ABSTRACT
It reached its height at the end of the nineteenth century, then came to an end shortly after the Second World War. Firstly, it highlights some of the semantic difficulties that plague this area. In early nineteenth-century Britain it was nearly always associated with Napoleon Bonaparte after he dubbed himself 'Emperor', which is why the British were so reluctant to apply it to themselves. It follows obviously but still needs to be emphasised that the book is not mainly a history of the empire. Contemporary Britons insisted on this; it is another of the reasons why they were so reluctant to use the word to describe their activities overseas for so much of the nineteenth century, which would have invited comparisons they did not feel comfortable with. It did not involve any great military superiority over her neighbours, for example, though the naval supremacy she achieved during the Napoleonic era certainly helped.
