A Gateway Of Empire

From Tristram Hunt, award-winning author of The Frock-Coated Communist and leading UK politician, Ten Cities that Made an Empire presents a new approach to Britain's imperial past through the cities that epitomised it The final embers of the British Empire are dying, but its legacy remains in the lives and structures of the cities which it shaped. Here Tristram Hunt examines the stories and defining ideas of ten of the most important: Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, and twentieth-century Liverpool. Rejecting binary views of the British Empire as 'very good' or 'very bad', Hunt uses an exceptional array of primary accounts and personal reflection to chart the processes of exchange and adaptation that collectively shaped the colonial experience - and, in turn, transformed the culture, economy and identity of the British Isles. TRISTRAM HUNT is one of Britain's best known historians. Since 2010 he has been the MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central, and in October 2013 was made Shadow Secretary of State for Education. He is a senior lecturer in British history at Queen Mary, University of London, and has written numerous series for radio and television. He is also a regular contributor to the Times, Guardian and Observer. His previous books include The English Civil War at First Hand, Building Jerusalem, and The Frock-Coated Communist: The Revolutionary Life of Friedrich Engels, which was published in more than a dozen languages. Praise for The Frock-Coated Communist: 'Beautifully written and consistently engaging' - Independent 'An excellent book ... Hunt has a mastery of 19th-century British culture and European political thought' - Robert Service, Sunday Times 'Thoughtful and engaging' - Telegraph Review

"After a humiliating defeat in the Crimean War, the Russian Empire struggled to reassert its position as a global power. A small noble family returned from the siege of Sevastopol and joined the rulers' efforts to advance Russian standing in the decades before 1917. Leaving Home tells the story of the Mansurovs, who were known to nineteenth-century observers as resourceful imperial agents and staunch supporters of Orthodoxy. In close interplay with scholarship and the media, they built churches and pilgrim hostels to increase Russian dominance within its borders and in the Ottoman Empire. They facilitated communication between the Russian Empire and the wider Orthodox world and expanded its institutional infrastructure in areas of religion and scholarship outside Russia. Some of the family's achievements stand to this day: the Russian complex in Jerusalem and an impressive Orthodox convent in Riga. When the Revolution came, they faced stigmatization as former nobles, believers, and monarchists. Impoverishment and arrests became part of their daily lives in Soviet Russia. Leaving Home is a study of the momentous role played by elite families in Russia's international involvement in the age of empire. It shows how three generations of a mobile noble family advanced the intertwined causes of the Russian Empire and Orthodoxy, using family resources and tools of intimacy. Women were crucial for the family's efforts, both behind the scenes and in public. Russia, Orthodoxy, and noble family life emerge as part of the European trans-imperial scene." --

In 1898, Nome, Alaska, burst into the American consciousness when one of the largest gold strikes in the world occurred on its shores. Over the next ten years, Nome’s population exploded as both men and women came north to seek their fortunes. Closer to Siberia than to New York, Nome’s citizens created their own version of small-town America on the northern frontier. Less than 150 miles from the Arctic Circle, they weathered the Great War and the diphtheria epidemic of 1925 as well as floods, fires, and the Great Depression. They enlivened the Alaska winters with pastimes such as high-school basketball and social clubs. Empire’s Edge is the story of how ordinary Americans made a life on the edge of a continent—a life both ordinary and extraordinary.