Reckoning With Empire at Britain’s Imperial War Museum

An exhibition at London’s Imperial War Museum offers a welcome corrective to the nostalgia for empire common among Britain’s elites.

All nations have an excess of history. But none more so than the nation-states that were once nation-empires. The 1960s marked a critical moment for the nationalization of history in the Western European societies confronting the loss of their colonies. In response to the ruptures and humiliations of decolonization, both the political right and left embraced narrower, more provincial visions of the collective past. Memories of empire were treated as personal and familial rather than public and institutional; textbooks, memorials, and museums left “overseas” history largely out of sight.

In recent years, however, the code of silence around imperial history h