In 1909 the millionaire French hanker and philanthropist Albert Kahn embarked on an ambitious project to create a colour photographic record of, and for, the peoples of the world. As an idealist and an internationalist, Kahn believed that he could use the new autochrome process, the world"s first user-friendly, true-colour photographic system, to promote cross-cultural peace and understanding. Until recently, Kahn"s huge collection of 72,000 autochromes remained relatively unheard of, the vast majority of them unpublished. Now, a century after he launched his Archives of the Planet project, this book and the BBC television series it accompanies are bringing Albert Kahn"s dazzling pictures to a mass audience for the first time and putting colour into what we tend to think of as an entirely monochrome age. Kahn used his vast fortune to send a group of intrepid photographers to more than fifty countries around the world, often at crucial junctures in their history, when age-old...