8/30/2023 0 Comments Sudoku kingdom puzzles![]() ![]() “Cosmologies of our own” accompanied the formation of many new nation-states. Ward elegantly relates other endings, notably the slow replacement of British symbols - flag, emblem, anthem - in the white commonwealth and the Caribbean, matched by faster-paced transitions where British settlers had been less numerous or powerful. Citizenship was confined to those from Great Britain and Northern Ireland, and their immediate descendants, with special franchise and movement arrangements for the white Commonwealth and the Irish-born. The “imperial subject” was also downsized as British citizenship was incrementally defined and confined - through tacit rather than explicit racism. The latter clause would be skillfully exploited by the new state to establish its sovereignty more quickly than Lloyd George and the Conservatives had hoped.Īnother end to Greater Britain occurred through the punctuated withdrawal of the UK from the Commonwealth as a market for goods (“imperial preference”) and as a zone of freedom of movement.īidding to join the European Economic Community in 1961 the UK abandoned its obligations to the Commonwealth - a task not completed until 1973. ” Article 2 specified that “the law, practice and constitutional usage” related to Canada would apply to the Irish Free State. Article 1 of the 1921 treaty provided that, “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada, the Commonwealth of Australia, the Dominion of New Zealand, and the Union of South Africa. Unobserved by Ward, in 1921 Ireland was forced to accept Commonwealth membership as a means to oblige it to recognise “the crown,” and in hopes of controlling its foreign and defence policy. ![]() ![]() The British identity was insufficiently democratic or liberal for the former, and too liberal and insufficiently racist for the latter. Over time, neither the racially excluded non-whites, nor the Boers, the other white settler community, found “Britishness” to their liking. Acceptance was much less evident in South Africa, despite being championed by Jan Christian Smuts. One is the end of the idea of Greater Britain, first propagated by Charles Dilke in the late 19th century, and romanticised more recently in erudite word-clouds by New Zealander JGA Pocock, a doyen of the history of early modern political thought.Īnother is the end of the British Commonwealth of Nations, originally an imperial confederation into which many sought to restructure the “white dominions” - with significant sentimental success in British Canada and the British Antipodes. His is a well-told narrative of related endings. In Untied Kingdom, Stuart Ward, a professor of history at Copenhagen, and of Australian extraction, retells the story of the decolonisation of the British empire against the to-be-determined question of whether the UK itself will unwind. ![]()
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