Compared with its relations with Asia, Australian engagement with the countries of the African continent was not extensive, and was defined even in the government’s view by a ’period of neglect’ by all sectors of government, including diplomacy, trade, aid and defence. That said, increased communication and involvement occurred in the period under reiew in this volume, as African immigration continued and as the Australian government sought African support in its bid for a United Nations Security Council seat for 2013–14. Formal government ties between Australia and the nations of Africa continued, however, to be limited. In this sense, there was little significant change in the period 2006–10 from previous periods.

The machinery of Australia’s foreign policy-making was transformed during the first decade of the twenty-first century, perhaps more profoundly than at any stage since the creation of an independent Department of External Affairs in November 1935. Until that time, the foreign affairs function of the Commonwealth government had been administered from within the Prime Minister’s Department. From its modest beginnings in 1935 in a clutch of rooms on the ground floor of Canberra’s West Block administrative building, the Department of External Affairs, then Foreign Affairs, then Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) grew steadily in size and confidence. When DFAT moved into its imposing new headquarters on the edge of State Circle in 1996, it symbolised a coming of age of a powerful, confident bureau of state with full and independent stewardship of the nation’s foreign affairs. While prime ministers from Sir Robert Menzies to Paul Keating may have felt strongly about particular international causes, few questioned that DFAT and its ministers played the central role in initiating and implementing policy across the full suite of Australia’s international interests.

For Australians in 1991, the old and traditional answers will no longer suffice. ’Kith and kin’ attachments to the United Kingdom have less and less meaning. Anglo-Celtic migrant Australia, the very basis of foundation settlement and the predominant force in society until well after the Second World War, has been substantially diluted by the great waves of postwar Central European and Asian migration. Australia passed through war against fascism as one of the imperial allies with a relatively monolithic and native born population. In 1947 less than 10 per cent of its 7.5 million citizens were born elsewhere, and many of these were born in the United Kingdom anyway. At the last official census in 1981, over 20 per cent of its 14.9 million population was born overseas, and a minority of that astonishing figure were Anglo-Celtic (7.78 per cent). Australia was indeed becoming a ’new society’ with a vengeance. Combined with tourism, and an increasing awareness of its Asian regional context, Australians admitted to living in a plural society, almost as much indeed as official multicultural policy of government kept declaring.

When in January 1976 the Fraser Government restored the use of “God Save the Queen” as Australia’s alternate national anthem, the London Daily Telegraph editorially welcomed the decision. Although admitting that Britain could “no longer act as chief investor or market protector or nurse” to Australia and New Zealand, it commented: We share with the Australians and New Zealanders a common parentage: we are of the same family ... And now, at a very dark time for us when everything seems to be going wrong for us and all certainties are in doubt, we hear from the other end of the earth a resounding symbolic reaffirmation of belief in the values and loyalties which were once our own and will—God willing—be ours one day again ... We may learn from down under that self-respect does not reside in vulgar novelty, or rude disrespect for what we were and still are.

Given the centrality of communities to the care of cultural heritage, this chapter explores how the UK legal and non-legal instruments recognise the concept of the UK, as a community and as a network of communities. This chapter identifies and analyses the varied communities of care that directly and indirectly care for cultural heritage. These include international, national and local communities, but also institutional communities and those involved in law-making and policy. It also considers the smaller-scale communities that form to challenge the status quo and who seek justice, or wish to assume responsibility for the care of cultural heritage. What becomes apparent is the interrelationship between communities of care and the shared responsibilities at times for the care of cultural heritage, which is all too evident in the context of World Heritage sites in the UK.

Until the early 1970s, UK immigration rules did not include a category of ‘illegal’ immigration. This chapter traces the shift from this largely permissive immigration regime based on the use of caps and criteria, to the more individualised approach based on illegalisation and individual punishment that emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It shows how this new, individualised approach was considered by officials and the Labour government as a necessary response to political expectations, rather than a means of better steering migration. The individualised approach also necessitated - and enabled - new forms of state knowledge of irregular migrants. However, a lack of operational commitment to this approach led to relatively lax implementation, and a residual issue of limited state knowledge of unauthorised migrants.

