s the Black Lives Matter movement forces Britain to confront its imperial history, the shadow foreign secretary, Lisa Nandy, has highlighted a set of murals on display in the Foreign Office (FCO). The murals depict, in the words of American historian Alexander Mirkovic, “the racial world” of the British empire, with the virile, heroic Anglo-Saxons lording it over their infantilised colonial subjects. Nandy is understood to have asked the foreign secretary, Dominic Raab, whether this is still the face Britain wants to present to visiting dignitaries. But as with the current debate over historical statues, what is really at stake here is not public relations or the causing of offence but the ways in which the imperial past shapes our persistently racist present. The FCO murals express a chauvinistic sense of collective self and a derogatory sense of others, which our political class has never really shaken off, and that still influences the dominant discourse around British foreign relations. The most significant scholarship on this topic was produced by the Palestinian academic Edward Said, whose analysis of 19th- and 20th-century European texts concerning the Middle East revealed a common thread of racialisation. The west was consistently presented as enlightened, rational and morally upstanding, in contrast with an east that was backward, irrational and dishonest. It was through the production and reproduction of such myths that the European elite was able to convince itself of the rightness of its imperial endeavours. In the aftermath of the first world war, just as the FCO murals were being completed, Britain took control of Iraq, Palestine and Transjordan (now Jordan) under mandate from the League of Nations. The league’s covenant justified this with a narrative mirroring that of the murals. These territories were “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves”, meaning that their “tutelage … should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience … can best undertake this responsibility”. The people of Iraq – the site of some of the earliest human civilisation – evidently felt that they were already well equipped to “stand by themselves” and declined the altruism of the British. A popular uprising ensued, which was quelled through the bombing of rebellious villages by the Royal Air Force, presided over by the then war secretary, Winston Churchill. A clear line can be drawn here, connecting the racism of the British ruling class with the indiscriminate state violence inherent to their imperial project. Eighty years later, Iraq was again subject to a crude geostrategic power-grab shrouded in western self-satisfaction. Within the British elite, the debate over the case for war was constrained within familiar ideological parameters: a virtuous, progressive west tackling threats emanating from a zealous and backward Arab world. The idea that a Ba’ath regime ruined by bombing and sanctions posed a major threat to the western powers was as absurd as the suggestion that those same powers, long the facilitators of tyranny in the region, were now on a serious mission to promote democracy. But once again the classic imperial outlook performed its vital function, protecting the modesty of what would otherwise have been a naked act of western aggression. Meanwhile, the wider “war on terror” fostered a modern Islamophobia that drew deeply on these long-established themes, with a “clash of civilisations” narrative reanimating the caricatures identified by Said. This buttressing of western machismo and dehumanisation of the peoples of the Middle East outlived the war on terror, and continues to pollute our foreign relations to this day. The same European bigotry that left thousands of migrants to drown in the Mediterranean was mobilised to great effect by the leave campaign in the run-up to the Brexit referendum. A particularly revealing comparison can be drawn between the reaction of the British political class to the wars in Syria and in Yemen. In the former case, a vigorous debate was framed in terms of whether Britain should ride to the rescue or not, with the failure to do so prompting a national identity crisis over Britain neglecting its supposed historic role. The war in Yemen, by contrast, where the atrocities have overwhelmingly been carried out by our allies with our help, has been met with virtual silence. How can we explain the overwhelming indifference to Britain’s role in the war in Yemen, where its deep complicity in the indiscriminate killing of thousands through bombing and starvation ought to be a national scandal? It may be that our political psyche has trouble processing an instance where Britain cannot be cast as well-meaning and benign. Or perhaps it’s a more simple case of brown lives not mattering, unless they can be wheeled out as a supporting cast in tales of national heroism. Again, the issue here is not “offensive” words and images, but the ideological underpinnings of state violence against racialised “others”. That ideology – exemplified in the FCO murals – has its roots in the centuries of empire that shaped modern Britain and its relationship with the rest of the word, especially the global south. The urgent task now is to expose and confront that legacy – and then dismantle it. David Wearing is a teaching fellow in international relations at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of AngloArabia: Why Gulf Wealth Matters to Britain.