognized. Racial presumptions often prompted officials to deny people of colour access to their legal entitlements as British subjects. Nevertheless, colonial subjects in Hong Kong became increasingly aware of their British status, with some making active claims to their rights. In exploring the understanding and usage of British nationality law in 1910–45 Hong Kong, this chapter illuminates how nationality and citizenship were understood in an era when such concepts remained relatively new.

The introduction sets out the framework of the book by situating Hong Kong as a site of Britishness. It introduces the major aim of the book: to challenge widely made assumptions about the primacy of ‘race’ in determining the entitlements and benefits of being ‘British’, and to call for a full consideration of how racial and cultural diversity shaped Britishness. It explains how Hong Kong, a nexus of mobilities within and across the British Empire, Chinese treaty port world, and the Asia-Pacific, offers us a uniquely important site to understand identities and belonging in the British Empire. The case of Hong Kong, this book argues, illuminates the blurred distinctions between Britons and other Europeans in colonial Asia, and the possibility for colonial subjects to claim a British subjectivity. Building on recent literature on modern Asia and global history, this book will also challenge common assumptions about race and identities in colonial Hong Kong. It will also trace how rising nationalism and the global dispersal of cosmopolitan sensibilities created tensions in the colony, offering a global history of exclusivity and cosmopolitanism in the twentieth century.

Historically, the idea of Britain is closely tied to Wales and the Welsh people, who saw themselves as the sovereign rulers of the island nation of Britain, cruelly dispossessed by the Saxons. This chapter traces the historical processes by which the kingdom of England first asserted and then legally established its right to include Wales within the nation of England, appropriating Britishness as a proxy for Englishness. This ideological strategy, first normalised by the Tudors and resisted through Welsh literary production, continues to the present day. In the twentieth century, the rise of Anglophone writing in Wales challenged the link between the Welsh language and Welsh nationhood, but increasing immigration and the achievement of devolution in 1999 encouraged a more inclusive and multilingual national identity. Though political devolution has enabled Wales to define itself as a substate nation within a federated state, the ideological impetus to claim Britishness for itself continues across the border in England.

This chapter tracks the emergence and evolution of the concept of the British nation from the twelfth century through to the present, from Geoffrey of Monmouth’s first attempt to fashion an image of a distinct British nation to the severe challenges the national unit of the United Kingdom has faced in the wake of Brexit and other recent developments. The chapter explores the issue of how the nation is constituted and constructed and, specifically, the role that literature (and culture more generally) plays both in facilitating that construction and in interrogating it. The particular – often fraught – place of Wales, Scotland and Ireland within a formation dominated by England is also explored, together with issues relating to internal colonialism and global imperialism. Among the other issues touched on are class, education, gender and race.

The introduction makes a case for addressing the ‘break-up of Britain’ as a problem of global history. For decades, historians of remarkably diverse leanings have thrown their intellectual weight behind a presumed connection between the historical burden of imperial decline and the slow depletion of shared British sentiment since the Second World War. Yet invariably, the end of empire tends to be framed as an abstract tipping point, with little sense of its real-life interactions or everyday consequences - as though its mere dissolution were causation itself. But if social identities are inherently relational, arising out of intricate patterns of material and cultural exchange connecting peoples across wide distances, then focusing solely on the ‘British of Britain’ can provide only a partial and incomplete perspective. By incorporating the fate of Britishness in the many corners of the world where it has long since ceased to command any popular allegiance, the diminishing strength of unitary sentiment in the contemporary United Kingdom emerges in a whole new light. The argument, structure and empirical range of Untied Kingdom all proceed from this fundamental premise.

This opening chapter mounts an argument about the overseas projections of imperial identity, surveying the material and ideological conditions for imagining Britishness on a global scale. It considers how imperial expansion from the early seventeenth century created the need to make sense of highly fluid movements of people in radically new social formations. The language of Britishness could be employed across enormous distances, but the resultant heterogeneity also engendered fault lines that would pose formidable problems in the years ahead. The veneration of British constitional freedoms rested uneasily with practice of ruling ‘inferior races’ by flagrantly authoritarian means - furnishing the definitive paradox of a nominally liberal British world. Contemporaries went to great lengths to contain the anomalies, employing a highly elastic conception of ‘Great Britain’ that eluded conventional categories of inclusion and exclusion. To be British was to inhabit a moving frontier comprising a patchwork of peoples who never seriously demanded or developed an integrated, transoceanic popular sovereignty. As such, the idea of Britain — more so than England — became heavily freighted with the imagined properties of global reach, and hence more vulnerable to the perils of imperial decline.