The Introduction sets the scene for a reassessment of the transformative reigns of Henry VII and Henry VIII (1485–1547). It addresses recent treatments of this period as the threshold between the late-medieval and early modern worlds, associated only with the growth of monarchical power. As this book reveals, a formalised system for dispensing royal justice emerged under the first two Tudor monarchs. The engagements between sovereign and subjects it facilitated provide insight into how a vulnerable regime was legitimised. Analysis of this point of contact in the following chapters proceeds through three frameworks. First is the administrative-history approach central to mid-twentieth-century scholarship on this period, which this study revives but also revises. Second is the emphasis on litigation to the Crown as a means of state–society cohesion in histories of the Elizabethan and Stuart ages, projected into earlier decades and given greater practical definition in this book. Third is the overlooked presence of contention within royal justice, given full assessment in the present study and crucial to understanding why this jurisdiction was dissolved in 1641.

Chapter 1 establishes the intellectual and cultural backdrop for royal justice in late fifteenth and early sixteenth-century England. It explores what justice meant for the wider populace of this period, drawing from a range of elite and non-elite sources: coronation oaths and proclamations issued by the Crown; sermons and speeches made by the chief ministers of the realm in Parliament and Council; and bills of complaints, popular poetry, rebel petitions, and commonplace books produced by humbler people. Surveying this range of differing perspectives, the principle of justice supplied by the king proves to have been deeply ingrained across society. Yet how, exactly, it might be put into practice proved a more contentious topic, and one that opened even the existing royal courts up to criticism. This nebulous ideal, with its cognate concepts of mercy, pity, and charity, was already at odds with the law of the land by the middle of the fifteenth century. These fragmentations help to explain why a more extraordinary kind of royal justice was in demand, and to show the expectations that weighed upon it.

This chapter opens with a discussion of the composition, publishing, and reception histories of Peter Bell and The Waggoner, poems dating from the late 1790s and early 1800s but not published until 1819. In a reading of Peter Bell, the chapter reflects on the representation of violence and on the poem’s attempts to negotiate the terms of a peaceable relationship between the human and the non-human. In the discussion of The Waggoner, the focus turns to the poem’s meditation on creative failure, artistic isolation, and the potential for cooperative living in the aftermath of war. Picking up on the conative entanglement of human and non-human entities addressed in Peter Bell, the chapter concludes with a consideration of how Benjamin’s waggon works like a peaceable commonwealth to realise the potential of its component parts in ways that advance the well-being of the whole.

Sarah Mortimer examines the impact of the Reformation on thinking about the human commonwealth within the Christian temporal and historical scheme of the Fall. From the outset Protestants sought to integrate the civil and the divine, pursuing the ideal of the godly commonwealth, while Catholics would align the commonwealth with natural law, distinct from the divine law which gave the Church its authority. With the hardening of confessional divisions, these differences were accentuated: Protestants appealed directly to Scripture for political guidance, while leading Catholics emphasised that priests and worship were essential to all forms of society. But there were also those such as Jean Bodin who sought to understand politics independently of the Christian story; others, including Francisco Suárez, began to analyse human relationships using the hypothesis of a state of nature with neither sin nor grace. These attempts to stretch and even hypothetically step outside the scheme of the Fall in turn informed the thinking of Hugo Grotius in the first half of the seventeenth century, and the chapter ends with an extended assessment of his reflections on the relation between commonwealth and churches, and his increasing acceptance of diversity in the civil sphere.

This chapter explores how the term sympathy was co-opted into political discourse in the first part of the seventeenth century, and how Jacobean literary and dramatic texts debated the political aspects of pity and compassion. Focusing on responses to the crises of succession and the plague, the chapter discusses the representation of sympathy in William Muggins’s Londons Mourning garment (1603), William Alexander’s The Tragedy of Croesus (1604), and Shakespeare’s King Lear (1608). It argues that King Lear exposes the ethical and philosophical problems involved in emotional perspective-taking, and points to the ways in which concepts of sympathy in this period were complicated by an individual’s class and status. The chapter then turns to royal elegies from the 1610s and 1620s, including poetic responses to the deaths of Prince Henry and Queen Anne. The chapter also explores several religious works that express concerns about a decline of sympathy during this period, and proposes that the increased bleakness of the 1623 Folio text of Lear may reflect wider social anxieties about what Thomas Medeley calls ‘this iron and flinty age’.

