Empire

The Exhibition held in Wembley in 1924 was intended to herald a great Imperial revival - in fact, as Kenneth Walthew shows here, it was to prove an escapist delight from post-war gloom and retrenchment.

Noel Carrington recalls how he was a Witness to the Past, as the Prince of Wales toured India in 1921.

In 1844 the people of the former Spanish colony of Santo Domingo rose in rebellion against the Haitians who had occupied their island since 1822. But instead of trying to establish genuine independence for their Dominican Republic, its political leaders did their best to trade it off to France and then to Spain which briefly re-annexed it in 1861.

Irene Coltman Brown looks at how the significance of the Peloponnesian war for its historian, Thucydides, was that it demonstrated that imperial power, to be used at all, has to be abused.

In the mid-seventeenth century Spain was at the apogee of artistic and cultural achievement under the patronage of her monarch, Philip IV - but, as R.A. Stradling shows here, she was fighting for survival as a great imperial power.

Stephen Usherwood shows how Lord Mansfield employed his precise legal mind and his reasoned humanitarianism to expose the iniquities of slavery - and thus helped pave the way for its abolition.

Robert Stephens looks at how Nasser left his mark on nearly twenty years of Egyptian, Arab and world history. An anti-colonialist who extended his concern to the newly liberated countries of the Third World, he has been acclaimed as a nationalist liberator - and condemned as a warmonger.

Maurice Collis visits the former Dutch and Portuguese port colony.

British imperial architecture as epitomised by the work of Sir Herbert Baker was not tied to any geographic setting. Its elements could be re-ordered to fit any tropical dependency. As Thomas R. Metcalf explains, what had been hammered out in Pretoria, and redefined in Delhi, could be carried to such places as Kenya. But Baker, who designed the imperial acropolis of New Delhi with Lutyens, differed from his colleague, "the most original and creative architect of his age." For Baker architecture always served a political purpose: for Lutyens, Empire was incidental.

The life of Rhodes - an empire-builder, arch risk-taker, megalomaniac mine-owner and namesake of Zimbabwe's pre-independence antecedant, Rhodesia.