Memories of empire: imperial pasts and imagined futures in British politics

This chapter examines how British politicians mobilise memories of empire to imagine and legitimise competing futures for the United Kingdom. Focusing on the turbulent decade from 2015 to 2025, it analyses parliamentary debates, speeches, memoirs and party manifestos surrounding Brexit and reparations politics to show how imperial history became a usable past in post-Brexit Britain. The central argument is that memories of empire are not merely retrospective or nostalgic, but forward-looking political resources used to define Britain’s role in the world. Across the political spectrum, British politicians drew on imperial pasts to legitimise some futures while delegitimising others. The imperial past is therefore not a distant backdrop to contemporary politics, but a living legacy that remains strikingly present, invoked not simply to describe what once was, but to shape what Britain should become. The chapter contributes to scholarship on the political afterlives of empire, memory politics and “imperial history wars” by bringing the future into closer conversation with the past. It argues that struggles over imperial pasts are also struggles over imagined futures, and that these contests cut across party lines. In post-Brexit Britain, unresolved disputes over what empire means continue to shape which futures can be imagined, claimed and pursued. More broadly, at a time of growing attention to reparations and imperial legacies, the chapter demonstrates that memories of empire function as a key site through which British politicians negotiate the future of the nation after Brexit.