Imperial Island

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What to expect

This riveting new history tells the story of Britain's journey from imperial power to a nation divided.

After the Second World War, Britain's overseas empire disintegrated. But over the next seventy years, empire came to define Britain and its people as never before.

From immigration and race riots to the Suez Crisis and the Falklands War, from the simplistic moral equation of Band Aid to the invasion of Iraq, the imperial mindset has dominated Britain's relationship with itself and the world. In the tragedy of Stephen Lawrence, in Britain's response to radical Islam, even in the opening ceremony of the 2012 Olympics, we see how this contradictory relationship has undermined its self-image as a multicultural nation, helping explain the Windrush deportations and Brexit.

Drawing on a mass of new research, from personal letters to pop culture, Imperial Island tells a story of immigration and fractured identity, of social strife and communal solidarity, of people on the move and of a people wrestling with their past. It is the story that best explains Britain today.

Critics Review

  • A masterful, ingeniously written telling of Britain’s real history, stripped of its sugarcoating. Read this incisive and forensic book, and you won’t look at Britain in the same way ever again

    OWEN JONES

  • Incisive, important, and incredibly timely. An urgent and necessary account for anyone wanting to understand how Britain became the nation it is today

    Caroline Elkins, author of Legacy of Violence

  • Imperial Island shows us that Empire’s legacy is soaked into Britain’s landscapes and built into its cities and inescapably in the country’s national DNA. An eye-opening study of the Empire within

    Shashi Tharoor, author of Inglorious Empire

  • Charlotte Lydia Riley radically retells a stale old story in her clear, bold, refreshing voice. Skilfully, inexorably and powerfully, she builds up a picture that’s been hiding in plain sight for far too long

    Lucy Worsley, Chief Curator at Historic Royal Palaces and author of Agatha Christie

  • Imperial Island is a marvellous account of how the empire made modern Britain. With an eye that ranges from popular culture to the highbrow, from high politics to the household, Charlotte Riley’s book is a thought-provoking delight that absolutely everyone should read

    Stephen Bush, columnist for the Financial Times

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