Review by Choice Review
Darwin (Nuffield College, Oxford) examines the global expansion of the British Empire from its humble origins to its unraveling after 1945. He builds upon his excellent monograph, The Empire Project (CH, Apr'10, 47-4636), asserting that there was no single imperial mind-set. Darwin stresses instead that the empire was driven by a constellation of forces that at times worked in tandem, but at others competed over the direction, expansion, and administration of the empire. For Darwin, the empire was not a monolithic entity, but constantly evolved to meet the challenges of holding together its far-flung regions. The work commences with a very useful historiographical overview that will be beneficial to both those new to the study of the British Empire and experts alike. It then advances chronologically, examining the rise and fall of the empire through a variety of perspectives and places. Darwin provides much useful background information, ensuring that his book is accessible to a variety of audiences. Clever analysis, poignant argument, accessibility of the text, and inviting prose make this work a must read for those interested in the British Empire. Summing Up: Essential. Most levels/libraries. J. Rankin East Tennessee State University
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by New York Times Review
"AN overseas empire produces a vast sea of paper," John Darwin writes. That sea - wide, deep and often treacherous - is what remains of the British Empire for historians to trawl, though few attempt to chart the whole of it in one relatively compact volume. Darwin managed something similar with his previous books "The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970" and "After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405" - emerging from the imperial brine with poise and balance where lesser historians would have beached themselves like lost whales or glugged down to the depths, tangled in the tentacles of a giant squid. In "Unfinished Empire" he turns his attention to the British Empire's why, who and how: small words that signify very big questions. He divides the "why" into four plausible C's of imperial purpose: colonizing, civilizing, converting and commerce. As for the "who," his interest is vested in the colonizers more than the colonized. Those Britons who sallied forth into the wider world, whether as traders, settlers, soldiers, politicians or missionaries, make excellent subjects - not least because they do not seem to have had an especially good time of it. In Jamaica, they suffered yellow fever, malaria, dengue and the "bloody flux." In Virginia, they settled at a meeting point of fresh and salt water, and ended up accidentally drinking their own sewage. In India, they endured dysentery, hepatitis, plague and a shortage of marriageable white women. Some of them were even killed in colonial wars, though they did try to avoid that: "'When a body of Natives is attached,' ran the official instruction, 'it should invariably be employed in examining bush or rugged ground offering concealment to the enemy before any European body is ordered to advance.'" One almost wonders why they didn't just stay at home with a nice cup of tea - though, of course, without the empire, they wouldn't have had the tea. Abroad, Britons attempted to cheer themselves up by smoking hookahs, drinking half-pints of brandy with dinner, frolicking with concubines - and, where possible, making huge amounts of money. There was nothing they would not buy and sell: gold, sugar, tobacco, booze, drugs, guns, people, cotton, coal, timber, coffee, rice, indigo, human hair and something called isinglass, "a gelatine drawn from the bladders of warm-water fish." Darwin's lucid chapter on trade reveals how all of these dealings in all of these farflung outposts ultimately found their way back to enrich the center: "To the empire colored red on the map," the City of London "had added an empire glued together by debt and defended by gold." It was not entirely about making money. Above all, Darwin insists, empire was complicated, and there was no master plan. Even if it is broken down from a messy whole into several slightly more coherent phases, it was usually inconsistent, often unstable and to varying degrees improvised. The empire was extremely large and decentralized, and it lasted for about 500 years. Darwin's mostly thematic structure obliges him to leap around in time and space: from taking possession of Lagos to taking possession of Kowloon, from trading in South America to trading in Canada, from the English-speaking "Straits Chinese" in Malaya to the "Black English" Krio in Sierra Leone. The breadth of Darwin's learning is impressive, though the fact that this is a short history means some of his examples (notably, snapshots from the fabulously intricate story of Indian independence) inevitably lose a little of the very complexity he emphasizes. This is not substantially troubling. One of the virtues of this book is its brevity. Darwin's tone throughout is admirably detached and scholarly, though his dry wit keeps it well away from being boring. His cool falters only when he brings up the postcolonialists: "For some Western historians, it remains de rigueur to insist that for them, empire was 'evil.'" He returns to this subject several times, without naming names. Still, whoever they may be, it is surprising that the moral critics of empire are his particular bugbear. On radio and television as well as in bookstores, the louder voices have of late been those of pro-imperial historians. He does not mention that school at all, though "Unfinished Empire" works just as well as an antidote to either strain of polemic. Though the "why" and "who" are diverting, many of the most interesting ideas here come from the "how" of empire. Darwin looks at this from many angles: settlement, cooperation, war, trade, missionary activity and administration. A striking theme is that of the empire's essential racism, which he approaches from a neglected but fascinating angle: the cultural and sometimes legal imposition of an English or British identity, often strongly linked with masculinity, upon the settlers. In 1366, the Statute of Kilkenny forbade Englishmen in Ireland to sport fashionable "Irish style" haircuts. Later, the East India Company barred its employees from wearing "moors dress" - the loose jacket, trousers and slippers common in the hot parts of South Asia. In the 1850s and 1860s, "an austere macho ethos was deliberately cultivated" as a consciously British image in the Punjab. One hapless civil servant brought a piano with him. "I'll smash his piano," the region's governor growled. Evidently, tinkling the ivories was not