All nations have an excess of history. But none more so than the nation-states that were once nation-empires. The 1960s marked a critical moment for the nationalization of history in the Western European societies confronting the loss of their colonies. In response to the ruptures and humiliations of decolonization, both the political right and left embraced narrower, more provincial visions of the collective past. Memories of empire were treated as personal and familial rather than public and institutional; textbooks, memorials, and museums left “overseas” history largely out of sight.

In recent years, however, the code of silence around imperial history has been weakening. In Britain, once the heart of the biggest empire of all, change has come from multiple directions. First, academic researchers turned to long-neglected sources, such as the records of British slave ownership, while discerning a resurgence of empire in the forever wars of the post-9/11 era. Second, a novel litigation strategy — suing the British government, in British courts, for human rights violations committed by imperial authorities decades earlier — achieved spectacular results.

In 2013, Kenyans who had been tortured in British detention camps during the counterinsurgency of the 1950s won a financial settlement of roughly £20 million and a formal acknowledgment of wrongdoing by the foreign secretary. Third, successive waves of protest targeted imperialist symbols as props of a tenacious systemic racism. The Rhodes Must Fall campaign, seeking the removal of the Cecil Rhodes statue at Oriel College, Oxford, took off in 2015. Then during the Black Lives Matter summer of 2020, the Winston Churchill statue in London’s Parliament Square was defaced with graffiti, while a crowd in Bristol toppled a statue of slave trader Edward Colston and dumped it into the city’s harbor.

But if empire is no longer neglected in Britain, the terms on which it should be remembered remain fiercely contested. The backlash against apologetic memory politics found an influential standard-bearer in Oxford theology professor Nigel Biggar, the author of Colonialism: A Moral Reckoning (2021).  The book, a bestseller, draws on cherry-picked evidence to argue that the British Empire wasn’t so bad. The Conservative Party has since rewarded the author with a seat in the House of Lords.

Not to be outdone, the chairman of the far-right Reform Party, Zia Yusuf, recently complained about a culture of shame surrounding British history, citing attacks on the Churchill statue and deriding claims that “the United Kingdom had a brutal empire.” Once in the halls of power, Yusuf said, the party would treat history education as a means of cultivating patriotic pride.

A challenge to the depressing denialism of culture-war salvos surfaced earlier this month in an unlikely place: London’s Imperial War Museum. As its name suggests, the museum — founded in 1917 to honor the sacrifices of World War I — is not a natural venue for anti-colonial history.  But it is exactly the kind of institution — a redoubt of nationalist storytelling, popular with tourists and school visitors, now crammed with artifacts from the “finest hours” of Dunkirk, the Blitz, and Bletchley Park — where the received version of British history might be reimagined.

It is home to a new exhibition called Emergency Exits: The Fight for Independence in Malaya, Kenya, and Cyprus, which runs until March 29 and pulls no punches in documenting the horrific violence inflicted by British imperialists as they struggled to hang on to power in the 1950s.

Few chapters in the long history of British colonial violence are as shocking as this one — not so much because of the number of fatalities, which might appear modest by comparison with the atrocities of earlier epochs and other empires, but because of the context. Just a few years after British soldiers liberated the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, the same military constructed a massive network of detention camps, ringed with barbed wire and guardtowers, in Kenya. Here tens of thousands of men and women were held for years without trial, subjected to forced labor and, in some cases, to the most sadistic tortures imaginable, all in the name of suppressing the insurgency known as Mau Mau. Violence aimed at rebellious populations in Malaya and Cyprus was less ruthlessly systematized but callous and indiscriminate nonetheless.

This wave of repression coincided with the celebrated human rights revolution that followed World War II. If not rank hypocrisy, the age of counterinsurgency at least entailed cognitive dissonance, as the imperial powers that emerged victorious in 1945 carved out self-serving exceptions to a new generation of international agreements. To take just one example: the famed expansion of the Geneva Conventions in 1947–49 pointedly failed to extend prisoner-of-war protections to insurgents or partisans — the erstwhile heroes of Nazi-occupied Europe — because Britain and France feared elevating the position of anti-colonial rebels.

The counterinsurgencies of the 1950s are shocking, then, because they confound the narrative of moral progress emerging from the wreckage of World War II. They are shocking too because of the modernity of the world in which they took place: a world very much like our own, saturated with audiovisual media and rich in possibilities for the documentation of atrocity in real time. Emergency Exits makes good use of the photographs, newspapers, newsreel footage, and propaganda films that left little to the imagination for contemporaries (even if, regrettably, the exhibition shies away from the point that even casual observers in Britain must have known a great deal about the violence committed in their name).

