A Taste for Empire and Glory : Studies in British Overseas Expansion, 1600–1800

The 15 articles in this text represent the late author's work and interest in the British world of the 18th and 19th centuries, including British relations with Canada, America and India. The final collection of three essays illustrates Anglo-Indian relations and the tea trade.

In the decade and a half before his untimely death at 46, Philip Lawson had already achieved more than many historians. This posthumously published collection brings together his work on the British overseas expansion during the ’long’ 18th century and includes two previously unpublished essays. The first articles deal with general issues of approach and interpretation, with Canada and the thirteen colonies, and with India and the empire of tea. The final essays illustrate Anglo-Indian relations and the tea trade, showing the relationship between the establishment of Indian tea plantations, the growth of the tea trade, and the political and cultural impact of tea drinking on the British and their colonists. Taken together these studies make an outstanding contribution to the field, important to anyone interested in the history of Hanoverian Britain as an imperial power.