The idea of the benevolent British Empire is pure myth. From ruthlessly crushing rebellion, to abetting the murders of indigenous peoples, to allowing its colonial subjects to starve, the history of ...

The British Empire was built and sustained on coercion and systematic violence. It's time to be honest about that fact.

In the new film of Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, the writer and director Patricia Rozema includes an early scene that is not in the book. As Fanny Price departs from her family in Portsmouth to ...

After Carl Carby arrived in England from Jamaica, in 1943, he wore starched shirts, polished dress shoes, and neatly knotted ties. He was from the colonies, but his mannerisms evinced a restrained, ...

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 ...

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 ...

This porcelain pot with enamel decorations is one of 100 teapots on display in the Met's updated British Galleries. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of R. Thornton Wilson, 1940 ...

Until recently, it seemed we, Britons, would do anything to get the attention of the world’s most powerful superpower. Up to and including becoming embroiled in ill-conceived wars in Iraq and ...

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 ...

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 ...