Empire

The political fallout of the Suez Crisis was keenly felt at home, but how did it change Britain’s approach to the Middle East? And what did it mean for the British Empire?

When the Suez Canal was opened its creator predicted that he had marked the site of a future battlefield. When Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, it seemed inevitable they would be the ones to fight for it.

In the Iraq war a radical Muslim group claimed that they prefer to attack black American soldiers, because ‘To have Negroes occupying us is a particular humiliation. Sometimes we aborted a mission because there were no Negroes’*. As Dick van Galen Last shows here, such prejudices were also common in the 20th century when an occupation by black soldiers was considered an exceptional humiliation: in the years after the Great War the German people called it the Black Shame.

Jonathan Colman provides an overview of modern British Imperial History, introducing the key events and issues that students need to understand.

Michael Broers argues that the influence of Napoleon’s Empire was out of all proportion to its duration.

J.H. Elliott looks at the differences – cultural, religious, ethnic and economic – between the Spanish and British approaches to their empires in the Americas, and asks how they turned out, both for the mother countries and for the colonies and states that eventually emerged from them.

David Anderson, Huw Bennett and Daniel Branch believe that the Freedom of Information Act is being used to protect the perpetrators of a war crime that took place in Kenya fifty years ago.

Christopher Kelly introduces the Emperor Constantine.

The Holy Roman Empire had survived over a thousand years when it was finally destroyed by Napoleon and the French in 1806.

Richard Cavendish describes how British prisoners were held captive by the army of the Nawab of Bengal, for one night, in the 'black hole' of Fort William in Calcutta.