Ornamentalism

For much of the modern era, the British Empire was the largest and greatest in the world, on which, it was truly observed, the sun never set. It encompassed almost every variant of human experience, and for three centuries it shaped the political, social and economic life of much of the globe.The origins of the British Empire, and the reasons for its collapse in the mid twentieth century, have been extensively studied by historians. But very little attention has been paid to how the Empire was actually run. How, during the heyday of its stable existence, did its rulers understand their task? And what, more generally, did Britons think their Empire looked like?In this characteristically entertaining and provocatively original book, David Cannadine investigates the ideologies and social attitudes at the heart of the Empire. One of them was, undoubtedly, race. But even more pervasive was class - a traditional vision of hierarchy and subordination, derived from the sense the British had of their own society, which they exported and analogized to the ends of the earth and back again.