Ukania Perpetua and the anomaly of empire

This essay offers a re-examination of Tom Nairn's lifelong prediction of an impending Break-Up of Britain, against the backdrop of the Union's apparent resilience since the publication of his magnum opus in 1977. Specifically, it considers Nairn's conceptualization of the end of empire as the necessary precursor event that doomed the UK to inevitable destruction. What Perry Anderson terms the 'protracted delay' between Nairn's predictions and their fulfilment provides a useful vantage point to reconsider Nairn's thesis with the benefit of more than 50 years' hindsight. It is argued that Nairn's Gramscian model and his inherently structural view of empire tended to screen out the complex social interface between Britain and the wider imperial world. For all the crucial explanatory power he attributed to the empire's demise, he almost never exemplified his argument with reference to any specific part of it or referred to the corrosive effects of any given decolonizing moment. To gauge the empire's full significance, then, requires a larger frame of reference, comprising not only the unitary UK state but also the empire-wide affinities that were so crucial to popular investments in being British. To the extent that Nairn was right about the intricate nexus tying the Union to Britain's global coordinates, it was not always for the right reasons.