The picture on the Boys Own Paper of March, 1913, says it all with panache. It portrays the Scots Greys in their triumph at Waterloo, epitomising the military power of the British Empire in its heyday.

Pick any patriotic subject — maps of red, postcards sublime, topical journals and oceanic posters, world-ranging stamps and jubilee mugs — and it is covered by Ashley Jackson in his gloriously produced Mad Dogs and Englishmen (Quercus, £20). You feel the throbbing heart of the hundred years of British dominion from Cairo to Cape Town, Bombay to Alice Springs.

Ashley introduces a myriad of images that anyone would have been familiar with in hearth and home anywhere in the world at the peak of Empire.

There are striking full-page portraits of Queen Victoria and her favourite general Gordon defending Khartoum against a horde of Dervishes. And the explorer Speke, wearing his magnificent double-breasted jacket, looks at ease before the source of the Nile. There are pictures of warships, camels in the desert and regal elephants at the great durbars.

The world was peopled by head-hunting Dyaks, Gulf sheiks, Eskimo hunters and Indian maharajahs — all presumably loyal subjects. Lakes and mountains were named for the great and the good (as it seemed to the pioneers) and Kipling was to praise Britain’s domain over “palm and pine”. It was all to give way to “human suffering and oppression”. But stay awhile. Banish any thoughts of right or wrong, for as Ashley presents it, this was the ultimate spectacle and, for a moment, in this marvellous quilt of memorabilia you can be a subject of king, queen and country in a far-off land, heavenly benighted. “Tell Daddy we are happy under British rule”, proclaims a banner at a state visit to Aden.

Meanwhile, the consequences of Empire were the wars fought during the Victorian realm. One of the most vicious and unforgiving was the Indian Mutiny, as it is known in the West. This is not the expression used by Som Prakash Verma who sees the rebellion as an “armed struggle” against British class domination. His book 1857: An Illustrated History (OUP, £35,99) is a jewel in the crown of publishing, which in its unique approach dispels many myths surrounding the revolt.

The book achieves this through the use of contemporary sketches that faithfully reflect the insurrection of the sepoys — Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company — from the uprising in Meerut over greased cartridges to the relief of cities and towns by a vengeful British army. Unforgettable pictures include the storming of Delhi and the firing from guns of captured rebels — “a more terrible punishment can scarcely be conceived”. All praise to Verma for his deeply insightful narrative into the year of crisis.

The British Empire had much earlier origins, according to Alison Games in The Web of Empire (OUP, £19,99). In lucid prose she descibes how British merchants in the 16th and 17th centuries colonised Virginia, traded with Japan in its small island outpost of Hirado and established settlements in Madagascar — the “phoenix of colonial experiments”.

Illuminating her book with a marvellous panorama of diplomacy and trade, expeditions and territorial expansion, Games offers a valuable reflection of how an ineffectual island off the coast of Europe could embark on the creation of a global kingdom.