The British Empire’s Legacy

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Britain’s colonial legacy. The 18th, 19th and early part of the 20th centuries were times of colonial conquest for this country but the abiding image of empire (true or not) is stuck squarely in the 1850’s when Victoria was on the throne and the world map was liberally sprinkled with red. So what does that mean for us as we go into the next millennium - Catherine Hall, Professor of Modern British Social History at University College London, asks us to ‘re-remember’ our colonial past, and suggests that only by acknowledging the guilt it has saddled us with and its legacy of a truly multi-cultural Britain can we face our new life in Europe.Are there different ways of remembering that past, and what effect do these different approaches have on our present? Are we still too close to our imperial past to view it objectively, or is the reverse true - that we are too deeply rooted in our present to learn the lessons of that past?

→ Listen on BBC Sounds website

Guests

• Catherine Hall 3 episodes
  Professor Modern British Social and Cultural History, University College, London
• Professor Linda Colley 5 episodes
  Currently holder of the Leverhulme Research Professorship at the London School of Economics and former Professor of History, Yale University

Related episodes

• Slavery and Empire
  
  17 Oct, 2002 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• The British Empire
  
  8 Nov, 2001 320 Political science
• Imperial Science
  
  1 Feb, 2001 320 Political science
• Cultural Imperialism
  
  27 Jun, 2002 320 Political science
• Heritage
  
  18 Jul, 2002 940 History of Europe
• History and Understanding the Past
  
  30 Mar, 2000 900 History
• Multiculturalism
  
  13 May, 1999 300 Social sciences, sociology and anthropology
• Memory and Culture
  
  27 May, 1999 150 Psychology
• The Nation State
  
  14 Oct, 1999 320 Political science
• The American Century
  
  17 Dec, 1998 320 Political science

Experimental. For more related episodes, visit the visual explorer.

---

Programme ID: p005459p

Episode page: bbc.co.uk/programmes/p005459p

Auto-category: 325.341 (British colonization and colonialism)

Hello (First sentence from this episode)

Hello, today I'm joined by two historians to discuss Britain's colonial legacy.