The British Empire

Woodcut illustration of slave labour on a sugar plantation

Success, sugar and slaves: the uncomfortable story of slaveholder Simon Taylor

Attack on the Court-House, St. Thomas-in-the-East, Jamaica, during the Morant Bay rebellion, October 1865. (Photo by Getty Images)

Resistance in the British empire

A British officer stands alongside two of his Japanese counterparts in 1914 in Tsingtao (now Qingdao). Japanese troops played a key role in the capture of that strategic German concession in north-east China. (Photo by Getty Images)

First World War

First World War: beyond the western front

Illustration by Davide Bonazzi

The big question: should museums return their treasures?

A c1860 depiction of Wentworth Works steel manufacturer in Sheffield

Why Britain punched above its weight

A young visitor looks at a painting depicting the Amritsar Massacre

Amritsar: day of shame

A memorial tomb to King Æthelstan, the first Saxon king of all England, in Malmesbury Abbey, Wiltshire. (Photo by Geography Photos/UIG via Getty Images)

A brief history of England

A First World War silk screened poster c1918 showing a frightening German soldier holding a bloodied bayonet. Caption reads:

First World War

Why did the Allies call Germans ‘Huns’ during World War I?

The Tibetan plateau lies at an altitude averaging over 4,500 metres above sea level

In the footsteps of Sir Francis Younghusband’s 1903 invasion of Tibet

Daniele Manin proclaiming the Republic of Venice, 22 March 1848. (Photo by De Agostini Picture Library/A. Dagli Orti/Bridgeman Images)

1848: the year of revolutions

English historian Edward Gibbon (1737-94), author of 'The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'. (Photo by Rischgitz/Getty Images)

The decline and fall of the British Empire

The repulse of a sortie during the Siege of Delhi, a conflict of the Indian Rebellion of 1857. The rebels advance on a British battery, who repel them with swords, bayonets and rifles. A lithograph by E. Walker, after a drawing by Captain G. F. Atkinson. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)

The myth of native-bashing

Scout Troop

Baden-Powell, Scouting and the British empire