This book addresses how the British Empire has become a prominent front in the ongoing UK “culture war.” The author considers the events of summer 2020: a reinvigorated Black Lives Mater movement and the toppling of the statue of slave trader Edward Colston. In this context, the BBC broadcast an episode of Moral Maze on “the morality of the British Empire.” Deploying Antonio Gramsci’s conceptualization of “common sense,” Bentley argues that this functioned as an exemplary site to comprehend how the cultural establishment digests, interprets, and domesticizes critical narratives over the British Empire. Through a textual analysis of the program, the author demonstrates how the British Empire and its legacies are: 1. Reduced to a dinner table debate. 2. Packaged in a balance-sheet format that weighs up the “good” and “bad” aspects of empire. 3. Framed as temporally remote from contemporary society. 4. Presented to be so “complicated” as to evade strong condemnation. The author illustrates how such framings are pervasive within government and establishment representations of the British Empire in the current culture war. Moreover, these representations function to tranquilize counter narratives and reproduce conservative “common sense” notions of both the past and the present. In the conclusion, Bentley considers the fragility of such “common sense” approaches to empire and how they may be overturned. This book is of key interest to students of Postcolonial Studies, Politics and International Relations, History, and the humanities more broadly, as well as those interested in contemporary debates in British society.

Tom Bentley is a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Aberdeen, UK.