One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink. By Matthew Parker. PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $35. Abacus; £25 Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain. By Charlotte Lydia Riley. Bodley Head ...

Those of us who went to school before our past was rewritten as a catalog of the White Man’s crimes were taught that empire—with all its vices and virtues—was built by monarchs and statesmen. In ...

Elkins is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Harvard University and author of the recently-released Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire “Queen Elizabeth was a life well ...

From the very beginning, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was deeply connected to Britain’s global empire and the long and bloody processes of decolonization. Indeed, she became queen while on a royal visit ...

British colonials with a pet cheetah in Secunderabad, India, 1906. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) In 2005, Britain’s then–Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, chose the backdrop of ...

Until recently, it seemed we, Britons, would do anything to get the attention of the world’s most powerful superpower. Up to and including becoming embroiled in ill-conceived wars in Iraq and ...

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997. New York: Vintage. Elkins, Caroline. 2022. Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. Sanghera, Sathnam.

This porcelain pot with enamel decorations is one of 100 teapots on display in the Met's updated British Galleries. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of R. Thornton Wilson, 1940 ...

NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Matthew J. Smith, director of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, about the commonwealth's complicated history. The ...