This book examines the cultural, economic, and social forces that shaped the development of the British empire in the eighteenth century. The empire is placed in a broad historiographical context informed by important recent work on the 'fiscal-military state', and 'gentlemanly capitalism'.

Imperial Spaces takes two of the most influential minority groups of white settlers in the British Empire -- the Irish and the Scots -- and explores how they imagined themselves within the landscapes of its farthest reaches, the Australian colonies of Victoria and New South Wales. Using letters and diaries as well as records of collective activities such as committee meetings, parades, and dinners, the book examines how the Irish and Scottish built new identities as settlers in the unknown spaces of Empire.

For much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Britain was the dominant world power, its strength based in large part on its command of an Empire that, in the years immediately after World War I, encompassed almost one-quarter of the earth s land surface and one-fifth of its population. Writers boasted that the sun never set on British possessions, which provided raw materials that, processed in British factories, could be re-exported as manufactured products to expanding colonial markets.

In her sixty-four years as Queen of England, Victoria saw more change than any other English monarch. From changing from an agrarian economy to a leader in technology and factory-produced goods, to expanding the empire to include one quarter of the earth¿s people¿Queen Victoria¿s reign was the historical high point of England¿s wealth and leadership.

Benjamin Franklin and the Ends of Empire provides a painstaking study of the Founding Father's stances on government, imperialism, and fiscal policy, ultimately emphasizing how his opinions on these matters evolved over the course of his lifetime. Carla Mulford uses Franklin's prodigious literary output-which includes letters, pamphlets, newspaper articles, journal entries, and drafted speeches-to demonstrate how his views shifted, with special attention to the role played by Great Britain in his decision-making process before, during, and after the Revolution.