Unfinished Empire

Unfinished Empire
Author: John Darwin
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 574
Release: 2012-09-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 1846146712

A both controversial and comprehensive historical analysis of how the British Empire worked, from Wolfson Prize-winning author and historian John Darwin The British Empire shaped the world in countless ways: repopulating continents, carving out nations, imposing its own language, technology and values. For perhaps two centuries its expansion and final collapse were the single largest determinant of historical events, and it remains surrounded by myth, misconception and controversy today. John Darwin's provocative and richly enjoyable book shows how diverse, contradictory and in many ways chaotic the British Empire really was, controlled by interests that were often at loggerheads, and as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength.

Ghosts of Empire

Ghosts of Empire
Author: Kwasi Kwarteng
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Total Pages: 590
Release: 2012-02-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 1610391217

Kwasi Kwarteng is the child of parents whose lives were shaped as subjects of the British Empire, first in their native Ghana, then as British immigrants. He brings a unique perspective and impeccable academic credentials to a narrative history of the British Empire, one that avoids sweeping judgmental condemnation and instead sees the Empire for what it was: a series of local fiefdoms administered in varying degrees of competence or brutality by a cast of characters as outsized and eccentric as anything conjured by Gilbert and Sullivan. The truth, as Kwarteng reveals, is that there was no such thing as a model for imperial administration; instead, appointees were schooled in quirky, independent-minded individuality. As a result the Empire was the product not of a grand idea but of often chaotic individual improvisation. The idiosyncrasies of viceroys and soldier-diplomats who ran the colonial enterprise continues to impact the world, from Kashmir to Sudan, Baghdad to Hong Kong.

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire
Author: David Armitage
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 264
Release: 2000-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780521789783

The Ideological Origins of the British Empire presents a comprehensive history of British conceptions of empire for more than half a century. David Armitage traces the emergence of British imperial identity from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth centuries, using a full range of manuscript and printed sources. By linking the histories of England, Scotland and Ireland with the history of the British Empire, he demonstrates the importance of ideology as an essential linking between the processes of state-formation and empire-building. This book sheds light on major British political thinkers, from Sir Thomas Smith to David Hume, by providing fascinating accounts of the 'British problem' in the early modern period, of the relationship between Protestantism and empire, of theories of property, liberty and political economy in imperial perspective, and of the imperial contribution to the emergence of British 'identities' in the Atlantic world.

The New British Empire

The New British Empire
Author: W. Y. Elliott
Publisher: Saveth Press
Total Pages: 540
Release: 2009-03
Genre: History
ISBN: 9781444605495

This historic book may have numerous typos and missing text. Purchasers can usually download a free scanned copy of the original book (without typos) from the publisher. Not indexed. Not illustrated. 1917 edition. Excerpt: ... (6) Columns for Discount on Purchases and Discount on Notes on the same side of the Cash Book; (c) Columns for Discount on Sales and Cash Sales on the debit side of the Cash Book; (d) Departmental columns in the Sales Book and in the Purchase Book. Controlling Accounts.--The addition of special columns in books of original entry makes possible the keeping of Controlling Accounts. The most common examples of such accounts are Accounts Receivable account and Accounts Payable account. These summary accounts, respectively, displace individual customers' and creditors' accounts in the Ledger. The customers' accounts are then segregated in another book called the Sales Ledger or Customers' Ledger, while the creditors' accounts are kept in the Purchase or Creditors' Ledger. The original Ledger, now much reduced in size, is called the General Ledger. The Trial Balance now refers to the accounts in the General Ledger. It is evident that the task of taking a Trial Balance is greatly simplified because so many fewer accounts are involved. A Schedule of Accounts Receivable is then prepared, consisting of the balances found in the Sales Ledger, and its total must agree with the balance of the Accounts Receivable account shown in the Trial Balance. A similar Schedule of Accounts Payable, made up of all the balances in the Purchase Ledger, is prepared, and it must agree with the balance of the Accounts Payable account of the General Ledger." The Balance Sheet.--In the more elementary part of the text, the student learned how to prepare a Statement of Assets and Liabilities for the purpose of disclosing the net capital of an enterprise. In the present chapter he was shown how to prepare a similar statement, the Balance Sheet. For all practical...

Imperial Intimacies

Imperial Intimacies
Author: Hazel V. Carby
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 480
Release: 2019-09-24
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1788735110

'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.

