Brexit-era Britain saw discussions of the imperial past explode in political and public culture, with some leading figures in the ‘leave’ campaign notoriously going so far as to look forward to an “Empire 2.0” of enhanced global engagements once Britain became freed from continental shackles. Yet imperial histories, heritage, and legacies are anything but a uniquely British “island story.” Alongside discussing more familiar western and southern European national cases, this talk will also draw attention to the growing body of writing that positions colonialism and empire as decisive aspects of European history across the continent, extending to Nordic countries as well as central and eastern Europe. Making the “imperial turn” not only characteristic of specific nations but rather a shared European history entails taking a “continental turn,” one that allows fresh approaches to Europe’s overseas and continental empires past and illuminates the still understudied colonial history and heritage of today’s European Union.

Elizabeth Buettner is Professor of Modern History at the University of Amsterdam. Since her book Europe after Empire: Decolonization, Society, and Culture was published by Cambridge University Press in 2016, her research has extended further into the overlapping histories of postcolonial Europe, migration, and European integration.

Through a series of public lectures, the Pierre du Bois Chair addresses Europe’s role in the nineteenth- and twentieth-century world, for example through colonialism and migration, as well as the question of how that global role conversely impacted European history itself.