 almost two decades at that point back in 2018 when I started writing this. And I thought, you know, I know the narrative of the British Empire in the modern period, and I wanted to be able to write, to offer just a narrative history of the British Empire because I felt it came organically out of my teaching and the lectures that I give. And I'd been working on assembling that, you know, for so long. So that was one goal. But the other kind of probably more important intellectual goal for me was