This chapter discusses the centrality of nostalgia, elegy and mourning to the high imperialist culture of the imperial core in the late nineteenth century. It explores the concept of ‘invented traditions’ and how collective/national pasts are constructed to meet political needs. The chapter argues that current UK imaginaries of empire and the imperial date largely to the period 1875–1914, and that that period based its own historical imaginaries on fundamentally nostalgic structures.