Crisis and State Recomposition: Finance, Borders and Contract in Post-Imperial Britain

This paper analyses Britain’s crises since 2008 as successive conjunctures within a longer organic crisis of the post-imperial settlement. I argue that these conjunctures are moments in the recomposition of a finance-dependent, rentier-property, post-imperial capitalist state. Operating through a shifting power bloc of dominant fractions, successive governing projects have confronted an unresolved profitability problem. They have repeatedly sought to displace the costs of this problem while preserving the basis of the bloc’s dominance. I track the recomposition through three internally connected relations: financial-rentier insulation; the racialised organisation of labour and social reproduction; and contractualised expropriation and managed liability. Across the 2008 financial rescue, austerity, Brexit, the scandal sequence (Windrush, Grenfell, Horizon), Covid and the war–energy–inflation conjuncture, these relations assume different configurations. Their recombination reorganises which claims are protected, where costs fall, and how legal status, entitlement and public capacity are structured. Against reductive crisis and additive polycrisis narratives, hollow-state accounts and theories of democratic backsliding, I specify authoritarian statism in post-imperial terms. In this state form, decisive economic and administrative capacities are insulated from popular determination through relations that also differentiate status, entitlement and exposure. These relations simultaneously constitute unequal positions of political contestation, making their articulation through competing projects and solidarities part of the struggles that reproduce and transform state form. Repeated survival of the settlement should therefore not be mistaken for resilience. Its reproduction proceeds through recurrent recomposition without restoring either productive dynamism or durable hegemonic direction.