The most recommended books on the British Empire

Up until the 1960s, Buckingham Palace barred “colored immigrants” from working in clerical roles in the royal household. A recent official report demonstrated that both the Metropolitan Police and the Home Office are “institutionally racist.”

Meanwhile, recent estimates put the amount of wealth extracted by the British from India between 1765 and 1938 at $45 trillion and from Africa at $777 trillion. Despite these findings, nearly thirty percent of Britons believe the former colonies were better off under the empire. The reason that these forms of casual racism persist, Sanghera argues in this highly readable book, is a function of a simple fact: “that our society grew out of the racist institutions of the British Empire.” A highly racialized form of imperial nostalgia still permeates modern British society and contributes to a form of collective amnesia about the real history of the empire: “The British profited from slavery for many… show more.

Wilhelm is credited with having the best writing that inhabits “speculative fiction” (Robert Heinlein's coined term in 1947). I agree with that wholeheartedly, even though many others have contributed. She has dozens of novels, including mystery, suspense, and speculative sci-fi, but start with this book. Each story is unique and they don't actually connect in any way except that she put them all into this book, so I can't summarize them. Please read them all: every single one is a gem and an amazing example of great sci-fi writing.

Formerly a professor of History at the University of Macau, Robert Antony has made it his life’s work to study piracy along the China coast. Among his several books on the topic, this one digs deepest into the development of piracy in the early 19th century, citing weather, economic, and political conditions, told in a highly readable narrative style. Among the entertaining details, he tracks the average annual going rates for ransom and stolen goods. He writes in an agreeable, relaxed manner, with a number of incidents told as edge-of-your-seat thrillers. The title itself was a common term of invective to describe Chinese pirates. An essential read for students of piracy.

The first collection by former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes includes one of the most stunning poems about the connection between poet, pen, and nature in the form of "The Thought-Fox." Hughes has a pared back, often disturbing vision of the world that seizes your attention. If you like this don’t stop, there are plenty of other wonderful books by Hughes, especially his retelling of the "Tales from Ovid" and "The Birthday Letters," his poems about his relationship with his first wife, the equally brilliant Sylvia Plath.

This book is pretty recent, having been published in 2015. In my opinion, it is the best book ever written about Atlantic piracy. Hanna dissects pirates to examine who they were and why they became pirates. What is unique about this work, is that he argues that pirates were just as significant on land as they were at sea. Without pirates, there would be no rise of a British Empire in the American colonies. This book was released during the last year of my doctoral research and I probably would not have been as successful in its completion without Pirate Nests!

This is one of the great literary biographies: impeccably researched, stylishly narrated, refreshingly indifferent to academic convention, and authentically Dickensian in its pungency of atmosphere and solidity of characterisation.

New Amsterdam is a collection of noir detective fantasy set in an alternate New World with sorcery, magical creatures, and terrifying evil.

The main character is a fallen figure, Abigail Garrett, who self-medicates with booze while trying to fulfill her duties as a forensic sorceress. She investigates heinous crimes with a voice and motivation that I absolutely loved. Add to this character and world a scenario similar to Murder on the Orient Express and I had to pick this one up.

Abigail is not Hercule Poirot – she’s much more interesting. Her motivations and resigned duty resonated with me and I loved the textured world she inhabited. Fun alternate history with very interesting magic and setting.

If you’ve chafed at the limitations of scale by these suggestions, this is the book for you.

All the stories on this list, including my own, take pains to couch the supernatural in such a way that the political, social, and economical natural orders are not threatened by the introduction of speculative elements. Not in Summerland.

Their pseudo-science real, Victorian spiritualists find a way to the afterlife and back. Within decades the strange, alien city on the other side is flooded with the principles of industry, commerce, and espionage.

Taking place between the World Wars, the existence of Summerland, and the technologies that unfold from its discovery change the landscape of pre-World War II Europe, but not the inevitability of human nature.

Empire, Incorporated makes it clear that corporations mattered in shaping the British Empire. But how did they actually operate?

Virtuous Bankers offers a window into an ordinary workday at the Bank of England, one of the most important institutions in eighteenth-century England. In the process, the book provides new insights into the nature of public credit and the growth of the British state, as well as an engrossing introduction to everyday life in Georgian London. 

Zenna Henderson's entire The People series is worth reading, including the original short stories. These were all published at a time when very few female sci-fi authors were published. There is also a film that is fairly faithful to the books. Her creativity, her understanding the experience of immigrants and those who are “different,” and her depictions of the ways humans and immigrants are likely to re/act are timeless, offering stellar insights into our modern-day experiences. Sci-fi authors would do well to read all her books to learn how to do world-building, draw parallels between non-human species and humans, and analogize modern dilemmas as speculative fiction plots.