Linda Colley Quotes

In the past, on Earth, it has largely been to exploit foreign resources and to expand the domestic territory.

The English sent all their bores abroad, and acquired the Empire as a punishment.

The British Empire is the greatest secular agency for good now known to mankind.

England was the first true colonial power to use its dominion over a large part of Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Australia, North America, and many Caribbean islands, in the first half of the 20th century.

But while the British empire is easy to write about, it is very difficult to summarise. This is because what we call 'empire' spans 400 years in time and thousands of miles in space; every continent on Earth was directly affected by it.

Like a cyclone, imperialism spins across the globe; militarism crushes peoples and sucks their blood like a vampire.

When I was a girl, the idea that the British Empire could ever end was absolutely inconceivable. And it just disappeared, like all the other empires. You know, when people talk about the British Empire, they always forget that all the European countries had empires.

All comparisons between America's current place in the world and anything legitimately called an empire in the past reveal ignorance and confusion about any reasonable meaning of the concept empire, especially the comparison with the Roman Empire.

You know, the Brits had a way of - running an empire. And I don't think America is comfortable with an empire.

You British plundered half the world for your own profit. Let's not pass it off as the Age of Enlightenment.

Were you to read the British press today, you would learn that the British Empire never forgets its defeats.

We have got over our imperial past, and the withdrawal symptoms.

For Carolina once ruined and destroyed, the extermination of her [England's] colonial dependencies will follow.

The British Empire (with the exception of a very short period in the 1930s) was a free trade empire, unlike all the other great empires of the world …. Anyone could trade with the British Empire.

The foundations of empire are often occasions of woe; their dismemberment, always.

British Empire

Our army is really an imperial army…. We used to wonder why British imperialists went to Iraq and Afghanistan.

We should keep the Panama Canal because we stole it fair and square.

The British Empire wasn't some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.

...if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British empire would not have been made.

With nearly every great European empire today walks its dark colonial shadow …

The British especially have no excuse for forgetting that empire is a most complex and persistent beast. And it has claws.

Empire in the past was always a far harsher and much more accident-prone business than conventional history books imply. And the costs of these overseas invasions were borne not just by those on the receiving end but - frequently - by ordinary, vulnerable people among or associated with the invaders.

There seems to be no end of books about the British empire, and the fascination it holds for historians of all descriptions is inexhaustible.

His Majesty’s dominions, on which the sun never sets.