Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool: since the end days of Empire, Britain’s colonial past has been the subject of passionate debate. Tristram Hunt goes beyond the familiar arguments about Empire being good or bad and adopts a new approach, describing the processes of exchange and adaptation that moulded the colonial experience and that, in their turn, transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles.