15–16 September 2026
This international workshop examines enduring imperial legacies in British politics since the 1960s. The dismantling of the imperial world order stands as one of the defining ruptures of the 20th century (Pedersen & Ward 2021; Thomas 2024), but its political, cultural and rhetorical aftershocks remain deeply contested (Stockwell 2018; Lester 2022; Ward 2023; Doble, Liburd & Parker 2023). By exploring how the world’s largest empire has been argued over and reimagined after its formal dissolution, the workshop seeks to situate contemporary debates about imperialism’s continuing impact in their broader historical and rhetorical contexts.
In particular, the discussions will address how prime ministers, party leaders, and other leading political figures have used and abused the imperial past to advance political ends. As the nation’s chief spokesperson, prime ministers occupy a unique position from which to shape political agendas and narratives of post-imperial identities. While scholarly attention has long focused on imperial rhetoric during the age of empire (Thomas and Toye 2017), this workshop turns to the post-imperial era – including the present – to examine how and to what extent memories of empire inform political discourse.
The workshop raises questions about perceptions of the persistence of imperial legacies in domestic and international politics; the contested nature of decolonisation within the UK; the impact of competing memories of colonial history on debates about Britain’s future; and how we can combine historical research with digital tools to study political and rhetorical afterlives of empire more widely.