Archival footage, much of it colorized for the first time, traces the rise and fall of the British Empire from its Victorian high point to decolonization in the twentieth century. The film moves across the territories that made up the empire, India, Africa, the Caribbean, and beyond, using newsreel, home movies, and photographs to show how colonial rule actually looked on the ground: administrators, soldiers, plantations, ports, and the everyday life of both colonizers and colonized. Historians and commentary fill in context between the footage, covering the trade routes and military campaigns that built the empire and the independence movements that dismantled it. The color restoration is the film's main asset, turning familiar black-and-white imagery of the Raj, colonial Africa, and wartime mobilization into something that reads as recent rather than distant. The film does not shy from the empire's violence and exploitation alongside its infrastructure and institutions, presenting a global system at its peak before following its rapid unraveling after the Second World War.