If you wander through Glasgow Green, you’ll encounter the Doulton fountain, a gaudy terracotta tribute to empire that features “native” and colonial figures in national dress holding out the produce of their lands to the imperial centre. Like thousands of imperial monuments across Britain, the Doulton Fountain is neither widely celebrated nor widely denounced. It is part of the everyday backdrop.
That quiet coexistence says a lot about Britain’s relationship with its imperial past. Empire is everywhere – cast in stone, threaded through schoolbook stories and family lore – but rarely front-and-centre in political debate. In a new article in the British Journal of Political Science, Daniel Devine and I set out to answer two questions: what do Britons actually think about the empire, and do those views matter politically?
