In summary, even if you give Brexiteers the benefit of the doubt, concede that their historical wistfulness is more about nostalgia for 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.
