The Map Painted Red

In May 1497 a small ship called the Matthew slipped out of Bristol harbour with a Genoese navigator aboard and a royal patent to find new lands. Five centuries later, on a rain-soaked Hong Kong night in 1997, the Royal Yacht Britannia carried the last governor away and the flag came down on the empire on which the sun never set.

Here is the whole vast, contradictory story: the sea dogs and the sugar islands; the slave ships and the abolitionists who shamed a nation into conscience; the trading company that conquered India with an army twice the size of Britain's; the convict fleets that founded Australia; opium wars, gold rushes and the Scramble for Africa; the telegraph cables and botanical gardens that wired and planted a world; Gandhi's salt march, the midnight of Partition, Suez, and the wind of change.

Told through vivid scenes and unforgettable characters — and honest about the famines, camps and massacres in the ledger — this is the story of how one small island redrew the map of the world, and how the world took it back.