On the 150th anniversary of the death of British explorer David Livingstone, Ben Lerwill asks why intrepid British men and women have long been – and still are – fond of venturing to the farthest corners of the globe.
In the early 1820s, a 10-year-old boy was put to work in a cotton mill on the banks of the River Clyde. He was tasked with tying together threads of broken yarn on a factory floor that thundered with the din of spinning machines. It was the sort of…