This book brings together original research by eleven distinguished historians who explore the cultural factors that helped to build and sustain a British world-system between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. Taking an expansive view of culture, the book considers such ranging topics as images of nakedness, transnational networks, literary criticism, travel narratives, humanitarianism, legal cultures, anti-slavery, visions of capitalism, and household possessions. Collectively, these chapters demonstrate that the British world's flourishing depended upon far more than such material...

This book reveals the British cultural engagement with Hong Kong in the second half of the twentieth century. It shows how the territory fit unusually within Britain's decolonisation narratives and at the same time served as an occasional foil for examining Britain's own culture during a period of perceived stagnation and decline.

In the British imagination, Hong Kong was a triumph of modernity. Once dismissed by Lord Palmerston as a 'barren island with hardly a house on it', in the late twentieth century it was recast as the site of one of British imperialism's greatest...