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European history. As Elizabeth Buettner outlines in her introduction, there are three historio graphical imperatives for such a work. First, there has been a tendency for much of the ‘new imperial history’ to focus on the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries rather than the twentieth. Whilst there are notable exceptions that do tackle the more recent past, Buettner argues this has meant that many of the insights of the ‘new imperial history’ have yet to be fully fleshed out in this period. Secondly, and perhaps most crucially, even in colonial history where the primacy of the nation state has been called into question, many existing histories of decolonisation (and colonialism) tend to focus exclusively on one European empire. In discussing the British, Dutch, French, Belgian and Portuguese empires, Buettner admirably manages the formidable feat of tackling multiple empires at home and abroad. Thirdly, Anglophone historians (who have most commonly then focused on the British Empire) have been particularly slow to incorporate the theoretical and empirical insights of other European empires into their scholarship, including literature on Portuguese, say, colonialism, but written in English. The first part of the book, ‘Decolonization for the Colonizers’, is an excellent account of decolonisation that focuses in turn on Britain, the Netherlands, France, Belgium and Portugal. From the Indian Congress to the Carnation Revolution, these opening first chapters bring home both the complexity of decolonisation and its global reach. Another thing that stands out is the violence of decolonisation from the use of torture in Algeria to the widespread hangings in colonial Kenya. The varying impact of the Second World War is also demonstrated to be formative, with the occupation of the Netherlands, France and Belgium by the Nazis and the occupation of various colonial territories by the Japanese, shaping the course of decolonisation. The heart of Europe after Empire, ‘Migration and Multiculturalisms in Postcolonial Europe’ is an engaging analysis of how French, British, Belgian, Dutch and Portuguese identities have been reconfigured by some of the repercussions of decolonisation and migration. Her first chapter of this section, ‘Ending Empires, Coming Home’, explores groups of migrants whose arrivals, inconspicuous in some cases though unwanted in others, have often been overlooked historically: colonial repatriates. Often white but sometimes descended from both colonisers and colonised, these groups were largely unfamiliar with Europe, despite, in some cases, having known it as ‘home’. From ‘Indisch Dutch’, ‘imperial Britons’ and Portuguese ‘retonados’ to ‘Pieds-noirs’ and Belgian ‘refugees’, their journeys to Europe occurred in different waves and under different levels of compulsion. With their tastes of food influenced by their lives in the colonies, values that were held with suspicion by metropolitan critics and, sometimes, with little in common with those whose heritage they were said to share, integration often proved difficult. The two other chapters in this section explore what Buettner terms ‘ethnic minority immigration’ from the former colonies. Again this is a careful analysis of the arrivals from various parts of the globe, the reactions and racism that greeted the migrants and the way in which national identities and ideas about belonging shifted as a result. Multiculturalism, assimilationism and integration are examined as state responses as well as the responses of political parties, individuals and other groups. Coalescing around debates about the hijab and halal meat, questions about Islam and about Muslim arrivals are shown to reoccur particularly potently across many of the European Europe after Empire is a useful intervention into the fields of decolonisation and postcolonial Europe After Empire: Decolonisation, Society and Culture, by Elizabeth Buettner, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2016, 551 pp., £69.99 (hardcover), ISBN 9780521113861, £21.47 (paperback), ISBN 978-0-521-13188-9 290 B OOK REVIEWS