Your comment reminded me of how I felt during my first semester of studying history at university: I was totally overwhelmed by the task of finding out what I should read for my classes and papers - how do I even that stuff, and where should I begin? So while I really can't give you any specific pointers with regard to the Empire in Africa, I can tell you a bit about how I learned to do it in university!

So there's basically two ways to start reading up on a specific topic. The first is to find a bibliography on it and start reading. That could either a comprehensive one which aims to document everything ever written on a specific subject - one example for that would be the bibliography of Bavaria maintained by the Bavarian State Library with the support of a bunch of other university and provincial libraries. The bibliography now lists more than 800,000 books, papers, encyclopedic entries and even newspaper articles that were published since 1927 and concern the state of Bavaria in any way. The advantages and drawbacks of this approach should be obvious: While you probably don't miss put on too much literature on the subject, the bibliography doesn't differentiate between what is important on a topic and what is only tangentially related or merely revisits what other authors already wrote on. You can get overwhelmed quickly when using big bibliographies like this - even a niche category like "noise protection in Bavaria" shows 77 titles from 1977 to today, and if I plug in a wider topic like "Bavaria and the Thirty Years' War" it gives me 624 titles which is great if I want to write a dissertation, but way too much for a simple school assignment.

The other type of bibliography is the "reading list" created e.g. by university professors for their students. This is great if you can find those, because someone who presumably already knows a lot about the subject at hand sat down and tried to list all the books somebody should read in order to get a good overview of it. The emphasis lies on the "can" here, though - you need to be a bit lucky to find something. I personally find that Wikipedia is often a good starting point, although its collaborative nature also means that the listed titles are sometimes wildly different in scope or quality. Here is one with regards to the British Empire. There is another good and mostly reliable way to get such a selected bibliography besides that, though, which leads me to my next and last point: the so-called "snowball method".

The snowball method (at least this was the name we used back when I studied at Freiburg/Germany in 2006) basically goes like this: You find a starting point that touches on your topic, look at its citations, take a look at the books and articles referred to by your starting point, then look again at the citations used by those... and so on, like a snowball rolling downhill that quickly evolves into a huge avalanche. There are two problems with this method, however: 1. What is a good starting point?, and 2. Your reading list can grow too quickly and too much if you're not careful. Regarding the latter it however also has a great advantage in that you can quickly see which works are repeatedly cited by different authors - this normally means that they are of some importance for people researching a subject, and that you should definitely check it out. And for the former: If there are textbooks or encyclopedia entries on your topic that try to present a condensed overview, then those normally come with a curated bibliography (see above) as well which you can peruse. When I look at Gale's "Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450" for example, then I can find a short article on "Britain's African Colonies" (pp. 147-150) there, which in turn refers me to:

• Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd ed. London and New York: Longman, 2001.
• Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
• Falola, Toyin, ed. Africa; Vol. 3: Colonial Africa, 1885–1939. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001.
• Falola, Toyin, ed. African Politics in Postimperial Times: The Essays of Richard L. Sklar. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001.
• Louis, William Roger, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire; Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, edited by Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

The second and fourth entries are maybe a bit too specific, but I would refinitely recommend looking at the other three titles, because they sound like great resources and starting points for the snowball method to me.

Okay, I lied: There is one last thing I need to mention and which I didn't touch on at all, and that is that you have to consider what broader topics your specific research interest or question really covers or touches. Taking your point of interest (British Empire in Africa, 1880-1980) as an example, then it is really at least three subquestions you need to look at. First: It's "What is the history of the British Empire?", so you need to find works on the British Empire and British colonialism in general. Then it's "What is an Empire?", which means that you should have at least a vague idea of how colonialism, imperialism and "Empire" are commonly defined when you write your paper. Then you have "What is the history of Africa, 1880-1980?" - you will find a lot of information in works that maybe don't specificaly talk about the British Empire, but because they are about, say, Nigerian history in the 20th century they will invariably talk about the realities of Empire before 1960. This blog post gives a great explanation of how this approach works.

