The British Empire In Color was originally broadcast as a three-part BBC television miniseries covering roughly the past 200 years in British world history. It is essentially a vivid recapitulation of these years, showing the glories as well as the ignominies of British rule. It shows the nation’s successes and failures with equal candor.

It also shines a 21st century light of political correctness on the British Empire, emphasizing more than once how British institutions such as the Church of England sided with the reigning government over the poorly-paid, cruelly treated working classes who had gone on strike on the homefront. It looks at the treatment of people of color throughout the Empire’s history, on up until recently, through racism, bigotry, and prejudice.

It stresses both the good and bad things that British sovereignty brought to its colonies. The positives such as technology, education, and the rule of law are shown in balance with the previously mentioned negatives. It also shows the end result of both sides of this equation, and the viewer is given a front row center position on the action.

The buildup of the empire is given the least amount of time, mainly recapping events and accomplishments, victories both military and political, and successes in general, a sort of short forethought before getting into the meat of the three parts, titled "Decline", "Fall", and "Legacy of the British Empire". Its coverage ranges from Canada to India, from Australia to Nigeria, from the Caribbean to South Africa, which was the length and breadth of the Empire at its grandest moment, when it held sovereignty over more than a third of the Earth’s human inhabitants.

From here on, the majority of the story and the footage concentrates on the deterioration of the Empire, with little coverage of other parts of history, such as the two world wars and the various insurgencies in other British colonies that are exhaustively covered elsewhere. The story revolves mainly around the broad picture of the dissolution of the Empire.

Most, if not all, of the footage shown was drawn from recently discovered film, all in original color, quite rare in the early days of filmmaking. The series begins in detail during the reign of King Edward VII, in the early 1900s, covering the circumstances which drew England into World War One, then shows the festivities celebrating the end of the war, along with a parade in Paris.

The great economic decline began immediately after the war ended, while many goods were still rationed and scarce, if not nonexistent. Many jobs were no longer needed due to the industrial drawdown, with an ambitious film journey covering the length and breadth of England and showing the industries in decline, particularly shipbuilding and its associated contributing manufacturers and suppliers, while at the same time employers were hiking required working hours and lowering pay. Particular emphasis was placed on the disparity between the elegant lives of the aristocracy, and the plight of the poor, which was a large part of the population. The beginnings of trade unions around this time helped the laborers somewhat, but the majority of the population was still at or below the poverty line.