Speaker - Harshan Kumarasingham 

As the world watches Britain’s slow departure from the European Union, it can be constructive to remember the multiple occasions, especially since 1947, when Britain pulled out of its imperial possessions, often in haste and turmoil. Decolonization changed the nature of the Commonwealth, the seventy-year-old organization that replaced the empire as the focus of Britain’s geostrategic ambitions. This lecture will comment on Brexit in relation to British priorities in shaping the modern Commonwealth.

Harshan Kumarasingham is Lecturer in British Politics at the University of Edinburgh. Originally from New Zealand, he is a political and constitutional historian who has written on British decolonization, the Commonwealth, and the political legacies of empire for post-colonial states. He edited the October 2018 issue of the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, which dealt with liberal ideals and the politics of decolonization. He is currently coediting The Cambridge Constitutional History of the United Kingdom.