If all that seems a bit daunting, then I wouldn't fret too much - your research interest is quite broad in its scope and also sure to be well covered, and any given textbook should present you with a good overview and a well-curated bibliography to start working with. The "subquestion" approach I explained above only becomes really important when you are looking at more specific questions that don't have a ton of research written on it - my Master's thesis for example was an examination of a Viennese confraternity which existed during the 17th and 18th centuries, and there is exactly zero literature on that confraternity besides what I wrote. So I had to look at related literature: What is a confraternity in the first place? What is the history of Vienna during that time? What were the religious beliefs and practices prevalent in European/Austrian/Viennese Catholicism back then? What is the history of the church building in which said confraternity had its HQ? And so on. But again: This is advanced stuff and probably not what you need for a school assignment like yours. Instead I would focus on what one or two textbooks say on your topic and go on from there.

There is much more that could be said about researching literature, and it really is one of the most important and yet least talked about things you learn (or should learn) at university. This includes questions like what databases and other resources you can use, why and how you should look at the authors of the works you read and how their specific perspectives may colour their writing, when it is appropriate to use older literature for your work and when it isn't and so on... But this post is already turning out way too long, and again: Don't worry too much, you are writing a paper for school and not a PhD thesis for university. Have fun researching!

Your comment reminded me of how I felt during my first semester of studying history at university: I was totally overwhelmed by the task of finding out what I should read for my classes and papers - how do I even that stuff, and where should I begin? So while I really can't give you any specific pointers with regard to the Empire in Africa, I can tell you a bit about how I learned to do it in university!

So there's basically two ways to start reading up on a specific topic. The first is to find a bibliography on it and start reading. That could either a comprehensive one which aims to document everything ever written on a specific subject - one example for that would be the bibliography of Bavaria maintained by the Bavarian State Library with the support of a bunch of other university and provincial libraries. The bibliography now lists more than 800,000 books, papers, encyclopedic entries and even newspaper articles that were published since 1927 and concern the state of Bavaria in any way. The advantages and drawbacks of this approach should be obvious: While you probably don't miss put on too much literature on the subject, the bibliography doesn't differentiate between what is important on a topic and what is only tangentially related or merely revisits what other authors already wrote on. You can get overwhelmed quickly when using big bibliographies like this - even a niche category like "noise protection in Bavaria" shows 77 titles from 1977 to today, and if I plug in a wider topic like "Bavaria and the Thirty Years' War" it gives me 624 titles which is great if I want to write a dissertation, but way too much for a simple school assignment.

The other type of bibliography is the "reading list" created e.g. by university professors for their students. This is great if you can find those, because someone who presumably already knows a lot about the subject at hand sat down and tried to list all the books somebody should read in order to get a good overview of it. The emphasis lies on the "can" here, though - you need to be a bit lucky to find something. I personally find that Wikipedia is often a good starting point, although its collaborative nature also means that the listed titles are sometimes wildly different in scope or quality. Here is one with regards to the British Empire. There is another good and mostly reliable way to get such a selected bibliography besides that, though, which leads me to my next and last point: the so-called "snowball method".

The snowball method (at least this was the name we used back when I studied at Freiburg/Germany in 2006) basically goes like this: You find a starting point that touches on your topic, look at its citations, take a look at the books and articles referred to by your starting point, then look again at the citations used by those... and so on, like a snowball rolling downhill that quickly evolves into a huge avalanche. There are two problems with this method, however: 1. What is a good starting point?, and 2. Your reading list can grow too quickly and too much if you're not careful. Regarding the latter it however also has a great advantage in that you can quickly see which works are repeatedly cited by different authors - this normally means that they are of some importance for people researching a subject, and that you should definitely check it out. And for the former: If there are textbooks or encyclopedia entries on your topic that try to present a condensed overview, then those normally come with a curated bibliography (see above) as well which you can peruse. When I look at Gale's "Encyclopedia of Western Colonialism since 1450" for example, then I can find a short article on "Britain's African Colonies" (pp. 147-150) there, which in turn refers me to:

