Trying to explain the British Empire to most young people, unless they have specifically ‘done a module’ on some aspect, is to invite incomprehension. Even older people, schooled during decolonisation, have little knowledge about it, the Commonwealth or recent global migrations, although regrets for a lost empire still linger. But explaining the 2016 Brexit vote, trade wars and race and migrant antagonisms must start with the British Empire, specifically in the later 19th century, when power, wealth and trade dominance were concentrated in a predominantly white world. Any early 19th-century humanitarian notions, which had influenced legislation ending slavery, gave way, as more countries were added to the Empire, to beliefs that ‘black and brown subjects were natural inferiors’ (Lloyd, 1984: 180). Beliefs that God was in favour of white supremacy and imperial expansion were widely embraced, as Lord Rosebery, in his inaugural address as Rector of the University of Glasgow in 1900, indicated. Queen Victoria was proclaimed Empress of India in 1877, and there was a ‘scramble’ for imperial control of African countries by major European powers in 1884. American historian David Goldberg wrote that by the late 19th century, race ‘had assumed throughout the European orbit a sense of naturalness … a more or less taken for granted marking of social arrangements … an assumed givenness and inevitability in the ascription of superiority and inferiority’ (Goldberg, 2009: 3). But he also noted that it took hard work to reproduce social and racial arrangements. Science and literature, scripture and law, culture and political rhetoric were co-opted to establish assumptions of white superiority.