Excerpt from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Out beyond Westminster, the end of Empire is equally redolent–not least in my own parliamentary constituency of Stoke-on-Trent Central. In the latter half of the eighteenth century, Josiah Wedgwood had been instrumental in commissioning the Trent and Mersey Canal to transport ceramic tableware from the Potteries to the port of Liverpool, then to be shipped out across the Empire. And his competitors followed suit, with the sturdy designs of Spode, Royal Doulton and the Empire Porcelain Company soon providing dinner services for colonial compounds from Canada to Australia. The booming pot banks of Stoke-on-Trent supplied the ceramics of Empire right up to the 1960s, while Herbert Minton's eponymous tiles could be found beautifying the most far-flung of colonial projects–perhaps most wonderfully, Sir George Gilbert Scott's convocation hall (Cowasji Jehangir) at the University of Bombay. This is not Stoke-on-Trent's only connection with Bombay, as it was in Burslem that the sculptor John Lockwood Kipling learned his craft and decided to name his son 'Rudyard' after a local beauty spot just north of the Six Towns. Rudyard Kipling, the finest poet of Empire, would describe his birthplace of Bombay as the 'Mother of cities to me', but his name is a reminder of his link to an altogether different colonial place.

In the postwar decades, the impact of Empire returned to Stoke-on-Trent in the form of extensive migration from Pakistan and India (most notably, the Mirpur district of disputed Kashmir), but the lucrative business of imperial production collapsed. The protected markets of the Commonwealth were thrown open to global competition. As with the cotton mills of Manchester and the port of Liverpool, the relative decline of the pottery industry in Stoke-on-Trent is connected to the end of Empire. Only a generation ago, the social and economic foundations of Stoke-on-Trent–as of so many parts of the UK–were bound up with a colonial identity which has now simply disappeared.

Indeed, barely a generation ago, that connection to Empire was central to the history and identity of my own family. My father was born in 1941 at a quintessential site of Kipling's Raj–the cool climes of Ootacamund, an Indian hill station in the Nilgiris Hills of Tamil Nadu. So-called 'Snooty Ooty' (now, Udhagamandalam), with its bungalows, club, Gothic Revival Anglican church, and beagles' pack, was where the officers and wives of the Indian Civil Service retreated from the blistering heat of the plains. One such officer was Roland Hunt CMG, my grandfather, despatched to Madras with his wife Pauline as a sub-collector after a year of Empire Studies–which involved a spot of Tamil and then learning to ride round the Oxford Parks–to administer British colonialism for what he and his colleagues regarded as the foreseeable future. In fact, his string of diplomatic postings perfectly mirrored the death-throes of the British Empire. When Indian independence arrived, he progressed to the High Commissions of Pakistan, South Africa and Malaya–where he assisted in the transition to Malaysia and (family legend has it) rewrote Benjamin Britten's score for the new national anthem, side by side on the piano stool, with the founding prime minister, Tunku Abdul Rahman. His final appointments followed the expansion of the Commonwealth, with the former colonies of Uganda and Trinidad and Tobago concluding his career as high commissioner. In retirement, the colonial legacy lingered. Visiting Roland and Pauline's bungalow in Pangbourne, Berkshire, was to enter a visual dreamscape of Empire: prints of Madras's Fort StGeorge and Calcutta's Fort William; editions of Kipling and Conrad; the traditional colonial ephemera of drums, rugs, diplomatic photographs and oriental artefacts. But to me, as a young boy, it appeared a civilization as ancient and distant, in its way, as the Aztecs, the Egyptians or the classical Greeks.

Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.