The British world was not just an assortment of widely dispersed peoples but also an empire of trade goods. Over time, the goods themselves became freighted with the ‘moral economy’ of imperial partnership. As the empire unravelled and the verities of global Britishness were called into queston, therefore, humble trade commodities were not immune to the contingencies, unable to rely on older consumer loyalties in the face of tectonic shifts in the terms of trade and the attractions of new markets outside of the British orbit. Britain’s decision to seek membership of the European Economic Community in the early 1960s represented not just a major rupture in the traditional patterns of trade, but also an audit of the emotional balance sheet. Everyday consumer items with little in the way of obvious emotional ballast — wheat, butter, lamb, tinned fruits, and especially sugar — would play a crucial role in denaturalising Britain’s place in Commonwealth markets and vice versa. Viewed from the perspective of disparate communities heavily reliant on goods for export to the UK market, Britain’s European aspirations ignited passions and resentments that could not simply be explained in terms of lost export opportunities. That such appeals to a wider moral economy ultimately failed to prevent the UK from taking the plunge — albeit delayed by a decade of false starts and endemic ill-feeling — suggests that the diminishing returns of greater British goods was a reliable index of an imploding British world.

In the Second World War years, the long-dreamed-of idea of a politically united Europe finally began to be realized, if only in Western Europe. At the heart of this project for a united Europe was the principle of “unity in diversity,” with the diversity lying in the distinct national cultures across Europe. Chapter 8 focuses first on the various reflections on the idea of a “European spirit” discussed at major international conference in Geneva in 1947, before considering the ways in which the notion of “unity in diversity” served to provide an ideological underpinning for this new Europe. Among the many writers and thinkers discussed in this chapter are T. S. Eliot, Denis de Rougemont, Georg Lukács, Stephen Spender, Georges Bernanos, and Karl Jaspers. The chapter highlights just how challenging it is to break with Eurocentric, Euro-supremacist, and Euro-universalist agendas even when the emphasis is placed on diversity. The case of Oswald Mosley, the leader of the British Fascists in the interwar years, is particularly instructive. As this chapter shows, he was among the most ardent advocates of a united Europe, his arguments having profound implications for any progressive idea of Europe.

Africa has seen progress and setbacks with regard to the economic and socio-economic development after decolonization until ca. 2000. These are linked to historical and structural challenges, including the economic infrastructure the colonial powers left behind and the unfavourable geography of vast parts of the continent. In the post-colonial phase there has been much economic and trade dependence on the former colonial powers – giving rise to the dependency theory and the notion of neo-colonialism. There was often an unwillingness of the post-colonial leadership to set the course for the economies of their countries. And rentier states developed. Several initiatives – from Africa and beyond – have been proposed to deal with the economic misery, with those of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund being the dominant ones, pushing African initiatives aside.

This chapter traces the origins of the European monetary unification project. The 1957 Treaty of Rome called for monetary policy coordination within the EEC. To achieve this, a committee of governors of the EEC central banks was created (1964). The governors chose the BIS in Basel as their meeting place to underline their independence from the EEC in Brussels. In the 1970s, after the breakdown of the Bretton Woods system of fixed exchange rates, the committee played a key role in the attempts to restore stable exchange rates within Europe, leading to the creation of the European Monetary System (EMS). In 1988–9, the BIS hosted the Delors Committee for the study of monetary union in Europe. The conclusions of the Delors Committee provided the basis of the 1992 Maastricht Treaty, which set the EU on the path of monetary union. Once this decision had been taken, the role of the BIS as host and agent of the EMS came to an end, and the committee of governors – soon recreated as the European Monetary Institute (EMI) and then European Central Bank (ECB) – moved from Basel to Frankfurt. The chapter ends with an assessment of the euro crisis of 2011–12.

Irish divorce reform began in the recognition of foreign divorces which produced convoluted case law from the time of the 1937 Irish constitution. The balance of these rulings pivoted on domicile, the intention to reside in a country permanently, which was challenging to test and still dictated by a husband’s domicile. Reform in foreign divorce and domicile was forthcoming from the 1980s and was part of a broader process of Irish family law reform which reflected changing social mores including those relating to the central position of the Catholic church in the Irish state. Some more liberal Irish priests emerged in the 1960s yet, more effective in prompting a reassessment of the position of the Catholic church was Vatican II, which recognised democracy and liberalism. The level of martial breakdown in independent Ireland was also becoming clearer and harder to ignore. A key recommendation of the New Ireland Forum of the mid-1980s was therefore the separation of church and state but divorce reform still provoked antagonistic and often religiously-charged debate.