Save guides, add subjects and pick up where you left off with your BBC account. The British Empire began in the late 1500s under Queen Elizabeth I. By 1913 the empire had grown to rule over 400 ...

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this ...

Abacus; £25 Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain. By Charlotte Lydia Riley. Bodley Head; 384 pages; £25 The British Empire was and is many things to many people: a civilising ...