The conclusion recapitulates the argument and offers some perspectives about the unfinished business of the end of Britain. Superficially, the persistence of the Union in the face of decades of gloomy prophesy might be viewed as a sign that the UK is somehow uniquely resilient — still standing more than half a century after the bell first tolled. But shared categories of belonging rarely permit clear-cut patterns of ‘closure’. That the end itself is incomplete and indistinct is entirely in keeping with the many offshore encounters examined here, where enduring dilemmas and loose ends abound.

This chapter tackles how the concept of British nationhood was mediated by small, portable material goods in the century that followed the 1707 Acts of Union. While existing narratives of nation-making have focused on the political, religious, and military forging of Britishness, this chapter instead considers how Britain’s intersecting industrial and commercial transformations offered opportunities for manufacturers and retailers to commoditize nationhood through material culture. This chapter restores the materiality of nationhood to historical narratives of patriotism to show that the commercialization of Britishness, through small things, provided a means of manufacturing and molding an affective form of British identity. This chapter focuses specifically on how the figurehead of Britannia signalled a material patriotism that could be worn, carried, and displayed at moments of national importance. Her image, as warrior queen, mother of the nation, and colonial pioneer, was replicated on fans, jewelry, and other decorative objects to formulate miniature material articulations of a national rhetoric. These small items held chronometric and affective significance for their owners and were complex signals of both transient and more enduring feelings of patriotism.

Save the Children was revived during the war and became a major organisation in dispersing funds to local children after the war, as discussed in Chapter 8. This signified a major shift in the role of the Fund in Australia, with localised branches working for the first time within Australia and in the Asian region. These activities directly impacted on Indigenous and migrant children, framed around the assimilation policies. The White Australia policy bound these endeavours. In Chapter 8 I consider two broad arguments. The first is that while the Save the Children branch developed a new localised identity, a form of imperial humanitarianism remained. My claim is that it did so through assimilation policies – which promoted an Australian way of life based on a White Britishness – that underpinned humanitarian work with Aboriginal children and war migrants. While this might not be surprising, it did make the Fund unique in post-war Australia. It was the only organisation that linked international humanitarianism to humanitarianism in Australia through its focus on Indigenous children and newly arrived war-refugee children. Arguably, these connections were possible only through a focus on children and the insistence that children were innocent, vulnerable victims across the globe. Second, this chapter continues the thread of examining the biography of lesser-known activists such as nurse Florence Grylls, which allows us to consider humanitarianism in action through attention to these campaigners.

Although characterized by generational shifts in terms of articulating cultural affiliations and attachments to both the Caribbean and Britain, Caribbean British writing remains deeply marked by issues of un/belonging. This essay explores this embedded thematic across changing political contexts and reads the transitions in Caribbean British literature that have brought different revisionary perspectives on literary forms and languages, post-Windrush British history and the much deeper historical connections between the Caribbean presence and the UK. As well as contesting racism, these works articulate intersectional identities informed by class, gender and sexuality as it is experienced within and across the UK and the Caribbean. Given that contemporary Caribbean British literature is very much connected with Caribbean literature and that of the larger diaspora, this essay considers the modes of critical attention necessary to engage with its new forms and platforms.

This chapter focuses on Clara Reeve’s The Old English Baron (1778), published during the early years of Britain’s war in America. It discusses how Reeve responded to Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto (1764), not only by rejecting the extravagance of his work but also by situating her tale in fifteenth-century England. Attempting to recover the political significance of this decision in the context of the American war, it considers the way in which the novel offers an allusive narrative of national reconciliation and repair. Even as Reeve claimed that her ‘picture of Gothic times and manners’ served the improving purposes of ‘Romance’, however, her work also acknowledges that its resort to the Gothic past is unable entirely to escape the ‘melancholy retrospect’ of ‘History’. With Reeve’s distinction between history and romance in mind, the chapter concludes by suggesting that, through its mediation of Otranto, The Old English Baron helped to make the diverse resources of the Gothic past available to subsequent writers, and at the same time to ensure that its questioning of Britain’s Gothic inheritance remained integral to the tradition of ‘domestic Gothic’ that it inaugurated.

Questions of accommodation, home and belonging, exile, migrancy and diaspora recur across the history of black and Asian writing from the eighteenth century to the present. Following the publication of key works such as Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses (1988), Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia (1990), and V. S. Naipaul’s The Enigma of Arrival (1987), it was increasingly clear that the figure of the migrant was beginning to be seen both as the ‘Everyman’ of the late modern period – a cultural traveller able to traverse a number of shifting national, political and ethnic boundaries – and as a figure already well versed in negotiating the demands of a new transnational and global world. Focusing on some of these seminal texts as well as fictions by a later generation of British migrant writers (such as, Abdulrazak Gurnah, Sunetra Gupta, Monica Ali, and Caryl Phillips), this chapter explores how these writers’ mixed identities and plural literary perspectives began to herald a wider recognition of Britain as a racially mixed postcolonial nation, at the same time marking a sea change in the form, style, range, and geography of British fiction.