The British empire was a huge enterprise. To foreigners it more or less defined Britain in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Its repercussions in the wider world are still with us today. One might expect this to have been reflected in her society and culture. This is the first book to examine this assumption critically against the broader background of contemporary British society. Bernard Porter, a leading imperial historian, argues that the empire had a far lower profile in Britain than it did abroad. He argues that though Britain was an imperial nation in this period, she was...

In 1855 it was decided to build a new block of government offices in London, starting with the Foreign and War Offices. This book explores the controversy surrounding the design of the new Foreign Office in London during Britain's Imperial heyday.

The British Empire is often misunderstood. Judgments of it differ widely, from broadly adulatory a great enterprise, spreading civilization through the world; to the blame that is often put on it for most of the world s ills today, including racism, exploitation and the problems of the Middle East. In this provocative book, Bernard Porter argues that many of these judgments arise from some fundamental misreadings of the nature, causes and effects of British imperialism, which was a more complex, ambivalent and in some ways accidental phenomenon than it is often taken to be. Drawing on his...