The British Empire and Commonwealth: A Short History

The British Empire and Commonwealth: A Short History
ISBN-10
0312163940
ISBN-13
9780312163945
Category
Political Science
Pages
197
Language
English
Published
1996
Publisher
Palgrave Macmillan
Author
Martin Kitchen

Description

From its modest beginnings as marginal scraps of territory in America and the Caribbean to its recent disappearance, the British Empire was an extraordinary and paradoxical entity. North America, Africa, South and Southeast Asia and Australasia and innumerable small islands and territories have been fundamentally shaped--economically, socially and politically--by a nation whose imperial drive came from a bewildering mixture of rapacity and moral zeal, of high-mindedness and viciousness, of strategic cunning and feckless neglect. The relative indifference and ease with which Britain finally divested itself of Empire in the 1950s, when compared to the ferocity and enterprise shown in its acquisition over the previous four centuries, suggests a quite baffling sea-change in the British psyche.

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