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Interesting. I would not have thought there would be so many nostalgics of the UK's colonial empire. In France, the "nostalgic" faction are the royalists, and t

Interesting. I would not have thought there would be so many nostalgics of the UK's colonial empire. In France, the "nostalgic" faction are the royalists, and they are an extremely small minority that nobody takes seriously.

vidarh 12y ago
I don't think many people wants it back. But many people do appear to look at the empire as a proud part of British history. With respect to the comparison with France, consider that France has been a republic far longer than Britain has been without at least the trappings of an empire, and the empire had a sort of "soft landing" with a gradual loss of territories, and with most of the colonies retaining special relationships with Britain in the form of the Commonwealth, and with many of them retaining the Queen as their head of state. It wasn't until 1981 that Britain lost its last colony (a few remaining overseas holdings remained as British Dependent Territories, now British Overseas Territories), and as recently as 1982, Britain defended one of its last vestiges of the Empire militarily (the Falklands War). But at the same time, Britain had for decades by then pursued a policy of voluntary decolonisation on relatively friendly terms (with a few notable exceptions, like Kenya and Zimbabwe) - explicitly with the aim of trying to avoid situations like what France ran into with e.g. Algeria (or anything like Britains own drawn out conflict in India). So really, a large proportion of the British adult population still at least has some vague memory of Britain still having an empire in their childhood or youth - albeit for most people their memory will be of one that had been in serious decline for a long time. Furthermore, most of them if they are aware of the decolonisation will have memories of a Britain that had abandoned any idea of holding on to its colonies with force and where decolonisation was largely orderly and reasonably "friendly" and where Britain in most cases where it did not happen peacefully could be reasonably construed as having acted properly (e.g. in Zimbabwe, it was the white minority local population, not Britain, that started the long running conflict) If most adults in France could personally remember the last monarch, I suspect they royalists would still have more support there too. Similarly I expect the British Empire will fade rapidly as fewer people personally remembers it.

vidarh 12y ago

I don't think many people wants it back. But many people do appear to look at the empire as a proud part of British history. With respect to the comparison with France, consider that France has been a republic far longer than Britain has been without at least the trappings of an empire, and the empire had a sort of "soft landing" with a gradual loss of territories, and with most of the colonies retaining special relationships with Britain in the form of the Commonwealth, and with many of them retaining the Queen as their head of state. It wasn't until 1981 that Britain lost its last colony (a few remaining overseas holdings remained as British Dependent Territories, now British Overseas Territories), and as recently as 1982, Britain defended one of its last vestiges of the Empire militarily (the Falklands War). But at the same time, Britain had for decades by then pursued a policy of voluntary decolonisation on relatively friendly terms (with a few notable exceptions, like Kenya and Zimbabwe) - explicitly with the aim of trying to avoid situations like what France ran into with e.g. Algeria (or anything like Britains own drawn out conflict in India). So really, a large proportion of the British adult population still at least has some vague memory of Britain still having an empire in their childhood or youth - albeit for most people their memory will be of one that had been in serious decline for a long time. Furthermore, most of them if they are aware of the decolonisation will have memories of a Britain that had abandoned any idea of holding on to its colonies with force and where decolonisation was largely orderly and reasonably "friendly" and where Britain in most cases where it did not happen peacefully could be reasonably construed as having acted properly (e.g. in Zimbabwe, it was the white minority local population, not Britain, that started the long running conflict) If most adults in France could personally remember the last monarch, I suspect they royalists would still have more support there too. Similarly I expect the British Empire will fade rapidly as fewer people personally remembers it.