As Robert Saunders has put it: ‘It is probably only possible to be nostalgic for empire if you forget most of its history.’ We have already touched upon some illustrations of such amnesia: as a nation we routinely forget the imperial precedents for modern wars; as a society, we forget not only that black and Asian people were invited to work here, but that many came as citizens; we forget more generally that Britain was built on immigration, Robert Winder observing that ‘Britain has an amnesiac streak … when it comes to acknowledging the immigrant blood in her veins’; the imperial nature of
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