This research group will bring together an interdisciplinary group of eight historians, English scholars and Museology scholars for a week-long workshop (to be held in Cambridge) on the structural, social and symbolic violence of colonialism in Britain’s largest and most culturally iconic colony, India. While there is an emerging body of scholarship on what Slavoj Žižek (2008) terms “objective” violence in India and other colonial contexts scholars have yet to develop a comprehensive understanding of the nature of colonial violence, particularly the nature of “objective” violence and the relationship between “objective” violence, which largely remains hidden, and “subjective”, or overtly visible forms.

This failure to reckon with the violence of Britain’s colonial past continues to have profound repercussions, most recently on Britain’s decision to leave the EU, since British perceptions of empire as the source of British ‘greatness’ and a force for global good played an important role in the vote to leave. But whether a result of “colonial nostalgia” (El-Enany 2016) or “the last throes of Empire working its way out of our system” (Tomlinson and Dorling 2016), Brexit reveals that, far from being merely a remnant of Britain’s past, empire continues to play a key role in shaping British identity and political culture. In light of the lack of education about empire in British schools (Heath 2016a) and the ongoing failure of cultural institutions, such as museums, to depict the reality of Britain’s colonial past (Heath 2015), a rosy perception of such a past is likely to continue.