For the most part, Emergency Exits is admirably clear on the self-interestedness that drove British warfare at the end of empire. The narrator of a short film about the impact of World War II declares that Britain attempted “to rebuild its devastated economy on the back of its imperial holdings.” In fact, rubber and tin from Malaya were probably the most lucrative commodities produced anywhere in the British Empire at the time (and a source of much-needed US dollars, especially after the exploding demand fueled by the Korean War). Geopolitical calculations prevailed elsewhere. With anti-colonialism on the march in Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt, the British military invested heavily in Cyprus as a new base of operations and would not leave without a fight.

The Kenya section of the exhibition, strangely, is the vaguest on British motivations. While noting the racist assumptions that lurked behind European settlement, we get little sense of the settler community as a political bloc or, perhaps more accurately, as a toxic subculture. It is difficult to explain the ferocious bloodlust of the war in Kenya without accounting for the mix of agrarian romanticism, aggrieved racial entitlement, and contagious racial paranoia that reigned in the so-called White Highlands. For the museum, this seems to be a case of settler colonialism that dare not speak its name.

What makes Emergency Exits a worthy experiment, despite its shortcomings, is the willingness of its creators to present an anti-heroic narrative of British warfare to a popular audience. The stark silhouette of a guardtower, with barbed wire strung in front, looms over the Kenya display.  Artifacts originally acquired as macabre trophies of battle — the swords, clubs, guns, and uniforms of insurgent fighters — take on a very different meaning when juxtaposed with video testimonials from elderly Malaysians, Kenyans, and Cypriots who experienced the traumas of counterinsurgency firsthand. Along with the Singaporean, Malaysian, Kenyan, and Cypriot scholars who helped to curate the exhibition and provide commentary in some of the films, these voices stake a claim to authority in the interpretation of the British past. Set against the long history of museums as showpieces of imperial ideology, this inclusiveness is a daring achievement in itself — all the more so at a time of emboldened reactionary attacks on critical history and eroding public support for academic expertise.

Where does this leave the national history of Britain? As if revealing nervousness about straying too far from the classic “island story,” the first and last rooms of the exhibition have nothing at all to say about counterinsurgency. Rather, these spaces are devoted to recorded interviews with elderly residents of the museum’s Southwark neighborhood whose lives were touched by empire in other ways: migrants from Grenada and Sierra Leone, respectively; a woman who grew up amid the docks where cargo ships once arrived from all over the world; and a man who could be described both as an imperial apologist (“I think it’s a shame we haven’t gotten an empire anymore, to be honest”) and a champion of postwar immigration in what is now popularly known as the Windrush moment (“They needed jobs; we needed workers”).

Inevitably there is something discordant about hearing these voices in close succession and, even more, something disjointed about the overwhelmingly nostalgic tone of their personal narratives in relation to the abuses chronicled in the rest of the exhibition. It’s a fascinating attempt to bridge the dark history of Britain beyond the waves — where, one might argue, most of British history actually happened — with more comforting and familiar stories of empire as something that has long since been domesticated. Making the unvarnished and unbounded history of empire a part of British heritage — making it, in other words, a past that people recognize as their own — will not be easy.

One of the Southwark residents featured in the exhibition makes a similar observation. “There is a bit of pain around what empire means to a lot of people,” Grenada-born Barbara says. “So I think those kind of thoughts are buried.” One might fairly ask what anyone could hope to achieve by challenging this reticence. Perhaps the remembrance of painful histories — or at least remembrance without reparation — is little more than masochistic narcissism. Perhaps, too, Ernest Renan was right when he observed in 1882 that nations need to forget in order to survive.

But Emergency Exits also shows why, if remembering is difficult, forgetting would be impossible. For one thing, there is the sheer scale of this history: the creation of security states, the forced movement of populations, the remaking of landscapes, the collapse of moral and legal restraints, the devastation of lives and communities. For another, there is the involvement — or the complicity — of many different sectors of British society. While the exhibition highlights the tens of thousands of ordinary young British men who were swept into these conflicts by conscription, this story could be extended well beyond the military to churches and missionaries, humanitarian groups, the press, and the political elite.

One of the most reassuring myths of an older British nationalism was that, no matter how big the empire grew or how unsavory its demands, it remained a distant and different place. As Oxford classicist Gilbert Murray wrote: “At home, England is Greek. In the Empire she is Roman.” While history is no panacea for the ills of the contemporary nation-state, it can at least offer an antidote to this particular form of multiple-personality disorder. Britain was always Britain, even in the empire’s far-flung hearts of darkness.