‘OMG, this is serious shit. We need to SHUT THIS DOWN”. So ran one of the earliest tweets to greet the news of the launch of my “Ethics and Empire” project last December. And there was more where that came from: my scholarship was “supremacist shite”, I was a “racist” and a “bigot”, and whatever came out of my mouth was “vomit”.

All this in reaction to my modest view that “empire” can mean a variety of things, is capable of good as well as evil, raises ethical questions worth thinking about, and requires sophisticated moral evaluation.

Incontinent abuse on Twitter is, sadly, so common as to be unremarkable. But this was remarkable, since its author is a senior academic at one of Britain’s most