Abstract The lack of colonial legacy, the promise of English as the language for prospects and prosperity, and the needs of economic globalization could be identified as motivations for the negligence in addressing the politics of English language teaching (hereafter ELT) in Thailand. The purpose of this paper is to question apolitical assumptions of the colonial and postcolonial spread of English and ELT. I argue that English serves as an instrument of neocolonialism and that ELT has been used to maintain advantages and interests of the British and American Empires. To address how English language and ELT promote and maintain imperialism in a systematic way, four inter-related dimensions consisting of scholastic, linguistic, cultural, and economic aspects are presented