History & Policy

Dane Kennedy (National History Center): Brexit and the Legacies of Empire Although Britain lost its empire some fifty years ago, this talk will argue that the legacies of its imperial past have helped shape the debate surrounding Brexit and Britain’s future. I intend to (1) note the historical forces that brought an end to Britain’s empire and led to its belated and ambivalent entry into the European Union, (2) point out how postcolonial demographics and politics within British society gave rise to sharply divergent interpretations of the nation’s imperial past, and (3) make the case that these interpretations have shaped arguments about Britain’s future, particularly for Brexit’s most vocal advocates, whose repeated evocations of the imperial past have served as proxies for their vision of a ‘global Britain’. Dane Kennedy is Director of the National History Center of the American Historical Association and the Elmer Louis Kayser Professor of History and International Affairs at George Washington University