ShelfLook
Tools About
Cover of Empire

How long does it take to read Empire?

How Great Britain Made the Modern World

Niall Ferguson

Empire by Niall Ferguson takes about 7 hours 38 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.

About 7 hours 38 minutes

A weekend read

First published 2003. 416 pages, about 114,400 words.

16 days at 30 minutes a day

Estimate based on 275 words per page.

At other speeds

Slow, 150 words a minute 12 hours 43 minutes
Average, 250 words a minute 7 hours 38 minutes
Fast, 400 words a minute 4 hours 46 minutes

The page count is the median across 20 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.

About the book

In this book Niall Ferguson argues that the British Empire should be regarded not merely as vanished Victoriana but as the very cradle of modernity. Nearly all the key features of the twenty-first-century world can be traced back to the extraordinary expansion of Britain's economy, population, and culture from the seventeenth century until the mid-twentieth--economic globalization, the communications revolution, the racial make-up of North America, the notion of humanitarianism, the nature of democracy. Ferguson shows that far from being a subject for nostalgia, the story of the Empire contains. Ferguson shows that far from being a subject for nostalgia, the story of the Empire contains lessons for the world today--in particular for the United States as it stands on the brink of a new kind of imperial power based once again on economic and military supremacy.

Subjects: British colonies, Colonies, Imperialism, Overzeese expansie, History, Modern Civilization

More by Niall Ferguson

Books like this

Popular books of similar length