What is the relationship between Britain's imperial past and its present-day condition? Charlotte Lydia Riley's Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain attempts to answer that question for a broad British public. She does so not by reaching back centuries but by examining the years since World War II to show the impact of empire on postwar British politics, society, and everyday experience.

The book seeks to intervene in contemporary conversations, spurred by Brexit in 2016; the Windrush Scandal, which began in 2018; and Britain’s Black Lives Matter reckoning in 2020. These events raised questions surrounding migration, citizenship, race, and national identity that many connected to Britain's history of imperial hierarchy and domination. While historians seek to make these connections visible to a public they imagine is unaware, Dominic Sandbrook, reviewing Imperial Island in The Times, argued that the claim that empire impacted the condition of Britain is “wearisomely familiar,” and that Britons are not ignorant of or resistant to this history but bored by it (“Why Empire is in Britain's DNA,” The Sunday Times, August 27, 2023). Several other reviewers argued that since World War II, Britain has become a more tolerant country, and this shift should be celebrated. For these reviewers, to argue that the imperial past shapes inequalities in Britain today is a claim to continuity that cannot bear the weight of the events of the last 80 years.

In identifying empire as only one strand of Britain's complex formation, these reviewers oversimplify the intertwining of empire and nation in the recent past. To tease out this relationship is Riley's project. In each of seven chapters, Riley addresses a decade, choosing significant events and movements to reveal the impact of empire on Britain. In the chapter on World War II, Riley shows how both evacuation and conscription were imperial experiences. She argues in the chapter on migration and racism in the 1960s and 1970s that the violence of imperial rule was brought home by border control agencies, the police, and the wider British state. Riley draws together both state practices as well as popular movements, both those generated by Black and South Asian Britons, as well as Powellism and the rise of the National Front. The last chapter addresses the period between Stephen Lawrence's murder in 1993 and the Brexit referendum of 2016, addressing the formal handover of power in Hong Kong in 1997 as well as racism and xenophobia within Britain. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the “history wars,” debates about the relationship between Britain today and its imperial past that have been waged through public conversation. Revisions to school history curricula in 2014 and to citizenship tests in 2013 show how deeply the Conservative government sought to promote a view of imperial history that shored up the significance of Britain's place in the world. As Riley shows, the Brexit referendum can be viewed as a judgment on Britain's past.

As this book intervenes to confront imperial nostalgia, the conclusion continues this discussion through examining the selective history presented during Queen Elizabeth II's funeral, the consequences of imperial forgetting in the Windrush Scandal, and attempts to reintegrate the history of Britain and Empire in the tearing down of slave trader and Member of Parliament Edward Colston's statue in Bristol in the summer of 2020. As the book draws to a close, we see that discussions of Britain's history are themselves historical events of note.

Riley is to be applauded for the ambition of the book. Historians of earlier periods will find excellent detail of the events she narrates and citations to the relevant scholarship in a bibliographic essay. In surveying 80 years of recent history, she brings together high politics and everyday experiences, warfare and welfare, activism, and culture. Importantly, people of color are not simply identified as being present for this history, but as active participants in it. In integrating the end of empire, migration, and race with domestic politics and everyday life, the book is a welcome corrective to recent popular surveys of Britain's postwar years, such as those written by Peter Hennessey, David Kynaston, and Dominic Sandbrook. However, many of Riley's chapters do not cohere into something more than a chronicle; they do not provide an explanation of the impact empire has had on Britain. In chapter four on decolonization, Riley claims that Britons had to reckon with the unpopularity of colonial rule, but the discussion of MacMillan's “Winds of Change” speech, British perception of “Emergencies” in Malaya and Kenya, the Universal Declaration of Independence in Rhodesia, and the Commonwealth does not explain how these events contributed to a reckoning in Britain or what that reckoning was. Similarly, in chapter six on the 1980s, Riley focuses on the Falklands War, Ethiopian Famine Relief, the Anti-Apartheid Movement, and the Rushdie Affair to show that imperial legacies shaped military action, humanitarian movements, international solidarity, and views on integration. However, it remains unclear how British people confronted the legacy of empire through these events, or how these events changed contemporary Britons’ relationship to their past.

These limits are perhaps due to the constraints of writing popular history. They are also a challenge to historians of twentieth-century Britain to take on the task of explanation. We need to move beyond stating that empire shaped Britain, to tackling in a complex way how and why. If we do not remain committed to the project of explanation and analysis, it will continue to be all too easy to excise the imperial dimensions of Britain's history from the domestic, to claim that the imperial past was too long ago to matter now, and perhaps most importantly, to identify racism as a US phenomenon and not a British one. For historians of Britain working in North America, we may not be personally invested in the condition of Britain today, but we can contribute to conversations on how and why Britain came to be as it is.