The occupation of San Juan Island by the Royal Marines between 1860 and 1872 marked the last time "redcoats" would be stationed in lands south of the 49th parallel. Following the nearly disastrous "Pig War" crisis, their primary mission with their U.S. Army counterparts was keeping the peace on an island considered ripe for the taking by Britons and Americans alike. Drawing on historical, archaeological and photographic research, Outpost of Empire offers an intriguing glimpse of a frontier garrison in the Victorian age. Mike Vouri is the San Juan National Park historian and author of The Pig War.

in 1985 Simon Winchester, struck by a sudden need to discover exactly what was left of the British Empire, set out across the globe to visit the far-flung islands that are all that remain of what once made Britain great. He travelled 100,000 miles back and forth from Antarctica to the Caribbean, from Mediterranean to the Far East, to capture a last glint of imperial glory. His adventures in these distant and forgotten ends of the earth make compelling and often funny reading and tell a story most of us had thought was over: a tale of the last outposts in Britain's imperial career and of those who keep the flag flying. With a new introduction and additional material in many of the chapters, this revised edition tells us what happened to these extraordinary places while the author's been away.

Covers the land development and architectural policies and practices that the US military follows worldwide in planning, building, and expanding installations of untold extent in 140 countries.

Following the Indian Rebellion of 1857, fear of Indigenous uprisings spread across the British Empire and nibbled at the edges of settler societies. Publicly admitting to this anxiety, however, would have gone counter to Victorian notions of racial superiority. In Settler Anxiety at the Outposts of Empire Kenton Storey opens a window on this time by comparing newspaper coverage in the 1850s and 1860s in the colonies of New Zealand and Vancouver Island. Challenging the idea that there was a decline in the popularity of humanitarianism across the British Empire in the mid-nineteenth century, he demonstrates how government officials and newspaper editors appropriated humanitarian rhetoric as a flexible political language. Whereas humanitarianism had previously been used by Christian evangelists to promote Indigenous rights, during this period it became a popular means to justify the expansion of settlers’ access to land and to promote racial segregation, all while insisting on the “protection” of Indigenous peoples.

This reissued hardcover edition thoroughly examines colonial era forts through narrative and illustration. It offers information about their physical attributes as well as why they were built.

Drawing on a wide range of recently declassified documents, Lee outlines the regional and international context of American diplomatic history towards Korea and Vietnam and analyses the relationship between containment, the bipolar international system, and European and American concepts of empire at the beginning of the era of decolonization. He argues that although policy makers in the United Kingdom and Canada adopted a more defensive containment policy towards Communist China than the United States did, they generally supported American attempts to promote pro-Western élites in Korea and Vietnam. This is an important book for anyone interested in American foreign policy, Anglo-American relations, Asia and the international system, and British and Canadian foreign policies.

This study of the cultural and military importance of British forts in the colonial era explains how these forts served as communities in Indian country more than as bastions of British imperial power. Their security depended on maintaining good relations with the local Native Americans, who incorporated the forts into their economic and social life as well as into their strategies.