Belonging to the Imperial Nation: Rethinking the History of the First World War in Britain and Its Empire

In anticipation of the 100th anniversary of the First World War in 2014–18, the British government set aside funds for a range of commemorative activities. These included a number of “engagement centres” that aimed to bring together academics and local community members in addition to providing separate arts-related programming.1 The Imperial War Museum reworked its main First World War galleries, which opened with great fanfare at the centenary’s start. This denotes a kind of publicly sanctioned interest in a war that Britain had won, after all, but that popular memory had enshrined as something quite different, something that required solemn reflection about the costs of war and reckoning of sacrifices rather than celebrations of victory and service.