Empire

Charles Boxer examines the impact of 1688 on Anglo-Dutch relationship with nations east of Suez.

The creation of the powerful propaganda image of the early medieval king as divinely-inspired and sanctioned was the work not of Charlemagne but his lesser-known grandson.

Bartholomew Dias' voyage to the Cape of Good Hope in the late 15th century marked the apex of an extraordinary Portuguese expansion overseas and the start of a fateful European impact on South Africa. 

by E.J.Hobsbawm

Two hundred years before Captain Cook, Dieppe map makers placed the Portuguese flag on a large land-mass called Java-la-Grande approximately where Australia appears on today's atlas. Helen Wallis sifts through the cartographic evidence to examine the intriguing question.

'A painful lesson in international politics' - Anglo-Australian relations in the Second World War revealed the rhetoric of Empire not matched by a British commitment to Australia's defence.

Personal persuasion and the hope of maintaining a Scottish identity encouraged emigrants to a better life in 1870s Canada - but their experiences on arrival were far from Utopian.

Paul Rich describes how the aggressive imperialism of the late Victorian age co-existed uneasily with the intellectual search for English 'roots' in a pre-industrial and mythical past.

'Beyond the pale' - the imperialists' vision of the Irish as ignoble savages originated in the attitudes and writings of medieval Englishmen.