Image: Rhodes Must Fall Oxford.
The British Empire was a white supremacist project of conquest, plunder and dispossession requiring the most extreme and brutal forms of violence. But since the Brexit vote – with questions of immigration to the fore – the nation’s appetite for imperial mythology and fantasy has grown. In place of the European market, government officials expected to revitalise long-abandoned trade relationships with the Commonwealth, expressing a preference for Indian and Australian migrants over Europeans.
Dubbed ‘Empire 2.0’, the policy mixed the arrogance of former imperial grandeur with the recycling in commodity-ready form of a discredited and shameful era in British history. Brexit has created the space for an unapologetic reassertion of colonialism. The hankering for Britain to be ‘great again’ has not only infused British politics, but has been mirrored in the renewed appeal of mythical narratives about Britain’s imperial history in academia. Pseudo-intellectualised attempts to rehabilitate Britain's imperial past have surfaced, partly in response to the ground gained by effective anti-colonial movements.
