Date/Time: Tuesday 14 November 2023, 5.30pm

Venue: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building, Newcastle University

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All our events remain free and open to all, but pre-booking is required. Bookings for this lecture will open at 10.00am on 7 November. To reserve your place click the booking link below or telephone our booking voicemail line 0191 208 6136.

Chaired by Dr Martin Farr, Senior Lecturer in Contemporary British History and Co-Chair, Public Lectures Committee

‘First the empire went’. For the veteran Scottish writer and editor Ian Jack, this simple formula amply distilled the fate of the United Kingdom in his 2009 collection of essays, The Country Formerly Known as Great Britain. It is by no means an isolated view. For decades, historians, journalists and political pundits have pointed to a deeper, if indistinct connection between the eclipse of the British empire in the decades after the Second World War, and the rise of separatist politics portending the ‘Break-up of Britain’ since the 1960s. But it remains a matter of idle speculation, with little sense of the precise of pattern of causality. In this INSIGHTS public lecture, Stuart Ward proposes that the end of empire did indeed raise formidable challenges to the durability of a unitary Britishness. But the registers of impending rupture appeared in a language, imagery and symbolism that resonated far beyond the physical confines of the United Kingdom. Drawing on his recently published Untied Kingdom: A Global History of the End of Britain, he makes a case for reconceptualizing Britishness as a global category of analysis, working from that fundamental premise to unlock the dynamics of its protracted unravelling. To fully comprehend the diminished returns of being British in the 21^st century, he argues, we need to trace the historical evolution of British sensibilities from the outside-in. He stresses the indispensable quality of a certain bandwidth in making Britishness an attractive, rewarding and necessary proposition – and hence of crucial importance for understanding how the end of empire upended the Union.

Biography

Stuart Ward is Professor of British imperial history and head of department at the Saxo Institute at the University of Copenhagen. His research deals broadly with the political, cultural and economic dimensions of global decolonization since the Second World War and the historical legacies of imperialism in contemporary Britain.

Originally from Australia (with degrees in history from the University of Queensland and the University of Sydney), he has previously held posts at the European University Institute, King’s College London, the University of Southern Denmark and University College Dublin. Since 2010 he has been Provost of the university college Regensen.