1985 large format hardcover with dust jacket and 255 pages in good condition.

Competently written and excellently illustrated, it is a portrait of those Edwardians who set out for the tropics in the days when a quarter of the globe was coloured red and the sun never set on Britain's fabled dominion over palm and pine (and any other schoolchild cliche that most of us were brought up on!) That moment of the imperial high noon was, as Valerie Pakenham points out, comfortingly 'unclouded by doubts about their mission to rule the earth, or at least to sort out its dark untidy places into some kind of decent order'.

This anecdotal history portrays the hardy, brave, and confident agents of the crown--ivory hunters, missionaries, idealistic younger sons--who set out to rule the British Empire's vast new territories in the early years of the twentieth century.