macho enough. Individually, such measures may seem trivial. Darwin adds them up into something significant. If British agents were permitted to "go native," they might build their own local power structures and defect from London's control. This was a real threat: "Of all colonial peoples, it was white settlers who were hardest to rule and who gave London most trouble," he asserts. The exception, of course, was the great Indian rebellion of 1857, to which Darwin devotes considerable attention. Throughout the 19th century, and especially in the aftermath of that quake, the British abroad strengthened their sense of Britishness. "This was the racial solidarity of their administrative steel frame: defection to the locals became culturally unthinkable," he writes. "It was reinforced by the device of deliberate social distance and the strict codification of almost all social contact." Racism was not incidental to empire: it was the cement. Even toward the end of empire (and beyond it), mainstream opinion in Britain retained an unshakable confidence in the endurance of its values and centrality to world affairs. Darwin quotes Prime Minister Harold Wilson asserting puffily in 1965 that "Britain's frontiers are on the Himalayas," a statement rightly contextualized here as one of support for India against China, but no less tragicomic for that. This confidence, Darwin says, came from a "belief that the British Empire was unique and incomparable." It considered itself free, democratic, open, and politically and economically liberal: a sort of British exceptionalism. As this sharp, thoughtful, enjoyable and levelheaded book shows, the real picture was a good deal murkier. There was nothing the British would not buy and sell: gold, sugar, tobacco, booze, drugs, guns, people. Alex von Tunzelmann is the author of "Indian Summer: The Secret History of the End of an Empire" and "Red Heat: Conspiracy, Murder, and the Cold War in the Caribbean."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [February 24, 2013]
Review by Booklist Review
Founded in a fit of absentmindedness, as the saying goes, the British Empire was never a monolithic polity but had different circumstances surrounding the establishment, growth, and rule of its colonies. Combine the variations in its parts and the range of historical opinion about it, from praise to condemnation, and one wonders whether a single-volume history of it is even possible. Darwin confidently forges one, however, that accentuates the decentralized character of the centuries of its expansion, which proceeded in tension with the links of trade, law, and military power between an outpost and London. If imperial control varied from colony to colony, it waxed and waned in a general sequence everywhere. British contact with a foreign land was followed by growth of a colonial society, assertions of autonomy or rebellion, and eventual independence. To contemporaries at all times, the worth and justice of the empire provoked debate that Darwin quotes amid his accounts of empire building in America, Africa, India, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Vast and controversial though his subject, Darwin raises all key historical issues in this solid survey of British imperialism.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Nostalgic Brits esteem the Empire as a redemptive "civilizing mission," others as an exercise in greed on a global scale. Oxford historian Darwin (After Tamerlane) argues convincingly that it was an ad hoc, largely private enterprise pursued by traders, migrants, soldiers, missionaries, and entrepreneurs with sporadic official support from the Crown. The book begins with Elizabethan England, at the time an outsider on the world stage: Spain enjoyed a "silver-rich empire" in the Americas; Holland controlled Asian spice islands; and Portugal had an outpost on the west coast of India. But by 1700, an "English Atlantic" was prospering with settlements strewn from Jamaica to Newfoundland, and though colonists played a minor role in Asia, traders there used military aid to assume control of the Indian subcontinent. By century's end, America had broken free, but the defeat of France at Waterloo in 1815 ushered in a golden age of trade and enlargement for the U.K. Though U.S. and German economies surged around the dawn of the 20th century, British expansion continued until WWII, when the unwieldy and far-flung agglomeration of territories began to finally break free from the shackles of colonialism. Temporally and geographically sprawling, Darwin's study is as expansive as his subject, yet his lucidly rendered project holds together remarkably well. Maps, illus. Agent: Adam Eaglin, the Wylie Agency. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A sweeping, nondogmatic study of the gradual and not always secure development of the British Empire. Darwin (After Tamerlane, 2007, etc.) looks fairly at both sides of the scholarly debate over the rightness of British imperialism, as both a civilizing force and imposition of a "cruel yoke of economic dependency." Versatility seemed to be the key to Britain's success in fashioning mercantile strongholds in the Americas, Middle East, India, Southeast Asia, China and Africa. The Tudor conquest of Ireland imparted some rough, lasting lessons in British territorial security, while British seamen, latecomers to Atlantic exploration, played catch-up against the exclusionary Spanish, Portuguese and Dutch, insisting on the universal right of "freedom of the seas." Private entrepreneurs, such as the leaders of the companies that first made contact in Virginia, West Africa and India, took the first steps; from possession by government charter, the privateers needed protection and assurance from London in luring settlers to the regions who would then enjoy the same civil rights as they had at home. Darwin moves steadily from this "assertion of sovereignty" to annexation to resorting to war in order to retain possession and quell rebellion, with more or less success (read: American colonies). The author does an excellent job delineating the remarkable British rule in India, which succeeded by "sheer bureaucratic persistence." Scottish missionary David Livingstone's formula for empire success--"commerce, Christianity and civilization"--gives a good idea of the myriad evolving colonies Darwin pursues in this vigorous but restrained historical survey. An evenhanded, erudite book that finds the work of empire building more nuanced than catastrophic.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Review by Choice Review
Review by New York Times Review
Review by Booklist Review
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Review by Kirkus Book Review
