The Oxford History of the British Empire, Volume I

In a lecture at the 1995 meeting of the annual Anglo-American Historians’ Conference I expressed some doubts about the plans for the new Oxford History of the British Empire to be the fruit of an Anglo-American endeavour, in part because I feared that the anti-imperial bias of much American thinking on the subject might lead to an under-estimation of the Empire’s positive role. (An abbreviated version of the lecture was published in History Today in February 1996). I also expressed more general scepticism as to the value of modern collective histories as compared with the products of a single mind.