Lecture

In recent years, the existence of a 'British World' has become perhaps the most influential framework through which historians in Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and elsewhere have examined the social and cultural linkages that bound their societies together in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century.

What was the 'British World', and what was its connection with that much more familiar structure of power and influence, the British Empire? How far was

John Darwin has been a Fellow of Nuffield College, Oxford, since 1984. He is the author of Britain, Egypt and the Middle East (1981) and Britain and Decolonization (1988), and is a contributor to the Oxford History of the British Empire. His book, After Tamerlane: the Global History of Empire, will be published next spring.