NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Matthew J. Smith, director of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, about the commonwealth's complicated history. The ...

One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink. By Matthew Parker. PublicAffairs; 624 pages; $35. Abacus; £25 Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain. By Charlotte Lydia Riley. Bodley Head ...

Those of us who went to school before our past was rewritten as a catalog of the White Man’s crimes were taught that empire—with all its vices and virtues—was built by monarchs and statesmen. In ...

Elkins is a Pulitzer Prize-winning professor of history at Harvard University and author of the recently-released Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire “Queen Elizabeth was a life well ...

Histories of imperialism, especially the European imperialism of the 19th and 20th centuries, were long dominated by purportedly neutral accounts that sanitized the often bloody practice. More ...

The death of Britain's longest-reigning monarch, Queen Elizabeth II, on Thursday has ended a 70-year reign that saw the fall of the British empire and the introduction of the Commonwealth of Nations.

From the very beginning, Queen Elizabeth II’s reign was deeply connected to Britain’s global empire and the long and bloody processes of decolonization. Indeed, she became queen while on a royal visit ...

This porcelain pot with enamel decorations is one of 100 teapots on display in the Met's updated British Galleries. Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of R. Thornton Wilson, 1940 ...

The death of Queen Elizabeth II set into motion a historic transition of power—not just in Great Britain but in 54 countries across the world that maintain ties to the royal family as members of the ...

British colonials with a pet cheetah in Secunderabad, India, 1906. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) In 2005, Britain’s then–Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, chose the backdrop of ...

For many residents of the United Kingdom, the death of Queen Elizabeth II has prompted questions about how the country is transitioning—substantively and symbolically—into a new era. Elizabeth ...