‘This vast Empire on which the sun never sets’: imperial expansion and cultural icon

The quotation above was widely, indeed both persistently and adoringly, usedto describe the British Empire in its heyday: the thirty years or so before the outbreak of the First World War. It comes as a surprise, therefore, to learn that it was coined more than a century earlier by the Irish peer and diplomat, Lord George Macartney. Macartney was a great advocate of imperial government and served in both India and southern Africa, but he was celebrating the much more modest imperial acquisitions which followed Britain’s successes in the Seven Years War (1756-63).1