Britain’s Empires

For more than four centuries, Britons have been dominating and colonising other peoples and territories. Britain’s Empires tells that story without flinching from the oppressive and exploitative side of the imperial mission that shaped world history. It also aims to tell the story of the colonial past as one marked by change and reinvention, where each new era was embarked upon as a break with the past. This is history of the many different British Empires – the Old Colonial System (1600-1776), the Empire of Free Trade (1776-1870), the New Imperialism (1870-1945), Decolonisation (1945-1990) and the era of humanitarian intervention (1990-2020). As well as explaining the importance of ‘primitive accumulation’ to kickstarting British capitalism in the Old Colonial Era, Heartfield shows that the New Imperialism of the 1880s was in large part a response to economic exhaustion in the mother country, and an attempt to find a new purpose in the colonies. Britain’s Empires also explains the d