The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset 1st Edition

I bought this for a class. I felt it was fairly easy to read. Enjoyed it. My "used" quality book was worth the price and the savings!

I received the correct book for my college class very quickly.

I am not by any means conservative, but even as a person with a very liberal view of the British empire, I was appalled at the way Levine sacrifices factual accuracy for her narrow ideology about gender, race and class. Reading this book told me very little factual about the British Empire and very much about Levine's personal views, often at the expense of very commonly known facts such as the chronology of the settlement of Massachusetts (for example, Levine mentions the 1629 voyage of the Puritans on the Mayflower early in the book). While I agree with most analyses of the British empire based on gender, race and class, Levine's way of telling the story was overtly simplified, overtly ideological and revisionist history at its worst. I do not trust Levine as a narrator, much less a historian, and I would not recommend her textbook.

I teach the history of modern Britain at the college level and have assigned Levine's penetrating book to great effect. It is balanced, sensible and extremely well written. I find the charges of "bias" in the other reviews to very misguided. Levine chose to write a book about issues of gender, race, and those aspects that many other histories leave out. The book purpose in not to catalog the misdeeds of British imperialists and the sufferings of those under their rule. Rather, Levine has achieved an excellent synthesis of scholarly work on social and cultural issues that affected both native populations *and* British colonizers. That she has chosen to focus on how this colonial interaction affected all of the peoples under British imperial rule, and how their colonies did not simply reflect the "civilizing mission" of British imperialists, is a great strength. She adds richness and complexity to our understanding of the imperial enterprise. She challenges the "absent-minded" or "unfinished" empire theses with trenchant counter examples in clear, sometimes beautiful prose, hardly grinding axes or pushing an agenda. If one is looking for apologia for the empire, there are plenty of other books that will fill that presentist agenda. Levine's is a fine work of historical analysis that maintains a scholarly but accessible tone throughout. I highly recommend the book to undergraduates and as a primer for graduate students, who can easily find more detailed studies by following Levine's notes. And by all means read it along with Porter's Absentminded Imperialists, and other sensible works that bring unique perspectives to bear on the how the British and their colonial subjects experienced and articulated empire.

A highly critical and unbalanced account of a massive institution that stretched all over the world, covering 500 years and involving millions of people. Very poor.

first class book highly recommended