Review: Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World (Documentary)

In the course of researching the moral and cultural decline of the Western world, I have come to realize that what I am studying is closely related to the rise and fall of the British Empire.

The story of America begins within the context of the nascent British Empire in Virginia and Massachusetts. Before and after the American Revolution, the key cultural developments in American history are never really separate from developments in the metropole. The Great Awakening in the 18th century was brought to the American colonies by George Whitfield and John Wesley’s preaching. The British Enlightenment with its rhetoric about liberty had a massive cultural impact on the future United States. Romanticism was similarly influential on both of the Atlantic.

The abolitionist movement triumphed in the British Empire before it triumphed in the United States. Britain had its Olaudah Equiano and America had Frederick Douglass. America later followed the British down the road of imperialism in Spanish-American War. The United States followed the lead of Britain and was drawn into the First World War and Second World War.