Shadows of Empire

If the history undergraduate of tomorrow can be sure of anything, it is that she will find herself in an exam hall writing essays about Brexit: how it happened, whether it could have been avoided, and what difference it made to British society, politics, and global power. Such an essay might take any number of starting points, from the interplay of personalities and contingencies (what if the Conservatives had lost the 2015 election? What if Boris Johnson had jumped the other way? What if Vote Leave had never paid for that notorious bus?) to deep, underlying structural factors (6 years of ‘austerity’, 30 years of ‘neoliberalism’, and 60 years of ‘relative economic decline’). The terms of the UK’s exit from the European Union have not yet been settled, but already there exists an abundance of comment, analysis, and punditry diagnosing its origins and causes. In Shadows of Empire, Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce contribute to this first draft of Brexit history by offering a cultural explanation. To understand why large numbers of British people voted to leave in June 2016, they suggest, we must attend to the power of inherited ideas. The visions of a future outside Europe conjured during the campaign did not spring from the minds of Johnson and company into a political culture unused to debating Britain’s place in the world. They belong instead to a long tradition of thought which has most recently found political traction through the concept of the ‘Anglosphere’

Austerity · Brexit · Economic history · Economics · Empire · European union · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Populism · Power (physics · Sociology · Vision · Political and Economic history of UK and US · History · Law