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These imaginary parameters that contained the British Empire were overtly politicised in the imperial articulations of Disraeli, and later in the justification of the colonisation of Africa. "To understand empire there needs to be a decoding of what we mean by it." But as an imaginary construct founded on select symbols, in Britain, empire was defined, recognised and reduced to a gross simplicity. In reality, the Empire was far more than a stock image, British imperialism manifested in innumerable ways, convulsing and adapting to each exploit to the extent where there was, and is, no one definition of the British Empire.

Magazines, exhibitions and songs created a structure that made imperialism conceivable and consumable to the general British public. Even at the height of imperialism and jingoistic narratives, Empire was a concept that was sanitised and anglicised – presented through particular and calculated terms that ensured commercial success. Much has already been said about how these developments created popular support for the Empire, but it was ‘products’ as the site of imagination that affected the parameters in which empire was conceived. Collected, housed and shown-off in the ‘Great Exhibition’ of 1851, the commercial communication of empire began to expand rapidly into children’s magazines, showcases, and a vast Empire Exhibition in 1924-25. The sites of the imagination were created through imperial products, which became the popular symbols of the British Empire. But for most, empire and its symbolic presence was understood through the imagination.

The obscurity of this profession was mystified in Britain as the memories of Nabobs from the East India Trading Company gave them a distinct, if not isolated place in British society. Even the main administrators of the Empire, who sat in the wood-panelled offices and wore sand-coloured pith helmets, were from selective families from the upper and middle classes. Such an expanse, funded by the profits of slavery and extraction, was inconceivable to most British people. This may seem like a banal observation, a general fact known to every over-sixty year old who used to shop in ‘Empire Stores’, but the repercussions of this shallow, iconographic interaction with Empire is part of the reason why Britain suffers from historical amnesia, and why we need to question the pervasive Anglocentric view.Īt its height, the British Empire had control over 24% of the globe with colonies spread from New Zealand to Canada. For a great deal of the time since Britain has profited off colonialism, the vast majority of British people did not travel beyond the island’s white cliffs, confining their interaction with empire to the songs they sang, the stories they read and the packaging they saw on the front of tea boxes. A symbol in the sense that the acts of colonialization, extraction and even slavery were primarily understood through secondary objects. "The sites of the imagination were created through imperial products, which became the popular symbols of the British Empire."įor many, the empire has always been a symbol. But we need to be specific: if we want to ‘come to terms with empire’ we need to evaluate and criticise the foundations in which empire was conceived in Britain. A definition that is built from a foundation of collective historical amnesia and continues to silence the voices of the people who have lived, and continue to live, under the weight of imperialism. When we speak of the British Empire, when we discuss its legacies, effects and continuing manifestations, what are we referring to? A vague feeling of white guilt, jingoistic pride and unarticulated rage pervade a shaky and unexamined definition of the British Empire.