Empire

The First Suez Crisis

In 1956 the Suez Canal seemed to flow through every British drawing room and the limits of British power and influence were forcefully brought home - but it had been a different story in 1882, explains Christopher Danziger, when the first Suez Crisis brought Britain prestige and the expansion of her Empire.

Manpower for Britain's Empire

The flood of emigrants bidding their 'Last farewell to England' in the early nineteenth century was not as the result of an organised governmental policy of colonial development, argues Mark Brayshaw, but of haphazard individual effort.

Kipling, Kim and Imperialism

Kipling's view of imperialism, explain Fred Reist and David Washbrook, was a more complex one than his single, famous line quoted often out of context, 'Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.' 

Scouting for Empire

Seventy-five years ago the Scout movement started in Britain, explains Victor Bailey, an authentic expression of the Edwardian age of Empire.

The British Army and the Slave Revolt: Saint Domingue in the 1790s

'Thrice had his foot Domingo's island prest, Midst horrid wars and fierce barbarian wiles; Thrice had his blood repelled the yellow pest That stalks, gigantic, through the Western Isles!' ran the epitaph to one of the more than 20,000 British soldiers sent to St. Domingue in the 1790s.

British Views of India

The British had been trading in India since 1600. As R.W. Lightbown, it was not, however, until the late eighteenth century that British interest in Indian culture burgeoned and was carried home by the traveller.

Administering India: The Indian Civil Service

To hundreds of thousands of Indians the British Raj was personified by its administrative arm, the Indian Civil Service, explains Ann Ewing, by which the British governed its imperial possession through a small élite spread thinly throughout the vast sub-continent.

'A Tyranny Against Nature': The Untouchables in Western India

In this article Rosalind O'Hanlon describes the effects of Hindu religious hierarchies upon the daily life of Untouchables in traditional Indian society and discusses some of the forces associated with British rule that worked to change both the social position of Untouchables and their perception of their position.