An empirico-historical inquiry into the empire cinema in Hollywood and Britain during the turbulent 1930s and 1940s. It shows how the empire cinema constructed the colonial world, its rationale for doing so, and the manner in which such constructions were received by the colonized people. Although empire cinema has been examined by western scholars, such studies have located the films almost wholly within the colonizing country rather that exploring their reception among the colonized. By shifting the emphasis to historical reception of imperial popular culture this book seeks to fill out a certain terrain between the current Indian writing on national cinema and non-Indian writing on empire cinema. Combining wide-ranging scholarship based on original documents, film, stuides and historical and political analyses, the book aims to give the reader a sense of how ideologies, images and identites are constructed, promoted, contested and resisted in relation to key film representations of empire. This book offers fresh insights in the field of cultural and film studies from a multi-focal perspective.