The decades that followed the Napoleonic wars saw a considerable expansion of the British presence in the world even though the full expression of imperial power and pride was to come in the later part of the reign of Queen Victoria. Unlike the hegemony of French language and culture during the long eighteenth century, Britain’s ascendancy needs to be seen more in military, naval, commercial and industrial terms. This emphasis gives a slightly different slant to the way in which books and libraries followed the flag into all parts of the globe. British possessions and zones of influence were highly diverse before, and indeed after, 1850, so that one cannot speak of one model of domination, colonisation or settlement. This situation makes it important to take due account of the specific circumstances of each colony and of each place in which English-speakers congregated.

Where once exiles of various kinds – Protestants, Puritans, Jacobites, Catholics – made up the bulk of the British component of the continental European population, the nineteenth century reinforced the ‘Grand Tour’ tradition. Alongside the wealthy there were the down-at-heel looking for a lower cost of living and the exporters of technological skills. In Paris, in the Channel ports, on the Riviera and in several Italian cities there were sizeable Anglophone colonies. These counterbalanced the strategic Mediterranean footholds of Gibraltar, Malta and even the Ionian Islands. Elsewhere there was the usual range of possibilities: commercial concessions or trading-posts, penal colonies, pastoral and agricultural settlements, plantations. Administrators dealt with indigenous populations, with sophisticated ancient civilisations and with displaced colonial regimes established originally by other European powers.