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The Empire never came up in my schooling or childhood at all. Part of that was tact, of course, but it was also because the formative events of British identity are broadly:
Not only was the Empire not really considered important, but neither were Napoleon, America or the Industrial Revolution. They were just stuff that happened.
Hold up. I'd argue the first four of those are formative events of English identity. British identity is something the English, Scots, Welsh and Ulster Scots can all share. And my argument is that whatever that is, it cannot be decoupled from the project that British imperialism. What else did those peoples ever do together after all?
Bugger all, but realistically I think that when people say ‘British’ what they mean is ‘English’ or at most 80% English and 20% Scottish. From the sheer proportions of population it really couldn’t be any other way.
There was a conscious attempt to make a British identity during the period of Empire but that died with Empire. The Scots and Irish hate it because it associates them with the Empire (as it ought) and nobody ever asks what the poor Welsh think about anything.
Basically the only people who use British are the English and the English-adjacent people like @2rafa, because talking about an ‘English’ identity or discussing Englishness is consciously exclusionary and raises awkward questions about how the vastly more populous part of the UK should act with the others. This is also why England is the only part of the UK not to have a devolved parliament.
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Hmm, the two major things you've missed out there that I was under the impression every schoolchild in England was taught were the English Civil War, and then the naval stuff so Trafalgar and the Spanish armada. Roundheads vs. Cavaliers featured very heavily in my education at least. Trafalgar also featured heavily as part of the post-WW2 vision of plucky old England against the tyrant of the continent. The rest of the Napoleonic wars barely featured, but Trafalgar and to an extent Waterloo definitely did.
I knew of both but was never educated on them. My education was during Blair’s tenure and lopsided towards modern (post 1900) history: heavy emphasis on the welfare state and the suffragette movement, plus the rise of Hitler and Stalin to power.
Perhaps Brown and Cameron re-emphasised the Civil War in the curriculum. I'll admit though that after the age of 14 "history" seemed to entirely consist of the 30 year span between 1914 and 1945.
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