The Trouble with Empire

The Trouble with Empire
Author: Antoinette M. Burton
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 337
Release: 2015
Genre: History
ISBN: 0199936609

While imperial blockbusters fly off the shelves, there is no comprehensive history dedicated to resistance in the 19th and 20th century British Empire. The Trouble with Empire is the first volume to fill this gap, offering a brief but thorough introduction to the nature and consequences of resistance to British imperialism. Historian Antoinette Burton's study spans the 19th and 20th centuries, when discontented subjects of empire made their unhappiness felt from Ireland to Canada to India to Africa to Australasia, in direct response to incursions of military might and imperial capitalism. The Trouble with Empire offers the first thoroughgoing account of what British imperialism looked like from below and of how tenuous its hold on alien populations was throughout its long, unstable life. By taking the long view, moving across a variety of geopolitical sites and spanning the whole of the period 1840-1955, Burton examines the commonalities between different forms of resistance and unveils the structural weaknesses of the British Empire.0.

The New Map of Empire

The New Map of Empire
Author: S. Max Edelson
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Total Pages: 481
Release: 2017-04-24
Genre: History
ISBN: 0674978994

After the Treaty of Paris ended the Seven Years’ War in 1763, British America stretched from Hudson Bay to the Florida Keys, from the Atlantic coast to the Mississippi River, and across new islands in the West Indies. To better rule these vast dominions, Britain set out to map its new territories with unprecedented rigor and precision. Max Edelson’s The New Map of Empire pictures the contested geography of the British Atlantic world and offers new explanations of the causes and consequences of Britain’s imperial ambitions in the generation before the American Revolution. Under orders from King George III to reform the colonies, the Board of Trade dispatched surveyors to map far-flung frontiers, chart coastlines in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, sound Florida’s rivers, parcel tropical islands into plantation tracts, and mark boundaries with indigenous nations across the continental interior. Scaled to military standards of resolution, the maps they produced sought to capture the essential attributes of colonial spaces—their natural capacities for agriculture, navigation, and commerce—and give British officials the knowledge they needed to take command over colonization from across the Atlantic. Britain’s vision of imperial control threatened to displace colonists as meaningful agents of empire and diminished what they viewed as their greatest historical accomplishment: settling the New World. As London’s mapmakers published these images of order in breathtaking American atlases, Continental and British forces were already engaged in a violent contest over who would control the real spaces they represented. Accompanying Edelson’s innovative spatial history of British America are online visualizations of more than 250 original maps, plans, and charts.

Britain's Empire

Britain's Empire
Author: Richard Gott
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 577
Release: 2022-01-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 1839764228

A magisterial history of resistance to the rising of the British empire As the call for a new understanding of our national history grows louder, Britain’s Empire turns the received imperial story on its head. Richard Gott recounts the long-overlooked narrative of resisters, revolutionaries and revolters who stood up to the might of the Empire. In a story of almost continuous colonialist violence, Britain’s crimes unspool from the beginning of the eighteenth century to the Indian Mutiny, spanning the globe from Ireland to Australia. Capturing events from the perspective of the colonised, Gott unearths the all-but-forgotten stories excluded from mainstream histories.

The British Empire, 1558-1995

The British Empire, 1558-1995
Author: Trevor Owen Lloyd
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 1996
Genre: Commonwealth countries
ISBN: 9781383032093

Lloyd describes the full sweep of expansion and decolonization in the history of the British empire from the voyages of discovery in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I to the achievement of independence in the second half of the 20th century.

The Development of the British Empire

The Development of the British Empire
Author: Howard Robinson
Publisher:
Total Pages: 542
Release: 1922
Genre: Great Britain
ISBN:

Robinson wrote this book to introduce American students to an important part of history that wasn't taught extensively at schools and colleges in the United States. The author discusses the growth of Great Britain, with particular emphasis on recent years, as progress had been quite rapid in the 100 years prior to his book's publication. Newfoundland appears as a topic in both chapters four and twenty-three, as both a British colony and neighbor to the Dominion of Canada. In chapter four, Robinson explains how the importance of the fishery to Britain lead to the colonization of the island and the resulting problems with the French. Chapter twenty-three includes a further description of Newfoundland's fishery, her government, and the possibility of joining Confederation.