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In June 1998, the first British World Conference was held at the Institute of Commonwealth Studies in London; its success led to the organization of five further conferences, held between 2002 and 2007 in Cape Town, Calgary, Melbourne, Auckland, and Bristol. Seeking to address the decades-long marginalization of the Dominions in British imperial history and of the British empire in the histories of the Dominions, the broad aim of the conferences was to bring the colonies of settlement back to the attention of imperial historians, and to remind the historians of the Dominions of the importance of the imperial connection in the histories of their nations. Employing a new historiographical term - the 'British World', which can be roughly defined as the worldwide British community that was bound together by familial, cultural, commercial, and professional networks; flows of information, people, and ideas; and a sense of a shared British identity and culture - the conferences endeavoured to explore the usefulness of the British World as a concept and to interpret what belonging to this world meant to those who lived in it.
The third British World Conference was held in Calgary in 2003 and attracted over 120 papers. Two collections of papers from this conference have been published - Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005) and Canada and the British World. With a strong showing of Canadian...