Linda Colley Quotes

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.

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

How is the Empire?

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

In recent times, European nations, with the use of gunpowder and other technical improvements in warfare, controlled practically the whole world. One, the British Empire, brought under one government a quarter of the earth and its inhabitants.

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

And there's the Victoria Memorial, built as a memorial to Victoria.

There is no such thing as a final draft of history.

Who colonized the other – us or them? Did Algeria colonize France, or vice versa? Did Egypt colonize England, or vice versa? We are the victims...

America has never been an empire. … We may be the only great power in history that had the chance, and refused.

… and of the British Dominions beyond the Seas

British Empire

History is a never ending argument.