Britain

Was power really devolved to Scotland in 1660, asks John Patrick, when the restoration of Charles II led to the recreation of separate Scottish institutions?

The buildings the British built in India tell us much about how the British shaped India's conception of the past, explains Thomas R. Metcalf, and how they turned India's architectural heritage to the service of the Raj.

Rudyard Kipling’s imperialism was more complex than the line, ‘Oh, East is East and West is West and never the twain shall meet.’

If the British Empire were to be saved, it would take a renewal of Britain’s youth. Robert Baden-Powell had the answer: self-reliance, patriotism and the Boy Scouts.

'Thrice had his foot Domingo's island prest, Midst horrid wars and fierce barbarian wiles; Thrice had his blood repelled the yellow pest That stalks, gigantic, through the Western Isles!' ran the epitaph to one of the more than 20,000 British soldiers sent to St. Domingue in the 1790s.

The British had been trading in India since 1600. As R.W. Lightbown, it was not, however, until the late eighteenth century that British interest in Indian culture burgeoned and was carried home by the traveller.

To hundreds of thousands of Indians the British Raj was personified by its administrative arm, the Indian Civil Service, explains Ann Ewing, by which the British governed its imperial possession through a small élite spread thinly throughout the vast sub-continent.

In the inter-war years, football was a popular sport which drew huge crowds of spectators. The totalitarian regimes of Germany and Italy, argues Peter J. Beck, were not slow to realise the propaganda, potential of their nations' sporting successes – and soon Britain recognised the value of sport to its own national image.

'London is rich in historic buildings and monuments, but behind most familiar landmarks lurk the ghosts of abandoned designs and rejected projects.' In this extract from their book London as it might have been, Felix Barker and Ralph Hyde consider bridges which were planned for the Thames.

From the Restoration in 1660 until 1714, England was intermittently at war with first the Dutch and then the French - and it became imperative, argues Howard Tomlinson, that the country should have an adequate central armoury for general ordnance equipment.