"The prolonged death throes of Europe's last overseas empires have stimulated a lively historical interest in the roots of decolonization. The theme is taken up in this elegantly written and admirably edited volume in which Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden bring together a team of specialists to examine how, in the major Atlantic empires prior to the independence movements of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, colonies came to see themselves as possessing their own particular characteristics, and the bearing this had on those revolutions." [Back cover].