Europe after Empire

Elizabeth Buettner joined the University of Amsterdam as Professor of Modern History in 2014, prior to which she taught at the University of York. She received her BA from Barnard College of Columbia University and her MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. In 2012–2013, she held a Senior Research Fellowship at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies in Germany in conjunction with a British Academy Mid-Career Fellowship, and in 2006 she was selected to participate in the International Research Seminar on Decolonization sponsored by the National History Center, the Mellon Foundation, and the Library of Congress in Washington, DC. Her publications include Empire Families: Britons and Late Imperial India (2004), which was awarded the Women's History Network Book Prize and led to her being shortlisted for the Young Academic Author of the Year award by the Times Higher Education Supplement in 2005. She has written articles in the Journal of Modern History, the Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, History and Memory, the Scottish Historical Review (where her piece won the Royal Historical Society's David Berry Prize), Annales de Démographie Historique, Ab Imperio, and Food and History. Contributions to edited collections include the chapter 'Ethnicity' in A Concise Companion to History, edited by Ulinka Rublack (2011).

'Trying to understand how 'the empire came home' has inspired some of the most important historiography of twentieth-century Europe during the past two decades, bringing colonialism's legacies under scrutiny in challenging new ways. With an approach both comparative and transnational, Elizabeth Buettner builds on this new work to craft a vividly insightful account of decolonization and its effects, one that deals not just with Britain and France, but with the Netherlands, Belgium and Portugal too.' Geoff Eley, University of Michigan

• Introduction; Part I. Decolonization for Colonizers: Europe's Transition to the Postcolonial Era: 1. Myths of continuity and European exceptionalism: Britain, decolonization, and the Commonwealth family ideal; 2. Occupation, resistance, and liberation: the road to Dutch decolonization; 3. Soldiering on in the shadow of war: decolonizing la plus grande France; 4. Long live the king?: Belgium, the monarchy, and the Congo between the Second World War and the decolonization years; 5. From Rose-Coloured Map to Carnation Revolution: Portugal's overseas amputations; Part II. Migrations and Multiculturalisms in Postcolonial Europe; 6. Ending empires, coming home: the ghost worlds of European colonial repatriates; 7. Ethnic minority immigration from empires lost; 8. Reconfiguring nations: identities, belonging, and multiculturalism in the wake of postcolonial migration; Part III. Memories, Legacies, and Further Directions: 9. Remembering and forgetting empires; Epilogue: thoughts toward new histories of contemporary Europe; Further reading; Index.