In post-imperial European states, debates about imperial legacies -- centered on issues such as colonial statues, national identities, police treatment of minorities, and school curricula -- have intensified in recent years. Despite this, there is little systematic research on public attitudes toward empire or how these views shape contemporary political choices. This paper develops a theoretical framework linking attitudes toward empire with political preferences, even in the absence of explicit imperial themes in campaigns, and presents exploratory findings from Britain to illustrate these connections. First, we find a clear and distinctive dimension of public opinion on the British Empire, ranging from nostalgic to critical, with significant minorities expressing pro-imperial, anti-imperial, and neutral views. Second, we find that imperial nostalgia strongly predicts party evaluations and vote intentions, rivaling established attitudinal dimensions like immigration opinion and authoritarian values. Finally, a conjoint experiment demonstrates that elite positions on empire mobilize voter preferences, but the effects are asymmetric, with strong right-wing opposition to anti-imperial views outweighing left-wing support for criticism of empire.