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The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
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Lawrence James presents a global history of British expansion from the maritime ventures of the late sixteenth century to the empire’s twentieth-century dissolution. Chartered companies, privateers and settlers carried English power into the Atlantic, North America, the Caribbean and Asia, while war with European rivals and the profits of trade and slavery turned scattered possessions into a strategic system. The loss of the American colonies did not end expansion: naval supremacy, Company rule in India, migration and commerce created a new empire across Asia, Africa and the Pacific.
The book follows the high imperial age through Victorian politics, missionary and humanitarian claims, military conquest and the racial assumptions used to justify rule. It then examines how the two world wars exhausted British resources, strengthened colonial nationalism and made imperial retreat unavoidable. Independence in India, Africa and elsewhere is treated alongside the emergence of the Commonwealth and Britain’s reduced global position, with James assessing both the institutions empire transmitted and the violence, inequality and contested memories it left behind.