The Forsyte family is the lens through which we observe the state of the nation," playwright and screenwriter Lin Coghlan tells the BBC. "It was a moment in history where imperialism and profit built families and institutions – but at an extraordinary cost. A theme which never becomes irrelevant.” “Pivotal to the entire story is an episode in which he rapes his wife – although marital rape was not illegal when Galsworthy was writing: it was not outlawed in the UK until 1991. “Another of the books' themes is imperialism – dominion over other nations, as well as the dominion of one generation over another, and of one person over another. The family is the empire in miniature .”
“The West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion (to which few members of other civilizations were converted) but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact; non-Westerners never do.” —Samuel P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilisation and the Remaking of the World Order, 1996, p. 51