Empire

Kevin Shillington looks at the impact on Africa of the slave trade, and its abolition 200 years ago this month.

This West African state was a focus of the slave trade for centuries, and the first African colony to win independence, exactly fifty years ago. Graham Gendall Norton finds lots of history to explore.

Kristian Ulrichsen believes that the politicians and planners behind the 2003 invasion ignored the lessons of the first British occupation of Iraq, which began with the capture of Baghdad from the Ottomans in 1917.

Martin Evans looks at the events of 1956 and the French war on terror, both at home and elsewhere, and how this was a turning point for French fortunes in the Algerian War of Independence.

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.