The Colonial Empire Of Great Britain

Prize-winning historian Robert Gildea dissects the legacy of empire for the former colonial powers and their subjects.

Excerpt from History of the Colonial Empire of Great Britain The Colonial Empire of Great Britain has now existed for so long a period, and has assumed such vast proportions, that some account of its origin, and of the various fluctuations to which it has been subjected in the progress of the last three centuries, cannot be otherwise than useful and, I hope, acceptable to the reading portion of our countrymen. The interests, moreover, of our colonies are so closely linked with those of the mother country, and they have become so essential a part of her riches and power, that the later history of England can never be properly appreciated without a competent knowledge of the subject. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Unlike some other reproductions of classic texts (1) We have not used OCR(Optical Character Recognition), as this leads to bad quality books with introduced typos. (2) In books where there are images such as portraits, maps, sketches etc We have endeavoured to keep the quality of these images, so they represent accurately the original artefact. Although occasionally there may be certain imperfections with these old texts, we feel they deserve to be made available for future generations to enjoy.