To what extent the empire influenced the making of modern Britain in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries is a question that once provoked intense debate both in scholarly journals and the public press. Although representatives of the “Little Englander” school of history continue to argue that the empire had minimal impact on British domestic life, this position has become increasingly untenable in the wake of over a decade of scholarship persuasively demonstrating the constitutive nature of imperial and domestic history. Andrew Thompson's survey seeks to revise the national narrative by weaving back into it evidence of imperial impact. The result is an ambitious, nuanced, and cogent assessment of how the empire featured in domestic culture, society, politics, and economics from its height to its decline in the mid-twentieth century.

The first third of this book is dedicated to analyzing British society and the variety of ways that, depending on class, a Briton might experience and participate in the imperial world at home and at work. This section is divided according to class, with attention first given to an area of society long associated with imperial administration, the elite, and then shifting into an assessment of how the middle classes, especially professional engineers, scientists, and medical personal, created networks that linked various imperial sites to the metropole. Having confirmed the very real and lived impact of the empire on the middle classes, Thompson then moves the reader's attention to that community imagined as impervious to imperial influence by the “Little England” camp, the working classes. In chapters 3 and 4, Thompson calls on a particularly rich collection of sources that give evidence to the material and quotidian ways that the empire transformed the working-class diet, as seen in the consumption of tea, sugar, and canned meat; work experience, as made clear in transimperial labor solidarity actions and the integration of the imperial workforce; and leisure activities, such as the films they took in at the cinema and the books they read.

Throughout his analysis of the lived experience of empire, Thompson returns to an important caveat: Britons engaged with and understood their empire in a multiplicity of ways. This is especially true as it relates to gender and age, and Thompson dedicates all of chapter 5 to several examples of how empire influenced literature, feminist politics, missionary work, and school curricula. It cannot be said that Thompson has merely tacked on this chapter in anticipation of a particular reading constituency, for women and children appear throughout the book as important participants in the production of empire's political culture at home. Even so, I would have celebrated a more thorough integration of the gendered analysis into the previous four chapters. The unintended consequence of semisegregating the lives of women and children is that feminism, literature, education, and church activism appear to be appurtenances of imperial Britain rather than fundamental aspects of its political culture.

Chapters 6 and 7 venture into the world of domestic politics and economics with the same commitment to nuance and context seen in the first part of the book. In chapter 6, Thompson argues that contrary to J. A. Hobson's supposition that the empire disrupted British political culture, domestic politics were forged by imperial concerns. Here the reader is reminded of how events in Jamaica and India, to name but a few sites of imperial conflict that occurred as early as 1857, were absorbed into political debates beyond Westminster. In the case of the domestic economy, Thompson is less certain of the extent to which imperial impact can be measured. While several scholars have argued that the empire fatally drained the national economy, Thompson argues that “Britain's economic position was neither substantially improved nor materially weakened by the possession of an overseas empire” (156). This retreat from the impact argument is puzzling even though Thompson musters considerable data relating to migration, finance, and military expenditure to make his case. His argument seems to be that because we cannot trace imperial finance and trade outside of international markets, it is difficult to measure their impact on the domestic. This critique should not fall exclusively on Thompson, however, as his work is largely synthetic. The real concern is that more work needs to be done by economic historians to assess fully the empire's impact on the British economy.

The final third of the book seeks to understand the political culture of empire in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Thompson explores issues of identity in the empire's declining years and how different British people could produce conflicting reasons to embrace or reject the imperial past. He explores these reasons in his analysis of the “unraveling” of British identity as colonial citizens began to migrate to Britain and the Britishness of settlers in the Dominions became complicated by the creation of alternate national histories. The final chapter, entitled “After-Effects,” contemplates the Commonwealth and how it has transformed memories of empire among a citizenry that generation after generation grows ever less familiar with the imperial past. It is here that the stakes of Thompson's take on modern British history are fully articulated: in order to truly comprehend Britain's place in the world today, as well as to appreciate the multiplicity of meanings attached to memories of empire, scholars in British studies must meet the contested legacies of imperialism and colonialism head-on.

Thompson's writing style is smooth and engaging, and many of the photographs used in the text are refreshingly unfamiliar illustrations of the empire in Britain. Thompson's notes are extensive (constituting 101 pages of the book's total 349), and the bibliography comprises an essential reading list for any scholar of the field. While this book will perform admirably as a textbook for an advanced course on Modern Britain, it is also an ideal supplement to volumes 3 and 4 of the Oxford History of the British Empire (1999), providing the much-needed evidence of imperial impact elided in those hallowed pages.