A strong emotional attachment to the memory of empire runs deep in British culture. In recent years, that memory has become a battleground in a long-drawn ideological war, inflecting debates on race, class, gender, culture, the UK’s future and its place in the world. This provocative and passionate book surveys the scene of the imperial memory wars in contemporary Britain, exploring how the myths that structure our views of empire came to be, and how they inform the present. Taking in such diverse subjects as Rory Stewart and inter-war adventure fiction, man’s facial hair and Kipling, the Alt-right and the Red Wall,
Imperial Nostalgia asks how our relationship with our national past has gone wrong, and how it might be improved.
Table of Content
Introduction 1 Associative magic: nostalgic time and the revolt against mourning 2 Inventing the tradition: how nostalgia made an empire 3 Sovereign bodies: Britain’s imperial present 4 ‘The best and most perfect virtue’: empire, race and free speech in the battle for the university 5 The adventures of the Imperial Wonder Boy: Rory Stewart and the fantasy of innocence 6 ‘Degraded underfoot perverse creatures’: empire and the languages of class Conclusion: escaping the empire Further reading Bibliography Index
About the author
Peter Mitchell is a writer and historian
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