“What are the best books about The British Empire?” We looked at 200 of the top books, aggregating and ranking them so we could answer that very question!

The top 19 titles, all appearing on 2 or more “Best British Empire” book lists, are ranked below by how many times they appear. The remaining 150+ titles, as well as the lists we used, are in alphabetical order on the bottom of the page.

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Top 19 British Empire Books

19 .) Farewell The Trumpets: An Imperial Retreat by James Morris

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Thing
• Goodreads 2

This concluding volume brings readers up to the death of Winston Churchill in 1965.

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18 .) Flashman (The Flashman Papers, #1) by George MacDonald Fraser

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• Goodreads

“Three of George MacDonald Fraser’s incomparable and hilarious novels featuring the lovable rogue, soldier, cheat, and coward: Harry Paget Flashman.

Praised by everyone from John Updike to Jane Smiley, Fraser was an acknowledged master of comedy and satire, an unrivaled storyteller, whose craft was matched only by his impeccable historical research. And his greatest creation was, of course, Flashman. The novels collected here find our hero in the midst of his usual swashbuckling adventures of derring-do: fleeing adversaries in the First Anglo-Afghan War; meeting and nearly deceiving a young Abraham Lincoln in America; alternately impersonating a native Indian cavalry recruit and wooing women in India; and managing, whatever the circumstances, to keep his hero’s reputation unsullied.
“

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17 .) Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress by James Morris

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Thing
• Goodreads 2

The opening volume of Morris’s “Pax Britannica Trilogy,” this richly detailed work traces the rise of the British Empire, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 to the celebration of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.

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16 .) Kim by Rudyard Kipling

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

This novel tells the story of Kimball O’ Hara (Kim), who is the orphaned son of a soldier in the Irish regiment stationed in India during the British Raj. It describes Kim’s life and adventures from street vagabond, to his adoption by his father’s regiment and recruitment into espionage.

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15 .) Old Filth by Jane Gardam

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“Book One in Jane Gardam’s Old Filth Trilogy

Sir Edward Feathers has had a brilliant career, from his early days as a lawyer in Southeast Asia, where he earned the nickname Old Filth (FILTH being an acronym for Failed In London Try Hong Kong) to his final working days as a respected judge at the English bar. Yet through it all he has carried with him the wounds of a difficult and emotionally hollow childhood. Now an eighty-year-old widower living in comfortable seclusion in Dorset, Feathers is finally free from the regimen of work and the sentimental scaffolding that has sustained him throughout his life. He slips back into the past with ever mounting frequency and intensity, and on the tide of these vivid, lyrical musings, Feathers approaches a reckoning with his own history. Not all the old filth, it seems, can be cleaned away.
“

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14 .) Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

“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 traveled 100,000 miles back and forth, from Antarctica to the Caribbean, from the 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, 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 those who keep the flag flying.”

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13 .) Rebel Queen by Michelle Moran

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“When the British Empire sets its sights on India in the mid-nineteenth century, it expects a quick and easy conquest. India is fractured and divided into kingdoms, each independent and wary of one another, seemingly no match for the might of the English. But when they arrive in the Kingdom of Jhansi, the British army is met with a surprising challenge.

Instead of surrendering, Queen Lakshmi raises two armies—one male and one female—and rides into battle, determined to protect her country and her people. Although her soldiers may not appear at first to be formidable against superior British weaponry and training, Lakshmi refuses to back down from the empire determined to take away the land she loves.
“

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12 .) Rise to Rebellion by Jeff Shaara

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Wikipedia

Jeff Shaara dazzled readers with his bestselling novels Gods and Generals, The Last Full Measure, and Gone for Soldiers. Now the acclaimed author who illuminated the Civil War and the Mexican-American War brilliantly brings to life the American Revolution, creating a superb saga of the men who helped to forge the destiny of a nation.

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11 .) The Blue Nile by Alan Moorehead

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

In the first half of the nineteenth century, only a small handful of Westerners had ventured into the regions watered by the Nile River on its long journey from Lake Tana in Abyssinia to the Mediterranean-lands that had been forgotten since Roman times, or had never been known at all. In The Blue Nile, Alan Moorehead continues the classic, thrilling narration of adventure he began in The White Nile, depicting this exotic place through the lives of four explorers so daring they can be considered among the world’s original adventurers — each acting and reacting in separate expeditions against a bewildering background of slavery and massacre, political upheaval and all-out war.

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10 .) The Great Game: The Struggle for Empire in Central Asia by Peter Hopkirk

Lists It Appears On:

• Library Thing
• Goodreads 2

Describes the nineteenth-century struggle between Britain and Russia for control of Central Asia

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9 .) The Painted Veil by W. Somerset Maugham

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Telegraph

Set in England and Hong Kong in the 1920s, The Painted Veil is the story of the beautiful but love-starved Kitty Fane. When her husband discovers her adulterous affair, he forces her to accompany him to the heart of a cholera epidemic. Stripped of the British society of her youth and the small but effective society she fought so hard to attain in Hong Kong, she is compelled by her awakening conscience to reassess her life and learn how to love.

