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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.

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: On the Inadequacy and the Indispensability of the Nation -- 1. Nations, Empires, Disciplines: Thinking beyond the Boundaries -- Rethinking British Studies: Is There Life after Empire? -- Transcending the Nation: A Global Imperial History? -- Empire and ''the Nation'': Institutional Practice, Pedagogy, and Nation in the Classroom -- We've Just Started Making National Histories, and You Want Us to Stop Already? -- Losing Our Way after the Imperial Turn: Charting Academic Uses of the Postcolonial -- Rereading the Archive and Opening up the Nation-State: Colonial Knowledge in South Asia (and Beyond) -- 2. Fortresses and Frontiers: Beyond and Within -- Unthinking French History: Colonial Studies beyond National Identity -- Notes on a History of ''Imperial Turns'' in Modern Germany -- After ''Spain'': A Dialogue with Josep M. Fradera on Spanish Colonial Historiography -- Making the World Safe for American History -- Asian American Global Discourses and the Problem of History -- Race, Nationality, Mobility: A History of the Passport -- 3. Reorienting the Nation: Logics of Empire, Colony, Globe -- Periodizing Johnson: Anticolonial Modernity as Crux and Critique -- The Pudding and the Palace: Labor, Print Culture, and Imperial Britain in 1851 -- Double Meanings: Nation and Empire in the Edwardian Era -- The Fashionable World: Imagined Communities of Dress -- The Romance of White Nations: Imperialism, Popular Culture, and National Histories -- Britain's Finest: The Royal Hong Kong Police -- One-Way Traffic: George Lamming and the Portable Empire -- The Whiteness of Civilization: The Transatlantic Crisis of White Supremacy and British Television Programming in the United States in the 1970s -- Selected Bibliography -- About the Contributors -- Index