In June 2020, as Black Lives Matter protests swept across the United States, campaigners in Bristol tore down a statue of the infamous British slave trader Edward Colston and dispatched it into the dark green waters of the city’s harbor. Eighteen months later, in January 2022, a Bristol court acquitted four of those activists of illegally removing the Colston plinth and causing criminal damage to public property.

According to the academic David Olusoga, a professor of public history at Manchester University, the verdict signaled a “landmark” moment in the UK’s “tortuous journey” toward acknowledging its role in the transatlantic slave trade — a key pillar of Britain’s imperial infrastructure for more than three hundred years. An English jury has decided that the real offense was the existence of the statue itself, Olusoga told the BBC after the verdict was announced, “not that the statue was toppled in the summer of 2020.”

There are other, less vivid indications that Britain is in the midst of a minor cultural reckoning with its imperial past. In July 2014, research by the polling company YouGov revealed that 59 percent of people in the UK felt “more proud than ashamed” of the British Empire, while 19 percent felt “more ashamed than proud” and a further 23 percent didn’t identify with either sentiment.