Introduction: The anatomy of break-up – Stuart Ward1 Maintaining racial boundaries: Greater Britain in the Second World War and beyond – Wendy Webster2 Cut loose: the British in China and the aftermath of empire – Robert Bickers3 Entangled citizens: the afterlives of empire in the Indian Citizenship Act, 1947–1955 – Kalathmika Natarajan4 ‘How come England did not know me?’: the ‘rude awakenings’ of the Windrush era – Stuart Ward5 Indians of Durban, South Africa and the break-up of Greater Britain – Hilary Sapire6 The birth of 'white' republics and the demise of Greater Britain: the republican referendums in South Africa and Rhodesia – Christian D. Pedersen7 ‘King’s men’, ‘Queen’s rebels’ and ‘last outposts’: Ulster and Rhodesia in an age of imperial retreat – Donal Lowry8 The tale of two Commonwealths? The (British) Commonwealth of Nations, decolonisation and the break-up of Greater Britain – Andrew Dilley9 Greater Britain and its decline: the view from Lambeth – Sarah Stockwell10 From Pax Britannica to Pax Americana? The end of empire and the collapse of Australia’s Cold War policy – James Curran11 Boundaries of belonging: differential fees for overseas students in Britain, c. 1967 – Jodi Burkett12 Persistence and privilege: mass migration from Britain to the Commonwealth, 1945–2000 – Jean P. Smith13 ‘The mouse that roared’: the Falklands and Gibraltar in Thatcher’s (Greater) Britain – Ezequiel Mercau14 Falling Rhodes, building bridges, finding paths: decoloniality from Cape Town to Oxford, and back – Stephen Howe Index

How did the end of empire affect the projection of British identities overseas? British decolonisation is conventionally understood in terms of the liquidation of the colonial empire in the decades after the Second World War. But it also entailed simultaneous transformations to the self-representation of peoples and cultures all over the world variously described as British, symbolised by the eclipse of the idea of ‘Greater Britain’. Originally coined by Charles Dilke’s 1868 travelogue by the same name, Greater Britain enjoyed widespread currency throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries before falling into disuse from the 1930s. But Greater British modes of thought, feeling and action persisted into the second half of the twentieth century, becoming embroiled in the global upheavals of imperial decline. Over a remarkably short time span, the ideas, assumptions and networks that had sustained an uneven and imperfectly imagined British world dissolved under the weight of the empire’s precipitate fall. Although these patterns and perspectives have been explored across a range of specific local and national contexts, this collection is the first to examine the wider mesh of interlocking British subjectivities that unravelled at empire’s end.This book presents a timely opportunity to place the current dilemmas of Britain’s future global orientations in the post-Brexit world in a deeper post-1945 historical context. It will find a readership with researchers and students interested in British imperial history and the history of global decolonisation at the end of the Second World War by exploring the ramifications of the end of an empire.