This book is committed to two main propositions, one general and one more particular. The general proposition is one with which it is hard to envisage serious disagreement, but for which David Cannadine is kind enough to invoke my imprimatur (among other much more weighty ones): the history of the British empire and the history of Britain itself are inseparable and must be studied as a seamless whole. The particular proposition is that in the high days of British imperialism, that is from about 1850 to about 1950, the history of the empire and that of Britain were brought together by a British commitment to reproduce overseas the kind of hierarchical society that, Cannadine believes, existed in Britain.