An essential starting point for anyone wanting to learn about life in the largest empire in history, this two-volume work encapsulates the imperial experience from the sixteenth to the twenty-first centuries.

• Provides primary sources that give voice to the people who ran, opposed, and were subjects of the British Empire

• Consolidates the most up-to-date research from established and emerging scholars in the field in many countries and at many institutions

• Includes a detailed introduction that succinctly puts the British Empire into historical context

• Offers a chronology of events and episodes important to both the rise and fall of the British Empire

• Provides a broad range of perspectives that focus not only on the white men who controlled the British Empire but also on the many people—such as women, indigenous peoples, poor Europeans, and Christian missionaries—who formed it

• Avoids simplistic assessments of British imperialism as merely "good" or "bad," emanating an objectivity that enables readers to develop their own ideas about the nature of the empire