ABSTRACT
The chapter focuses on to argue that Britain in the 1950s was principally an imperial power entering a period of post-imperial crisis, and it is this context that determines its relation to integration. An imperial status order was established, organised around hierarchies of social and political identities in which ‘property was no longer the basis of the suffrage, but “race”, gender, labour and level of civilisation determined who was included in and excluded from the political nation’. The British post-war consensus was, therefore, largely a modification of this social imperial consensus, which had been intellectually fashioned towards the end of the nineteenth century and established at the beginning of the twentieth century. From the perspective developed, this flawed Fordism can also be seen as an expression of the extent to which the British political economic order continued to be post-imperial, rather than national, with a considerable but problematic international orientation.
