In his new and fascinating book, Britain Alone: How a Decade of Conflict Remade the Nation (Manchester UP, 2022), Dr. Liam Stanley explores how, over the past decade or so, various crises have encouraged a particular process of nationalization in Britain. Typically, increased scarcity of resources will twist and intensify existing tensions about access to those resources – who should have access, who shouldn’t, and why. Stanley’s project in Britain Alone is to take a deep dive into the stimuli of a single decade to identify the cultural and economic motivators of that impulse. From the funding of the NHS to the Scottish Independence referendum, from Brexit to the COVID response, the ways they all had the potential to both reinforce or undermine the forces of nationalization and nationalism are the focus of Britain Alone.

Lia Paradis is Professor of History at Slippery Rock University of Pennsylvania. She is the co-host of the Lies Agreed Upon podcast and author of Imperial Culture and the Sudan: Authorship, Identity and the British Empire (IB Tauris, 2020)

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