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8 .) The Siege of Krishnapur by J.G. Farrell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2

“India, 1857—the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in bloody rebellion on their British overlords. This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur, widely considered one of the finest British novels of the last fifty years.

Farrell’s story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion—at once brutal, blundering, and wistful—is soon revealed.”

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7 .) The White Nile by Alan Moorehead

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

Relive all the thrills and adventure of Alan Moorehead’s classic bestseller The White Nile — the daring exploration of the Nile River in the second half of the nineteenth century, which was at that time the most mysterious and impenetrable region on earth. Capturing in breathtaking prose the larger-than-life personalities of such notable figures as Stanley, Livingstone, Burton and many others, The White Nileremains a seminal work in tales of discovery and escapade, filled with incredible historical detail and compelling stories of heroism and drama.

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6 .) Things Fall Apart (The African Trilogy, #1) by Chinua Achebe

Lists It Appears On:

• Telegraph
• Goodreads

Things Fall Apart is the first of three novels in Chinua Achebe’s critically acclaimed African Trilogy. It is a classic narrative about Africa’s cataclysmic encounter with Europe as it establishes a colonial presence on the continent. Told through the fictional experiences of Okonkwo, a wealthy and fearless Igbo warrior of Umuofia in the late 1800s, Things Fall Apart explores one man’s futile resistance to the devaluing of his Igbo traditions by British political andreligious forces and his despair as his community capitulates to the powerful new order.

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5 .) White Mughals by William Dalrymple

Lists It Appears On:

• The Guardian
• Wikipedia 2

“White Mughals is the romantic and ultimately tragic tale of a passionate love affair that crossed and transcended all the cultural, religious and political boundaries of its time.
James Achilles Kirkpatrick was the British Resident at the court of the Nizam of Hyderabad when in 1798 he glimpsed Kahir un-Nissa—’Most excellent among Women’—the great-niece of the Nizam’s Prime Minister and a descendant of the Prophet. Kirkpatrick had gone out to India as an ambitious soldier in the army of the East India Company, eager to make his name in the conquest and subjection of the subcontinent. Instead, he fell in love with Khair and overcame many obstacles to marry her—not least of which was the fact that she was locked away in purdah and engaged to a local nobleman. Eventually, while remaining Resident, Kirkpatrick converted to Islam, and according to Indian sources even became a double-agent working for the Hyderabadis against the East India Company.

It is a remarkable story, involving secret assignations, court intrigue, harem politics, religious and family disputes. But such things were not unknown; from the early sixteenth century, when the Inquisition banned the Portuguese in Goa from wearing the dhoti, to the eve of the Indian mutiny, the ‘white Mughals’ who wore local dress and adopted Indian ways were a source of embarrassments to successive colonial administrations. William Dalrymple unearths such colourful figures as ‘Hindoo Stuart’, who travelled with his own team of Brahmins to maintain his temple of idols, and who spent many years trying to persuade the memsahibs of Calcutta to adopt the sari; and Sir David Ochterlony, Kirkpatrick’s counterpart in Delhi, who took all thirteen of his wives out for evening promenades, each on the back of their own elephant.”

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4 .) Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire by David Cannadine

Lists It Appears On:

• Wikipedia 2
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and “upon which the sun never set” finally lost its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire–its origins, nature, purpose, and effect on the world it ruled–is far from settled. In this incisive work, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective–through the eyes of those who created and ruled it–and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire. Arguing against the views of Edward Said and others, Cannadine suggests that the British were motivated not only by race, but also by class. The British wanted to domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they ruled according to an idealized image of their own class hierarchies.

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3 .) Pax Britannica Trilogy by Jan Morris

Lists It Appears On:

• Telegraph
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing

Pax Britannica is actually a collection of three books charting the history of most of the British Imperial experience. The first book in the trilogy is entitled Heaven’s Command and charts the rise of the Victorian Empire. It documents the bravado, confidence, absent mindedness and cunning that led to the creation of the largest empire the world has ever seen. The second book is entitled Pax Britannica and is intended as a snapshot of the Imperial world at the apogee of its power in 1897. This is the year in which Queen Victoria held her Diamond Jubilee in truly imperial pomp and ceremony. The Final book is entitled Farewell the Trumpets and documents the final retreat from the great adventure.

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2 .) Plain Tales from the Hills by Rudyard Kipling

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing
• Telegraph

First published in 1888, “Plain Tales from the Hills” was Kipling’s first volume of prose fiction. Most of the stories it includes had already appeared in the “Civil and Military Gazette; ” they were written before he reached the age of 22; and they show a remarkably precocious literary talent. His vignettes of life in Brittish India a hundred years ago give vivid insight into Anglo-India at work and play, into a barrack-room life, and into the character of Indians themselves.

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1 .) Burmese Days by George Orwell

Lists It Appears On:

• Goodreads
• Goodreads 2
• Library Thing
• Telegraph

Orwell draws on his years of experience in India to tell this story of the waning days of British imperialism. A handful of Englishmen living in a settlement in Burma congregate in the European Club, drink whiskey, and argue over an impending order to admit a token Asian.

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The 150+ Additional Best Books About The History Of The British Empire

9 Best British Empire Book Sources/Lists