The Empire at Home

Modern Britain is forged through the redeployment of structures that facilitated and legitimised slavery, exploitation and extermination. This is the ’empire at home’ and it is inseparable from the strategies of neo-colonial extraction and oppression of subjects abroad.

James Trafford’s recently published The Empire at Home: Internal Colonies and the End of Britain (Pluto 2020) suggests that the framework of internal colonialism gives us a way of thinking about Britain that centres continuing underdevelopment, differential exploitation, violence, containment and criminalisation.

Please join James in discussion with Adam Elliot-Cooper, Dalia Gebrial, Suhaiymah Manzoor-Khan, and Jasbinder Nijjar to discuss property, policing, bordering, and racism and their connections with an empire that is still present with us. This poses significant challenges for political and social movements in an era that is increasingly characterised by ethnonationalism and intensifying bordering regimes.