It seems somehow symptomatic of David Edgerton’s style as a historian, of a certain wilful singularity, that even his book’s title requires explanation. On the face of it ‘the rise and fall of the British nation’ seems a comforting enough notion, but when Edgerton deploys the term British nation he is not talking about any long perspective, but a very specific, post-imperial, nationalist project of internal reconstruction that rose and flourished between 1945 and the 1970s, only to sink back into the global system from which it had emerged.