Seeing this shared a lot. Perhaps the strongest articulation of a growing feeling that empire isn’t really relevant to today.

Problem is this review, like many others, never talks about distinctiveness of British empire-size, structure, history... https://www.newstatesman.com/empireland-sathnam-sanghera-new-age-empire-kehinde-andrews-review

Even at the time, Jan smuts contrasted the British empire with the ‘evils’ of European imperialism.

Britain’s empire was not an empire but an ‘extended trading network’ + ‘an embryonic league of nations based on political decentralisation’

British empire was subsumed into much wider commercial and cultural dominance that stretched far beyond territorial holdings. This became naturalised as Britain’s preeminence was gained, in seeley’s words, in ‘a fit of absence of mind’.

Different empires produce different political cultures. Structure of Britain’s empire plus the seamless transition of hegemony to its ‘child’ -USA- sheds light on why a return to both ‘island independence’ + being a ‘global free-trader’ resonates here more than other ex-empires.

Trying to explain all racism in the world through the British empire obvs makes no sense.

But so does trying to address the multiple crises faced by 2021 Britain (brexit, union breakup, distinctive covid path etc) without looking at 300 years of the nation’s formative history.