COMMENT: The British believe their word is their bond – but no one who’s dealt with us agrees, least of all in Afghanistan, ...

N athaniel Isaacs’s life defied convention. A white Jewish Englishman who came of age during the early 19th century, he spent much of his career on the outer reaches of the British Empire in Africa.

The British empire embarked on a successful and far-reaching anti-slavery campaign in the first half of the 19th century, one of the first global humanitarian efforts of its kind. Professor Maeve Ryan ...

But by the early 19th century, the British Empire had mutated into the world's first liberal empire. In the subsequent century, this empire clearly was a force for good in at least two respects.

In 1732 just one estate in St. Kitts in the Caribbean, colonized by the British, needed £1000 of copper equipment and, by the mid-18th century, a single plantation worked by 300 people needed ...

The original investors in the East India Co.—the pre-eminent joint stock, from its founding in 1600 to well into the 19th century—were all merchants, with only one aristocrat among them ...