It was long conventional, if inexplicit, wisdom that Britain’s era of decolonisation, beginning in the mid to late 1940s, was largely concluded by the mid to late 1960s. Most overviews of the subject end around there, with the remaining African colonies and almost all the larger ones elsewhere having achieved independence, and the ‘East of Suez’ military commitment abandoned. More recent rethinking, however, has tended to see this as a story which, in so far as it has ever really ended, did so considerably later than once believed. Several important events and, indeed, crises of the Thatcher years can be viewed as involving a politics of decolonisation and/or having a distinctively post-imperial dimension. Most evidently, these include the Falklands War; the transfer of power in Zimbabwe and the complex events leading to the transfer of power in Hong Kong; crises in Commonwealth relations, especially over apartheid South Africa; and, in some eyes, various aspects of domestic politics and policy, such as immigration and European integration.

Yet such varied events and processes have rarely been seen either as a coherent ensemble or as forming parts of some larger narrative, whether of the end of empire as such or of a British ‘post-imperialism’. Zimbabwe, the Falklands or Hong Kong are typically viewed as detached ‘epilogues’ to these narratives, and have quite often literally been thus consigned in overviews of decolonisation. I attempt here both a broad survey of these events and a tentative answer to the question of how far and in what ways such diverse episodes and controversies can be made elements in a coherent single ‘end of empire’ narrative – one which places the Thatcher era clearly within a more capacious account of decolonisation, both external and internal.