If you look at Brexit, you will find that romanticism about the power, influence, justice, and luxury of the empire is still a driving propaganda technique...

Even _before the Empire_, nostalgia for a fictional past was a huge thing in England; see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merry_England.

That is widely said, but I know of no serious social scientific finding that nostalgia for empire played any part in Brexit vote share.

Ok, maybe not nostalgia for the Empire specifically, but nostalgia for the "good old times", when the EU didn't meddle in the UK's business and force it to e.g. display the hated metric measurements besides the beloved Imperial ones (ha! there you have the Empire again!).

And to quote some sources: according to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Causes_of_the_vote_in_favour_o...):

> Nearly half (49%) of leave voters said the biggest single reason for wanting to leave the European Union was "the principle that decisions about the UK should be taken in the UK". ("in the UK." meaning: "by the UK." logically implying: "on behalf of 66 million UK citizens not 508 million EU residents.")

Preference for more-local government is hardly the same as nostalgia for former times.

And really the history of Europe more broadly. If you think Britain had it bad look at the history of just about any of the small eastern and central European countries in particular. I was in some history museum in Budapest, and it's account was basically we got invaded by so and so, and then laid siege to by another so and so, things were pretty good for 50 years, and then a third so and so invaded, etc.