This is Britain's colonial Empire from the Antarctic to the Tropics with dependencies in every continent and every ocean. So what we think of as the collapse of the British empire took place more or less around the middle decades of the 20th century and we normally mark this from the end of the Second World War in 1945 up until let's say the mid to late 60s, although there were in fact decolonization moments happening after that Nkw from 1945 to that period sort of mid-late 60s, what you saw was the formal political legal independence of countries in Asia and Africa, particularly South Asia beginning with India and going through Africa starting with Ghana in 1957 and moving on through from there. So why did Empire collapse? There are many competing explanations but we can group these broadly into thinking about what's happening inside Britain and what's happening outside Britain. Inside Britain of course at the end of the Second World War the country was pretty devastated in a material sense and people were keen to focus efforts and energies on rebuilding the country. There was more a sense that the national economy needed to be rebuilt and so the imperial trading arrangements the preferences that had gone before began to become less important. The other idea that circulates about the end of Empire within Britain was the sense that the the time was changing, that the period of its imperial rule was coming to an end, and it chose to withdraw from those colonies. Now these explanations are very contested and that's particularly done by looking at factors from outside Britain. So this would emphasize the role of resistance against Empire in a political and a military sense across the world. Now if you think about India, you had a lot of mass movements there that tried to render the country ungovernable. If you look at places like Kenya, there were insurgencies against the colonial government. So you had resistance. You also had the Cold War which meant that the West was particularly keen to make sure that countries didn't go communist and therefore attempted to manage the process so that they wouldn't become more aligned with the Soviet Union. Beyond this you had ideological shifts at the level of the United Nations where the questions of racial equality and decolonization were becoming pressed by newer and newer members who became more and more numerous. So in 1960 the UN passed its declaration on decolonization setting the agenda for rapid decolonizations thereafter Why do we need to talk about empire today? Well first there's a strong sense in which many structures from Empire such as the hierarchies in the world economy and the differential treatment of people with different racial backgrounds and also the ways in which political institutions work continue to have this kind of hierarchical structure that they inherited from empire. So those are issues and areas in which people want to probe whether we've really decolonized. There's a tension fundamentally between the hierarchical structure of an empire and what we think of as a more equal democratic structure in the world as enshrined in things like the right to self-determination and racial equality and so on now those things are intention and what we're negotiating at the moment is how the hierarchies that were produced in one age impact on and shape this idea of equality that we have now. So why are statues contentious? On the one hand probably most of us walk past statues all the time and especially when we walk past them every day we don't even notice them Yet they're part of the everyday fabric of our lives and part of the symbolic order in which we celebrate public figures. Now as we've begun to reappraise empire and begun to reappraise what values we think public space should celebrate it's right that we should think about what statues there are and what they celebrate and what they represent. Now this is particularly important because Britain is not, if it ever was, that fantasy of a single national entity. It's always been transnational in some sense, think about Ireland, Scotland, Wales, and transnational in a more fundamental sense if you think about its atlantic spread and its its Empire. So thinking about Britain as a kind of transnational entity a country which has all these connections how do different parts of that entity relate to the ways in which it represents its past and what it celebrates about its past. So the debate about statues is about who gets to belong, who gets to matter, what kinds of violence we're comfortable with and not comfortable with and what we choose to uphold going forward. It's not unusual in the wake of reassessing historical periods for memorials and other kinds of things to be re-evaluated If we look at what happened in Germany after the Second World War, certainly there was a massive re-evaluation of how the public space understood fascism and understood German imperialism So when we talk about decolonization now in relation to the curriculum or public space what we're really thinking about is how to firstly have a sort of critical awareness of colonialism and empire and how these things shaped the way we think about the world and second to think about whether there are alternative perspectives or points of departure which we can use to articulate our meanings and our interpretations So let's think of an example: in history and in fields of social science we're taught to think about countries as being ahead or behind each other we think of a country as being advanced and other countries is catching up, and this is a language which actually just updates the idea of civilized and backward countries right. And so these ideas are pretty pervasive: let's think about the idea of international development or national development but when we understand that these were forged with certain assumptions about what societies should look like and which societies were good and which were not so good, then we start to challenge whether we should even be comparing countries and societies in that way and it's through a critical reappraisal of some of these ideas that we can actually make progress in how we think about things.