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Brexit and empire: a long-term view

20 February 2017

The ways in which empires - and their collapse - transform their central regions as much as the colonies constitute a significant part of the Brexit story, argues Andrew Gardner.

sycamore

The ways in which empires - and their collapse - transform their central regions as much as the colonies constitute a significant part of the Brexit story, argues Andrew Gardner, summarising an article recently published in the Journal of Social Archaeology.



Analysis of the motivating forces behind the narrow Leave majority in the UK's referendum on EU membership, on 23 June 2016, continues to develop as new data and events shed more light on the nature of populism and resurgent nationalism around the world. Ranging from the economics of globalisation and de-industrialisation to correlations with particular age-groups or levels of education, all of these factors are likely to be important in explaining aspects of the reaction against the EU and so-called 'elites' expressed in the referendum result.

Identity politics is also clearly part of the mix, and there many different perspectives on the role of this and related issues, such as how identity-based conflicts have been stirred up by certain sectors of the right-wing media. Building upon my research interests in the transformations of identity in Britain between the later Iron Age and the early Medieval period, and in how identity is theorised, my article examines the long-term history of 'British' identity and how it might be compared to other imperial identities, specifically 'Roman-ness'. Perhaps surprisingly, this exercise reveals some interesting observations about the broad identity dynamics at play in the referendum result, while also highlighting some of the ironic inconsistencies present in some of the fallacious arguments of the Leave campaign.

To summarise a complex argument, empires generate a particular configuration of the fundamental tensions between similarity and difference, essentialism and hybridity, and boundaries and boundary-crossing, which are part of all identification processes. These are important and continuous elements of the formation of personal and group identities, and accepting their paradoxical nature is the first step in understanding how identities work - as much scholarship in social theory and, more specifically, in what is known as 'Border Studies', has recently shown.

In the case of the Roman Empire, it can be argued that - in diametric opposition to the traditional interpretation of a 'Romanising' wave that homogenised the provinces from the Roman core - the long-term story of the Roman world sees the core transformed continuously by the complex interactions taking place in the frontier provinces, like Britain. What it meant to be Roman in the 4th century AD was very different from the 1st century AD and in turn from the 3rd century BC, all as a result of empire and the dynamic effects of frontier processes.

The same can be said of British identity, and this provides some context to the identity politics of Brexit. A key piece of evidence here is the correlation between the areas showing a preponderance of Leave votes in the referendum and the census data from 2011 concerning national identity. It is striking - especially given the famous confusion between 'British' and 'English' as appellations - that many people in England do not primarily identify as British in the census, the exceptions being those living in urban areas and citizens of migrant backgrounds. Each part of the UK has different dynamics here, but one reading of this data is that part of the dislocation underlying the Leave vote has to do with the relative weakness of 'English' identity and its detachment from 'British' identity, which is presently sustained mainly in more cosmopolitan areas. This is similar to the process that took place at the end of the Roman Empire whereby smaller-scale, more 'ethnic' identities were asserted, as the larger-scale, more dynamic imperial identity changed in its political significance.

Given the long-term process of British imperialism, and the way in which English dominance in this process was masked by the co-option of 'British' identity (linked to non-Anglo-Saxons in the early Middle Ages), a curious situation has therefore developed. Whereas some regional (sub-UK) identities, such as 'Scottishness', have strong signifiers created largely in opposition to this co-option process, 'Englishness' does not; meanwhile 'Britishness' has come increasingly to be defined by wider colonial referents, as part of a similar process to the 'frontier' influence referred to above in the Roman case. It seems that many English voters blame the EU for this 'loss' of identity, although there is little evidence European integration is responsible, since small-scale identities flourish elsewhere in Europe. Rather, this state of affairs is a consequence of the way the building of the British Empire transcended and transformed its 'core'.

This in turn means that harking back to the British Empire as the model for an alternative future outside the EU betrays an ignorance of the way in which that Empire affected Britain, and the world. Indeed, Britain has a long way to go in dealing with the legacies of empire. The foremost issue here is taking responsibility for the entirely negative manifestations of colonial violence that went with it. We should also acknowledge, though, that globalisation and migration are themselves direct consequences of empire, but ones that can be constructive parts of a progressive future, if properly understood, and responsibly debated. Indeed, we might take some inspiration from the fact that, in the later Roman period, Britain was a frontier province where interesting interactions happened, in spite of a rather famous Wall, and contributed to a cosmopolitan Roman-ness. Embracing that past might suggest a better way forward, where a cosmopolitan Britishness can both be reconnected with all of the citizens of the UK, and help contribute to a greater European future.

Sycamore Gap Image (C) Andrew Gardner


  • Andrew Gardner is Senior Lecturer in the Archaeology of the Roman Empire at the UCL Institute of Archaeology.