What did the possession of Empire mean to the people of Britain? How did it impact upon them, how did they understand it, and how did they respond? These questions have increasingly been posed by historians, recognising that alongside the powerful, but much contested, effects of the British Empire on those it colonised were potentially powerful, but equally disputable, effects on those in the metropole. For a long time, as Andrew Thompson suggests, “‘Empire” was something that was judged to have happened overseas; although originating in Britain, imperialism remained marginal to the lives of most British people’. This marginalisation of empire in histories of modern Britain is now widely contested. Criticism of such a view has come most persistently from John MacKenzie, the books he has written dating back to the 1980s, but also many other books published in the Manchester University Press series ‘Studies in Imperialism’ which he inspired. Much of this work was influenced by the broader linguistic and cultural turn in historical writing, which has placed particular emphasis on the discursive constructs surrounding empire, and how these constructs shaped domestic cultures. These approaches have suggested that empire was crucial to the evolution of modern Britain, and that the British understandings of themselves, their identity, depended crucially on the imperial ‘encounter’. There have always been dissenters from this view, most prominently Bernard Porter. In recent contributions to this debate MacKenzie and Porter have continued to disagree fundamentally about whether empire mattered to the mass of the British population, or whether it mainly engaged only a small elite whose lives were intimately bound up with the fortunes of Britain's overseas possessions. A key problem with this debate has been its sharp distinction between ‘culture’ and ‘economy’. Porter writes: ‘no-one, incidentally, who questions the effect of her empire on Britain's popular culture doubts its impacts materially. There is sometimes confusion here’. But this is an unhelpful dichotomy. Britain's popular culture has always been shaped by material forces; conversely, understanding of ‘material’ forces was shaped by the prevailing culture. This point is superbly illustrated by Trentmann's recent work on free trade. As he shows, support for free trade became, for a while, an important element of popular culture; equally, the significance of that culture is inexplicable without the material consequences that free trade brought.