by Nick Bunker
In the United Kingdom, I am greatly indebted to William Legge, the tenth Earl of Dartmouth, his brother Rupert Legge, and the Dartmouth Heirloom Trust for kindly permitting me to reproduce Gainsborough’s portrait of their ancestor and to quote from the Dartmouth papers. My thanks are also due to Joanna Terry, head of Archives and Heritage at the Staffordshire Record Office, and her predecessor, Thea Randall, county archivist. Elsewhere in the U.K., I am grateful to John Moffett, librarian of the East Asian History of Science Library at the Needham Research Institute, Cambridge; to the Fitzwilliam Estates for permitting the publication of material from the Burke and Rockingham papers held as part of the Wentworth Woodhouse Muniments at the Sheffield Archives; to Maia Sheridan, manuscripts archivist at the Department of Special Collections, University of St. Andrews; and to the staff of all the other libraries and record repositories referred to in the endnotes, especially Sarah Millard of the Bank of England Archives, Hugh Alexander of the National Archives at Kew, and Annie Pinder and Simon Gough of the Parliamentary Archives at the House of Lords. While visiting Lord North’s old estate in Somerset, I received a friendly welcome from Wayne Bennett, the manager of Dillington House, and from Lady Caroline Cameron of Whitelackington Manor, to both of whom I extend my thanks.
Like its predecessor, Making Haste from Babylon, An Empire on the Edge was commissioned in America by Carol Brown Janeway of Alfred A. Knopf, without whose editorial support, encouragement, and wisdom neither project could have come to fruition. I am deeply grateful to Carol; to Will Sulkin, her opposite number at Random House in London, who commissioned the British editions of both books for The Bodley Head and examined the first draft of An Empire on the Edge with an athletic attention to detail; and to my agents, Bill Hamilton of A. M. Heath in London and George Lucas of Inkwell Management in New York. At Knopf, my thanks are also due to Victoria Pearson, Lisa Montebello, Joshua LaMorey, and Erica Hinsley; and at The Bodley Head, to Stuart Williams and Katherine Ailes.
This book is dedicated to my wife, Sue Temple, with my heartfelt thanks for her love and companionship, and for her frequent advice to pause for a while at moments when work on the book threatened to become overwhelming. Sue was ably assisted by our otterhound, Champion Teckelgarth Quintus, a tower of canine strength.
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NICK BUNKER is the author of Making Haste from Babylon, a history of the Mayflower Pilgrims described by the Washington Post as “a remarkable success.” Educated at King’s College, Cambridge, and Columbia University, he was a journalist for the Liverpool Echo and the Financial Times, and then an investment banker, chiefly with the Hong Kong and Shanghai Banking Corporation. During his careers in journalism and finance, he travelled widely in China, India, the former Soviet bloc, and the United States. He now lives in Lincolnshire, England.
