Entrails of Empire

Empire still has sufficient afterlife to bite at the heels of modern Britain: court cases and compensation claims by elderly Kenyans once held in Mau Mau-era detention camps; hidden colonial records disclosed only under legal duress; the revival of Argentina’s claim to what it calls the Malvinas and Britain calls the Falkland Islands. That’s part of the aftermath. Yet in many more ways, the map of much of the world has been made, or fractured, by colonialism – and that is still exacting a price from those whose forebears were unwillingly caught up in Europe’s imperial ambitions. The dovetailing chronologies of the histories of Britain’s Empire reviewed here cover the gamut from the first stirrings of native American resistance to colonial armies, through to the British handover of Hong Kong and war in Iraq. They focus, respectively, on resistance to Empire in its first hundred years (Gott); the end of...

Afterlife · Ancient history · Archaeology · Art · British Empire · Colonialism · Economic history · Empire · First world war · Literature · Political science · Resistance (ecology) · Australian History and Society · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Law