Seven nations lost their overseas empires after 1945. This experience had a deep impact on their collective memories. Seven scholars, representing those nations, have studied these memories and contributed to this volume: John Darwin (Oxford), Great Britain, Gert Oostindie (Leiden), Netherlands, Pedro Monaville (U. of Michigan), Belgium, Eric Savarese (Nice), France, Antonio Costa Pinto (Lisbon), Portugal, Nicola Labanca (Siena), Italy, Takashi Fujitani (U. of Toronto), Japan. They met for a conference at Heidelberg University, which was sponsored by the Robert Bosch Foundation, Stuttgart. There were discussants for each contribution. Two commentators inaugurated the final discussion: Aleida Assmann (Konstanz) and Partha S. Ghosh (Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi). The reaction to the loss of colonial empires was in most countries an enduring conspiracy of silence. Encounters with immigrants from the ex-colonies proved to be of great importance for some of these countries. It is only in recent times that traces of tansnational sensibilities can be noticed in national collective memories.
