The history of Britain is dead; long live a global history ofBritain

Abstract

I propose a global history of modern Britain around an account of the rise, demise and reinvention of a liberal political economy that reified the market as the organising principle of government. It is a story that is inseparable from the growth and collapse of the British Empire, as well as the continuing, if precarious, global hegemony of the Anglosphere. The liberal political economy that germinated within the British Empire may have had a world system built around it, but events, processes and peoples far beyond the Anglosphere shaped the history of its rise, demise and reinvention. This history of Britain is then a global story, not because of that old imperial conceit that Britain made the world, but because the world made Britain. This article has been peer reviewed.