Questions of citizenship and belonging are usually organised within national frames and in this talk Gurminder K. Bhambra asks how taking seriously the broader histories of empire and colonialism would enable us to rethink these central concepts. Such questions have become particularly acute in the context of a renewed atavism in Europe sparked in part by the recent attention given to the refugee crisis on Europe’s borders as well as the fiscal crisis and related continent-wide politics of austerity. While public intellectuals, such as Jurgen Habermas, have expressed concern about the growing economic inequality within and across European states, they have said little about the refugee crisis or the increasing hostility towards migrants and those presented as ‘multicultural others’ across Europe. This silence, as here suggested, is not an individual lapse, but is systematically produced in the failure to think through the connected histories and connected sociologies of empire and colonialism at the heart of Europe and European conceptions of citizenship.