The legacy of colonialism has deeply affected our perception of the world and discourse on power, politics, and capital. However, as Kwasi Kwarteng points out in his 2013 book Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, imperialism is chaotic. There was no one model for imperial administration in the British Empire, it was rather a series of fiefdoms managed with varying degrees of competence and brutality. Seeing imperialism not as a sweeping grand idea, but rather random acts of improvisation allows us to forfeit broad condemnation and instead focus on the ubiquitous afterlife of empire on an individual level, thinking less about what imperial and colonial rule were and more about how contemporary society manages their echoes.
October 2, 2022