• Cain, P. J., and A. G. Hopkins. British Imperialism, 1688–2000, 2nd ed. London and New York: Longman, 2001.
• Elkins, Caroline. Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain’s Gulag in Kenya. New York: Henry Holt, 2005.
• Falola, Toyin, ed. Africa; Vol. 3: Colonial Africa, 1885–1939. Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2001.
• Falola, Toyin, ed. African Politics in Postimperial Times: The Essays of Richard L. Sklar. Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2001.
• Louis, William Roger, ed. The Oxford History of the British Empire; Vol. 4: The Twentieth Century, edited by Judith M. Brown and William Roger Louis. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press, 1999.

The second and fourth entries are maybe a bit too specific, but I would refinitely recommend looking at the other three titles, because they sound like great resources and starting points for the snowball method to me.

Okay, I lied: There is one last thing I need to mention and which I didn't touch on at all, and that is that you have to consider what broader topics your specific research interest or question really covers or touches. Taking your point of interest (British Empire in Africa, 1880-1980) as an example, then it is really at least three subquestions you need to look at. First: It's "What is the history of the British Empire?", so you need to find works on the British Empire and British colonialism in general. Then it's "What is an Empire?", which means that you should have at least a vague idea of how colonialism, imperialism and "Empire" are commonly defined when you write your paper. Then you have "What is the history of Africa, 1880-1980?" - you will find a lot of information in works that maybe don't specificaly talk about the British Empire, but because they are about, say, Nigerian history in the 20th century they will invariably talk about the realities of Empire before 1960. This blog post gives a great explanation of how this approach works.

If all that seems a bit daunting, then I wouldn't fret too much - your research interest is quite broad in its scope and also sure to be well covered, and any given textbook should present you with a good overview and a well-curated bibliography to start working with. The "subquestion" approach I explained above only becomes really important when you are looking at more specific questions that don't have a ton of research written on it - my Master's thesis for example was an examination of a Viennese confraternity which existed during the 17th and 18th centuries, and there is exactly zero literature on that confraternity besides what I wrote myself. So I had to look at related literature: What is a confraternity in the first place? What is the history of Vienna during that time? What were the religious beliefs and practices prevalent in European/Austrian/Viennese Catholicism back then? What is the history of the church building in which said confraternity had its HQ? And so on. But again: This is advanced stuff and probably not what you need for a school assignment like yours. Instead I would focus on what one or two textbooks say on your topic and go on from there.

There is much more that could be said about researching literature, and it really is one of the most important and yet least talked about things you learn (or should learn) at university. This includes questions like what databases and other resources you can use, why and how you should look at the authors of the works you read and how their specific perspectives may colour their writing, when it is appropriate to use older literature for your work and when it isn't and so on... But this post is already turning out way too long, and again: Don't worry too much, you are writing a paper for school and not a PhD thesis for university. Have fun researching!

I’ve looked through the reading list on modern Britain but haven’t seen anything that covers what I’m looking for.

Have you looked at the reading list for Africa? You will probably have better luck there.

One other approach here would be to look through Ph.D. comps lists. Here's a set of lists from one of the best-established African history Ph.D. programs in the US: https://history.wisc.edu/our-graduate-program/current-students/sample-prelims-lists/. It's organized regionally rather than thematically (so, Southern Africa rather than British colonialism), but if you go through the regional lists you will find more than enough relevant titles.

Here's one focusing on Colonization, which has a specific section on British Empire: https://networks.h-net.org/node/69274/pdf

For reference-level works, the Oxford History of the British Empire series that another commentator cited is good. You might actually start with the volume on historiography to get a sense of the literature overall. The Oxford Research Encyclopedia for African History is also good, and includes several entires related to empire, which have suggested reading lists included.