Empire

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.

Buying and selling with our 'kith and kin' was the hallmark of an intensive inter-war campaign for the idea of Empire.

Philip Mansel looks at the commemorations surrounding the 250th anniversary of the death of a Habsburg monarch.

Victor Bailey reviews two titles on Empire and Culture.