Conclusion

Abstract

If the ‘Third British Empire’ slowed in the mid-1930s, it was ossifying from the inside by 1940; and it was the brittle shell of an ideal come 1945. But the modes of history writing developed and sustained over generations did not disappear. This conclusion surveys how imperial historians responded to the imperatives of the Second World War , and how constitutionalism remained available, even indispensable, as British thinkers confronted postwar decolonization. It then grapples with the fortunes of imperial historical theory in the mid-twentieth century—with the episodes of protest, disillusionment, and bloodshed that attended the writing of an imperial story at that empire’s end, and which have yet to find a chronicler.