Empireland: How Imperialism has Shaped Modern Britain

It is puerile to reduce imperial history to a matter of 'good' and 'bad'; trying to weigh up the positive and negative in this way is like defending the morality of kicking a random old man in the shins one afternoon because you helped an old lady across the road in the morning.

After the First World War, the man in charge of recruitment at the Colonial Office was Major Ralph Dolignon Furse, a decorated war hero, a keen rugby and cricket player and, crucially, holder of a poor third-class degree from Oxford. Furse's selection process was designed to eliminate anyone too smart: dependability was the thing most desired. The last thing anyone wanted was for men in the field to analyse what they were doing.

In summary, even if you give Brexiteers the benefit of the doubt, concede that their historical wistfulness is more about nostalgia for the nineteenth-century free-trading prowess rather than nostalgia about empire per se, you ignore the fact that free trade at that time was actually imperial. You also ignore that some of the deadliest calamities in Britain's history of empire, some leaving millions dead, happened in the name of free trade.

the Prince of Wales, went on a series of imperial tours, being greeted by a banner at Aden in 1921 which declared: ‘TELL DADDY WE ARE ALL HAPPY UNDER BRITISH RULE’.

Trader, The Owner, The Slave by James Walvin.