More than Shakespeare, more than the invention of the railway, more than fair play, it was Empire which made Britain into Great Britain. By the early 20th century, that Empire covered around a quarter of the earth s surface, and embraced more than a quarter of its inhabitants, a mass of over 500 million people. From Australian sheep farmers to African nurses, all lived in an imperial world over which the Union Jack always fluttered, and on which it was commonly said the sun never set. From the pirate-ridden Atlantic and Caribbean of over four centuries ago to the success of the Falklands War, this extraordinary patchwork of territories and peoples was the creation of British ambition, ingenuity, and enterprise."