This chapter explores how the postcolonial predicament bequeathed by the British Empire challenges us to rethink conceptions of ‘postmodernism’ and ‘Britishness’. The specifically Anglo-American sense of the close connection between postmodernism and postcolonial studies is established via the identification of ‘grand narrative’ with the ‘civilising mission’, but this equation is problematised through a reading of Ian McEwan’s novel Saturday (2005) and a review of the changing history of British imperial ideology. A different approach to the interplay of fictive and historical narrative is identified in Ngugi we Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat (1967), a novel that locates characteristic postmodern concerns within the late colonial violence of the Kenyan Emergency. The novel is shown to anticipate a contemporary cultural moment in which postmodernism’s choreography of certainty and uncertainty proves increasingly ill-suited.