Books like India in the French imagination by Kate Marsh

Adela Quested, her companion Mrs. Moore, and the respected Dr. Aziz navigate the Indian town of Chandrapore and the Marabar caves, where a mysterious incident ignites scandal and exposes the volatile racial and political tensions of the British Raj.

Sir Walter Raleigh’s ill‑fated Roanoke colonists and their encounters with Native Americans unfold in Giles Milton’s well‑researched narrative that spans English exploration, the mysterious disappearance of early settlers, and Elizabeth I’s legendary title, "Big Chief."

The rise and fall of modern colonial empires have had a lasting impact on the development of European political theory and notions of national identity. This book is the first to compare theories of empire as they emerged in, and helped to define, the great colonial powers Spain, Britain and France. Anthony Pagden describes how the rulers of the three countries adopted the claim of the Roman Emperor Antoninus to be 'Lord of all the World'. Examining the arguments used to legitimate the seizure of Aboriginal lands and subjugation of Aboriginal Peoples, he shows that each country came to develop identities - and the political languages in which to express them - that were sometimes radically different. Until the early eighteenth century, Spanish theories of empire stressed the importance of evangelization and military glory. These arguments were challenged by the French and British, however, who increasingly justified empire building by invoking the profit to be gained from trade and agriculture. By the late eighteenth century, the major thinkers in all three countries, and increasingly the colonies themselves, came to see their empires as disastrous experiments in human expansion, costly, over-extended, and based on demoralizing forms of brutality and servitude. Pagden concludes by looking at the ways in which this hostility to empire was transformed into a cosmopolitan ideal that sought to replace all world empires by federations of equal and independent states.