3. In his study After Empire (London: Routledge, 2004), Gilroy suggests that the ‘crisis’ of British and Dutch multiculturality might well have to do with an inability to come to terms with their imperial histories. He diagnoses a pathological mindset which he calls ‘postimperial melancholia’: an ambivalent mix of feelings in which sadness about the loss of imperial prestige and power coincides with the disturbing realisation that this imperial ‘greatness’ in fact resulted from extremely violent and immoral behaviour towards others. A culture of forgetting and denial stands in the way of a more (re)constructive working through of the trauma of empire towards more inclusive senses of Britishness and Dutchness.