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This chapter analyzes British director Ken Russell's biographical film about composer Edward Elgar titled Elgar which was released in 1962. During this period Elgar already seemed a dusty anachronism to many in the midcentury, but Russell's film breathed new life into his oeuvre by presenting a composer deeply invested in a reinvigorated sense of Britishness. This chapter describes Russell's directorial style and identifies his influences.

This chapter focuses on the use of Tudoresque architecture overseas, where it began as an expression of Britishness, but since then has come to have other connotations along the way. It describes examples from 1920s America which show that Tudoresque architecture can flourish without the support of a British expatriate community; and Tudoresque buildings at Shimla in the northwest Himalayas, India, which from 1864 became a seasonal capital that served as the seat of government from March to November. Tudoresque architecture has become emblematic of Britishness and can be found around the world wherever quality is valued. It is also found in a less explicitly ‘Tudor’ mode, where the black-and-white colouring of the style is used for the sake of its connection with earlier, more colonial buildings that have come to be seen as smart and authoritative, but where specific evocation of Britishness does not seem to be the point.

At the end of the first decade of the twenty‐first century democracy in the United Kingdom is drifting. No political party seems able to articulate what constitutional reform is for anymore and in this context stimulating debates about ‘Britishness’, citizenship or a ‘common statement of values’ might, therefore, be regarded as weak and oblique responses to the challenges of constitutional anomie set out in this book.

This chapter investigates the imperial integration and traces its emergence during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. It focuses on Britain and the settler colonies — known to contemporaries as Dominions — of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. It shows that the distinct privileged position occupied by the Dominions in the imperial hierarchy, as component parts of what some contemporaries saw as a ‘Great Britain’. ‘Old Commonwealth’, or ‘British world’, united by a common sense of Britishness. It highlights connections between the English-language press in Britain and the colonies of settlement, but does not deny that French Canadian or Afrikaner newspapers, or papers in India and the so-called Crown colonies had an important role to play in the life of the British Empire. It aims to give a fuller and more revealing perspective on the history of the press in Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and Britain.

This chapter focuses on the effect of the conflict brought by the First World War on the imperial press system. It also explains that the imperial system survived the First World War and was successfully mobilized as part of the empire's broader war effort. It then discusses the new relationship formed between Reuters and the British government and that the relationship proved to be the precursor to a wider attempt to move official propaganda arrangements onto a more effective basis. It investigated the private enterprise and news services throughout the war. It then examines the Britishness and the imperial press system in the wake of the war.

This chapter discusses aspects of patriotism, particularly the role of the volunteer corps and patriotic propaganda. Civic patriotism provided an arena within which social and political tensions manifested themselves rather than were resolved. It surveys the motivations for volunteering and the impact the invasion scares had upon inhabitants' geographical identities. It shows how local authorities used the invasion scares to boost their own civic identity as well as demonstrate their patriotism. This attempt to gain hegemony over the meaning of patriotism riled radicals and others who felt equally under threat by the French. The chapter also analyzes local patriotic literature, including a rethinking of the popular dialect ballad, ‘Jone o'Grinfilt’. It argues that the Napoleonic Wars fostered a distinctive ‘Lancashire Britishness’.

Eighteenth-century armed conflicts have been identified by some historians as one of the ingredients which promoted a popular sense of Britishness. Linda Colley, in particular, has pointed to the ways in which war helped to bring together the various peoples of Britain, subordinating narrower patriotisms, and even papering over the cracks caused by social and political tensions. Britishness seems to have been embraced more readily in the Seven Years War than in the War of the Austrian Succession, suggesting a movement towards the adoption of a new and broader national identity. It would be a mistake, however, to assume from this a simple process of linear progression, reaching its culmination in the great struggles of 1793-1815. There was no relentless upward trajectory, but rather a jagged faltering movement forward.

After a brief restatement of arguments about transatlantic political discord but continuing links in many other respects, the Conclusion goes on to consider the state of the British empire and the American union in the ten years or so after independence. It stresses the strength of ethnic, religious or regional loyalties and the difficulties facing both the British empire and the United States in commanding allegiance. The new America had an ambitious leadership but a population whose commitment to ideals of unity was uncertain. The subjects of the British empire were given to vigorous assertions of what they saw as their rights against imperial authority and were not likely to be enthusiastic adherents to doctrines of Britishness propagated from above. The book concludes that an Atlantic world that linked peoples survived the political developments that had divided them.

The Natalians established a tightly knit society in Natal, similar to British settlements elsewhere in the empire. Predominantly English and middle‐class and imbued with concepts of white racial and cultural supremacy, their sense of identity was informed by Britishness. Although outnumbered by Zulus, the Natalians dominated the colony, receiving responsible government in 1893. From 1910, Natal was a province of the Union of South Africa and until 1961 the Natalians fought unsuccessfully to protect themselves and their British heritage from Afrikaner domination. Increasingly defined by what they were against rather than what they were, they developed into an idiosyncratic, separatist and impotent community with their identity defined by their province. With the advent of democracy in 1994, the Natalians lost political control of the province, undermining their sense of identity. Yet, unlike other British communities in this volume, few Natalians have gone into exile, reflecting deep roots sunk in Natal's soil.

This chapter examines the largest and last of Britain's colonies of settlement, highlighting its advanced degree of responsible government, making it almost a dominion, which caused Britain its greatest crisis of decolonization. Despite its unusually high rate of population turnover, great efforts were made to foster a local sense of identity which was linked to a wider loyalty to the British empire/Commonwealth and a sense of kinship with the white dominions in particular. The chapter analyses the white Rhodesians' egalitarian self‐image, as well as the complexities of their attitudes to the metropole, to Afrikaners and to Africans who constituted the great majority of the population. It also examines the settlers' ambition to become a permanent autonomous community against increasing odds, as well as their attempts to come to terms with the failure of this project.

This chapter addresses Britons' experiences of returning ‘home’ after time spent in the empire as settlers or expatriates between the late nineteenth century and decolonization. It asks how timing affected their reintegration and considers their responses to British domestic life—and, in turn, how British society responded to them. Themes covered include colonial children's education, home leaves, and retirement in Britain; how men's, women's, and children's experiences differed or overlapped; resentments about British life; and the racial and class identities of overseas Britons upon their return to the metropole. It concludes by assessing the wider impact of repatriates' self‐affirming narratives on how the history of empire has been reimagined within postcolonial Britain.

This chapter reflects on the papers in the volume, exploring the historical significance of these British communities. Clearly, wherever they enjoyed any political or commercial influence, their ideas and attitudes, and the internal dynamics of their social systems shaped the imperial presence. They often determined the basis of the ‘collaborative bargain’ on which all kinds of empire—formal or informal—almost invariably depended. Secondly, the rise and demise of small settler and expatriate societies has a comparative interest. They suggest by default some of the reasons why British migrants elsewhere proved much more successful in colonizing their new worlds. Thirdly, although we might be tempted to see the cases examined in this book as forming the outermost margins of a ‘British world’, they also serve to remind us of the curious shape of the British ‘world‐system’.