NPR's Ari Shapiro speaks with Matthew J. Smith, director of the Center for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery at University College London, about the commonwealth's complicated history. The ...

After Carl Carby arrived in England from Jamaica, in 1943, he wore starched shirts, polished dress shoes, and neatly knotted ties. He was from the colonies, but his mannerisms evinced a restrained, ...

As British redcoats flooded into America’s bustling port cities during the Revolutionary War, the clatter of boots, the neigh of horses and the steady beat of drums signaled a stark choice for ...

At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this ...

British royal history proves that with great power comes great responsibility…and a great deal of rules. While the role of the Crown in contemporary society is largely symbolic, vestiges of traditions ...

“PAY UP FOR THE BRITISH GULAG IN KENYA,” one sign read. It was 2011, and four elderly Kikuyu — once Kenya’s largest ethnic group — stood in a cold, April sun beneath the soaring arches of London’s ...

In the new film of Jane Austen’s novel Mansfield Park, the writer and director Patricia Rozema includes an early scene that is not in the book. As Fanny Price departs from her family in Portsmouth to ...

At the beginning of the 19th century, aristocratic networks connected to the monarchy and the Tory party had effectively “captured” the institutions of the state and exploited them for their own ...

British colonials with a pet cheetah in Secunderabad, India, 1906. (Hulton Archive / Getty Images) In 2005, Britain’s then–Labour chancellor of the exchequer, Gordon Brown, chose the backdrop of ...