Empire

John Gallagher, edited by Anil Seal

Ivan Roots is impressed by this history of the 17th century relations between Holland and Spain

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.

The buildings the British built in India tell us much about how the British shaped India's conception of the past, explains Thomas R. Metcalf, and how they turned India's architectural heritage to the service of the Raj.

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.

Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism was more complex than the line, ‘Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.’

If the British Empire were to be saved, it would take a renewal of Britain’s youth. Robert Baden-Powell had the answer: self-reliance, patriotism and the Boy Scouts.

'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.

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.

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.