Global, Area, and International Archive

“Quietly dazzling. . . . In this gripping account of welfare’s postcolonial history, Jordanna Bailkin throws the archives wide open and invites us to walk through them with new eyes—and with renewed appreciation for the intimate connections between empire and metropole in the making of contemporary Britain. The Afterlife of Empire challenges us to reimagine how we think and teach the twentieth century in Britain and beyond.” Antoinette Burton, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

“A brilliant contribution to the history of twentieth-century Britain. It does what no other book has done: narrating the end of empire and the rise of the postwar welfare state together, while placing the stories of ordinary people—children, adolescents, parents, husbands, and wives—at the heart of this account. With this book, Bailkin transforms our understanding of how some of the most critical issues of twentieth-century British history were not just perceived, but lived.” stephen j. brooke, York University

The Afterlife of Empire investigates how decolonization transformed British society in the 1950s and 1960s. Although usually charted through diplomatic details, the empire’s collapse was also a personal process that altered everyday life, restructuring routines and social interactions. Using a vast array of recently declassified sources, Jordanna Bailkin recasts the genealogy and geography of welfare by charting its unseen dependence on the end of empire, and illuminates the relationship between the postwar and the postimperial.

Jordanna Bailkin is Giovanni and Amne Costigan Professor of History and Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the University of Washington.

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