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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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.

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

TimesMachine is an exclusive benefit for home delivery and digital subscribers. About the Archive This is a digitized version of an article from The Times’s print archive, before the start of online ...

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 ...

Empires are hard to build and even harder to keep intact. No sooner does an empire congeal than centrifugal forces — overreach, complacency, strategic miscalculation and enemies, foreign and domestic ...

More than 600 items, including military medals and jewellery from a collection documenting the links between Britain and countries in the former British Empire, were stolen from a UK museum in ...