Brexit politics—which is apparently indefinitely coterminous with British politics per se—is moving so fast that in addition to being a study of how and why imperialism is a touchstone for the future of the United Kingdom, Embers of Empire in Brexit Britain is already an artefact of the pre-history of Boris Johnson's premiership. I felt a unique sense of urgency about writing this review lest it become outdated before it is even published. That said, the sixteen essays that comprise the collection are a valuable snapshot of what Brexit looked and felt like after the 2016 referendum and before the Tory party was purged and Parliament prorogued. More intentionally, it represents a prismatic take on the ideological and affective work that empire has done to shape what Brexit means—and an extended set of reflections on the multiple meanings of imperial history in the twenty-first century.

Ward and Rasch are to be congratulated on the mix of contributors recruited. Academics predominate, but they are not all historians. They include directors of public policy institutes (Michael Kenny and Nick Pearce) as well as journalists and writers (Neal Ascherson and Fintan O'Toole). Among the historians, several of them have extensive media experience: Yasmin Khan has done a BBC2 series and Olivette Otele is a broadcaster for Sky News. It is not just the age of Brexit that has produced this mix of voices academics must all be public commentators now. But Brexit has surely catalyzed a new kind of public intellectual in Britain, bringing scholars more than ever into debates about history, memory, nostalgia, and empire as they pertain to what Dane Kennedy in his conclusion calls the “psychodrama” (171) of Brexit Britain.

The book starts strong on the “embers of empire” theme, cataloguing how and in what rhetorical contexts imperialism has been invoked to shore up anti-EU feeling, to signal nostalgia for a whiter Britain or to justify the Anglosphere as both trade policy and global ideal. Some of the best essays in the volume are those that demonstrate how anti-EU feeling and empire histories are related. In this vein, Elizabeth Buettner quotes a 2017 remark from Denmark's finance minister (“There are two kinds of European nations … there are small nations and there are countries that have not yet realized they are small nations” [37]) and argues effectively for decolonization as a decisively “European integration experience” (40)—in stark contrast to the shrinking Island story history of postwar, postcolonial decline in Britain.

Readers will find a variety of entry points into what the editors call the “plurality of imperial afterlives” (4) that haunt the Brexit debate. Scotland, Ireland, Gibraltar, and China all get their due. Robert Bickers's evidence of how easily the long and bitter memory of “gunboat diplomacy” can be ignited to fuel contemporary Chinese animosity toward Britain (and explode any fantasy of a “British helping hand” in global trade) may be the best example of an imperial “ember” in the collection. Ascherson, for his part, is notably adept at balancing the comparative silence on independence attendant on Scotland's Remain percentages with an excellent short history of Scots investments (material and symbolic) in both empire and its histories. The pairing of essays by Camilla Schofield and Yasmin Khan on the “special relationship” with white supremacist ideologies and practices shared by the United Kingdom and the United States and the recent scandal over Windrush migrants’ claims to rights-bearing citizenship, respectively, links forms of imperialized racism whose kinship might otherwise go unnoticed. The juxtaposition of Katie Donington on public memory and Otele on debates about slavery and contemporary commemoration in Bristol is equally effective, not least for providing eminently teachable examples of the national and local stakes of the imperial pasts in “British” communities. Saul Dubow suggests that the Rhodes Must Fall movement has more “association” than direct “connection” with Brexiteering invocations of imperialism, but the placement of his essay alongside those two indicates otherwise.

Richard Drayton's piece on Nigel Biggar's “secular congregation and … practical theology” (151) of war, history, moral community, and empire touches on recessive structures of feeling that help to ratify Donington's claim that Brexit may be best understood as a question of culture rather than economics. For me, the two most compelling essays in the collection take up a related view: that the terrain on which Brexit is playing out—locally, regionally, nationally, trans-Atlantically, internationally, and globally—is that of political culture. Following on from his earlier writing about heroic failure and the politics of pain, O'Toole argues that Brexit enlists an “insistently unitary Britishness” (63) that rests on denial of England's historically colonial relationship with Ireland. It is an uncaringness about that history that goes way back. But here O'Toole routes it through the Good Friday Agreement, a momentous event less than two decades old that scarcely registers in contemporary political memory. And with the kind of concision arguably uniquely possible in the short essay form, he maps “Ireland's English problem” onto the binary of colonizer-colonized by way of a deceptively simple, ultimately commonsensical, reading. For Leavers and their acolytes, “the EU is Britain and Britain is Ireland”: defeated, abject, and subject to the kind of Joycean “back kick” of twentieth-century postwar history that simply cannot be endured.

O'Toole is set up nicely by Bill Schwarz's essay, which is, characteristically, a tour de force of argumentation and insight. He rejects any easy cause and effect between imperial nostalgia and the current disjunction of political parties and “popular life.” Writing before late summer 2019, he anticipates what manifested as history: a crisis of the state mediated by a willful disregard for the imperial past and its violences that helps to produce not just ethno-populism but a historically recognizable disruptive political formation. Looking back to an earlier populist moment, namely the Irish crisis of 1912–1914, Schwarz calls this “English Unionism,” and he traces a line between Rudyard Kipling, Enoch Powell, and the present moment. Schwarz contends that this phenomenon was the consequence of the age of imperial democracy. What we witness today is derivative of the remnants of that historical moment, salted by the great global moving right show in ways that will be newly unimaginable, undoubtedly, by the time the ink on this review is dry.