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 ...

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 ...

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 Imperial history wars, ...

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 ...

Histories of imperialism, especially the European imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, were long dominated by purportedly neutral accounts that sanitized the often bloody practice. More ...

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 ...

WITH Empire, historian David Olusuga has produced a fascinating series of three programmes linking the often censorious approach to the history of the British Empire to the immigration debate ...

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 ...