The final chapter ties the argument of the book to the many pathways out of empire, and the often-hesitant process of civic reinvention and readjustment as popular energies were redirected to post-imperial modes of belonging. This, too, brought patterns of social division and public dispute that were replicated (and modified) across multiple contexts and settings. The need to reconstitute history itself brought a clamour for new national symbols, without garnering and real consnensu abut what those new emblems should be. The frequent use of referendums to resolve questions of civic identity was itself a major legacy of the break-up of Greater Britain, affeting the ‘four nations’ of the United Kingdom as much as the former holdings of the British empire.

The chapter looks at period boundaries – c. 500, c. 1000 – and ways of transcending them. To position oneself on a boundary is one way, and another is to look for deep continuities. Here additional schemas have been proposed: the re-emergence of a half-submerged system with the recurrence of the conditions that gave rise to it originally, and, above all, the evolution of a sequence of communications (as opposed to a constant idea) like a conversation, from its origin through its twists and turns over many centuries. The history of the first papal jurisprudence’s reception over time can be a ‘part for the whole’, a synecdoche for the changes in history of Western Christianity. Tracing its reception helps to subvert the apartheid of periodization.