International organisations include global organisations such as the United Nations and regional organisations such as the European Union. The chapter examines constituent instruments and their interpretation, membership (which may include non-state entities) and withdrawal, including the withdrawal of the United Kingdom from the European Union. International organisations have the capacity to enter into treaties but may only conclude agreements in those areas in which they are competent to act. The Vienna Convention of 1986 adapts the rules of the 1969 Convention to apply to international organisations, but it is not yet in force. The chapter examines bodies which play a role in recommending or negotiating treaty texts (including the United Nations, UN Sixth Committee and the International Law Commission) and those which play a role in settling disputes (such as the International Court of Justice) and in monitoring compliance (such as the Human Rights Committee). It looks at special cases, including the OSCE, Commonwealth and European Union.

The goal of the final chapter is to examine the central role of necessities in the epistemological, moral and political theory of An Essay of Human Understanding and of the Two Treatises of Government. A study of the former shows Locke’s preoccupation with classical moral questions such as happiness and the ‘good objects of desires’ and how necessities helped him to strike a balance between tradition and the new science. As a rule of thumb of proper conduct, knowledge of necessities leads to the preservation of life, a human being’s most important duty to God. His doctrine of necessities is what made it possible for Locke to develop the theory of the public good with which, it is argued, he attempted to defeat the egoist theory of self-interest. Examination of his conception of property and money through the lens of human necessities shows a certain ambiguity in Locke’s normative ideals. Nevertheless, my conclusion is that above other considerations underlying the capital-oriented ideals of the period, the last word of Locke’s political theory is the public good represented by preservation and convenience for the commonwealth and, when possible, for the whole of humanity.

Part 1 of the book concludes by considering the paradoxical effects of two World Wars, at once harnessing an unprecedentedly vast emotional and material reservoir in the service of a common cause while at the same time ushering in a new era of ‘internationalism’ that would ultimately strip the British world-system of its effectiveness and fundamental rationale. Reformers in the interwar years sought to breathe new life into imperial Britishness ‘with a small “b”’ (in the words of Australia’s Keith Hancock) alluding to a more inclusive concept embracing a ‘diverse family of many kindreds and languages’ . By tracing interwar developments across three key interfaces - political thought, economic cooperation, and Indigenous rights advocacy - the shortcomings of this aspirational new Commonwealth are laid bare. Such was the long ascendancy of race in the hierarchy of Greater Britain that it could not easily be cast to one side.

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.

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.

Milton's divorce tracts create a political ideology of marriage and husbands which increasingly sees wives as the problem for male citizens. Like Habermas in creating a fantasy of the public sphere that excludes women, and like Charles I in Eikon Basilike, Milton in the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce, Tetrachordon, Colasterion, and Martin Bucer tracts imagines a hapless husband who needs to be freed from both paternal oversight and wifely constraints if he is to be a public authority in England. Inviting Parliament to see divorce itself as not just an analogy for anti-monarchy movements but as itself a key linchpin in the new commonwealth, Milton, in the divorce tracts, creates the perfect male citizen as the man who can repudiate his wife.

If you search for ‘federation’ on the internet, you will find accounts of systems of government in which sovereignty is divided between a central, national government and a series of regional, partially self-governing states. You may well find a webpage of the Parliamentary Education Office recording that, ‘in a process known as Federation’ Australia ‘became a nation on 1 January 1901 when six British colonies – New South Wales, Victoria, Queensland, South Australia, Western Australia and Tasmania – united to form the Commonwealth of Australia’ (PEO 2020). These search results suggest some key takeaway points for students of Australian politics. First, a federation is a particular form of political system where two tiers or levels of government (national and regional) share power and neither has authority over the other. Second, when capitalised ‘Federation’ describes the process which resulted in the creation of Australia at the dawn of the last century. The final point to note is that Australia’s federal system shapes its politics and other activities. Its federation provides a good example of how 21st century Australian politics remains in the grip of institutions established in the distant past.