Relishing the death throes

Piers Brendon does not much like the British empire. In over 650 pages of closely researched, patronising disdain he uses his Stakhanovite labour to perform a smug hatchet job on empire- builders, administrators and the British military. He warns us in his introduction what to expect: ‘Less emphasis is placed here on triumphs than on the disasters that undermined the future of the empire.’

As a result, he accumulates the impression of an empire consisting entirely of unimaginative, hypocritical despots embattled by racial attitudes, snobbery and smug military incompetence. You have to ask yourself how such a useless people as the British managed to acquire a quarter of the earth’s surface and hang onto it until the middle of the 20th century. For by that time, not only had the United Kingdom been weakened by two world wars and her industrial supremacy overtaken, but even the least politically aware of the empire’s peoples had recognised the force of the Gibbon dictum that is Brendon’s text for this book. There is nothing ‘more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in opposition to their inclination and interest’.

He does attempt to answer the question in one sentence: ‘[The empire] had been the product of temporary circumstances that occurred after the loss of the American colonies, the supremacy of the Royal Navy, the establishment of the workshop of the world and the relative weakness of rival states.’ Mutatis mutandis, he could say the same about any other superpower since time began: Assyria, Persia, Rome, Ancient China, the Mughal empire, the Mongols, the Abbasids and now the Americans. The moment of their apparent apogee is the moment immediately before their fall. It is not unusual for each empire’s successor to adopt a high moral tone about its pre-decessor’s shortcomings while feasting on its disintegrating corpse.