Linda Colley Quotes

I was born too late and missed the dream of empire. Its shadow, the Commonwealth, coincides with my life but rarely connected with it.

You know, 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.

The fate of the Celt in the British Empire bids fair to resemble that of the Greeks among the Romans.

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.

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

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

Whereas the British were generally quite open about the fact that they were running an empire, few Americans politicians today would use the “e” word as anything other than a term of abuse.

So what if America loses its empire? We never should have had one in the first place.

The truth is that the free movement of goods, people, and money that developed under British hegemony between 1870 and 1913 - the first episode of globalization - was made possible, in large part, by military might rather than market forces.

'Commonwealth' is not a word I ever used growing up in Colombo. There, in the late 1950s, it would have meant little more than New Zealand lamb and Anchor butter at the cold stores.

How is the Empire?

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

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

Postcolonial critics are, I suspect, wrong when they argue that the mass of British people still mourn the loss of empire. But Britain's politicians - and its Foreign Office - have found it hard to adjust to the loss, not so much of onetime colonies as of the global clout the colonies once afforded.

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

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.

Whatever was the conduct of England, I am equally arraigned.

If you look at the history of the U.S., we were an empire long before we were a nation.

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

Imperialist enterprise draws political consequences.

We really need to stop the imperialist tendencies of countries like the United States and Great Britain.

Nothing the European mind ever devised was meant to do anything but to facilitate the European's control over the world.

In the span of a human lifetime, and well within the collective memory, Britain went from a stable imperial power ruling an appreciable fraction of the Earth's surface to being a tumultuous patchwork which was at least superficially in decline.

I'll tell you what colonial experience is.

Margaret Thatcher inherited a country in transition. The British Empire was still a considerable entity well into the 20th century.