The Face of Empire

The Cambridge historian Piers Brendon, author of more than a dozen books, including biographies of Churchill and Eisenhower, and a powerful work on the 1930s, "The Dark Valley," has now turned his spotlight — and his scalpel — upon the history of the last two centuries of the British Empire. The result, "The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997" (Jonathan Cape, 793 pages, £25), just published to real fanfare in England, is a massive but readable and highly provocative volume, which ranges all the way from the defeat of Cornwallis's troops at Yorktown (in 1781) to the handover of Hong Kong in 1997. It is full of atmospherics, of larger than life characters, of epic and tragic scenes, along with an amazing array of photographs (though, alas, no serious maps).

This is not a dry, blow-by-blow account of Britain's impact upon the outside world. It is not the cheery story that British schoolchildren (like myself, some 50 years ago) received of the steady acquisition of new territories, of the benign imperial rule over those lands, and then, after India's independence in 1947, of a graceful withdrawal. In Brendon's view, that favorable image needs correction, and he is here to provide it. This is the story of the British Empire, warts and all.

Mr. Brendon wears his scholarship lightly, and it is only when one turns to his sources that one grasps the sheer array of private letters, diaries, scrapbooks, official reports, autobiographies, and secondary sources upon which this account rests: He is determined to keep the reader's attention, and to move the story along with verve, wit, and gorgeous illustration of imperial follies and glories. This is, after all, the author of the best-selling work "Eminent Edwardians" (1979). It is therefore not surprising that the best parts of this book are the lively vignettes of characters, such as the arch-aggrandizer Cecil Rhodes, those self-important Viceroys of India George Nathaniel Curzon and the late Viscount Mountbatten, and, of course, of Winston Churchill himself. (Mr. Brendon was for many years the keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre in Cambridge, so he had easy access to the private letters and diaries of so many of Britain's imperial elite.)

It is impossible not to be impressed by the sheer geographical coverage of this work, which ranges from Swaziland to Burma, from Jamaica to Singapore. Still, it is easy to see which parts of "the Empire upon which the sun never set" interest Mr. Brendon most: India and Africa, and parts of the Far East and Middle East, get a lot more attention than the Dominions — Canada, Australia, and New Zealand — perhaps because the latter are rather more British and therefore more dull, perhaps because the white settlers in those lands had stopped killing the indigenous tribes early in this book's epic tale, and therefore have a naturally smaller role in his bloody account, a revisionist history of the second order. (The longest section about Canada describes the amazing fighting spirit of their divisions in the First World War trenches; the longest section about South Africa describes Britain's inglorious performances in the two Boer Wars.)

This leads us, then, to what I think are the two scholarly weaknesses in this enjoyable addition to the massive literature upon the British Empire. The first is that there is a very definite preference for providing the reader with lots of vignettes of imperial statesmen and adventurers, and also of the great or less great nationalist leaders — Kruger, Nehru, Nasser, Nkrumah, and others — over analyzing the structure of the empire, the complex and diffuse system of authority that supported it, and the technological and organizational wizardry that kept this amazing creation going for century after century. There is one discussion of the role of the telegraph cable in the advancement and maintenance of the empire, but it quickly becomes a disquisition on the effect of technological gains on the British sense of racial superiority. The Royal Navy, upon which the entire edifice of the empire rested, gets little mention, apart from its dilapidated condition around 1900 and the ignominious sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales and battle cruiser Repulse by Japanese aircraft in 1942. Absent in Mr. Brendon's survey is a genuine explanation for the way a small island state off northwest Europe actually managed this remarkable, incredibly complex, and geographically disparate entity, at its height consisting of one-quarter of the land surface of the globe, through the City of London. Such an explanation would point not just to the role of the telegraph, but to Lloyd's shipping insurance, the Cardwell military reforms, which made service more attractive to potential recruits and bolstered an army depleted by the Crimean War and the Sepoy Mutiny, the network of maritime bases, and the myriad of long-range cruisers, all powered by Welsh stoking coals. Since Mr. Brendon readily supplies us with so many examples of British arrogance, cruelty, and folly, or of gallantry going astray (as in the Gallipoli campaign of 1915–16), the reader might be forgiven for wondering how this global organization could have kept itself afloat for so lengthy a period of time if it was so incompetent, and run by leaders so wrongheaded.

This brings me to my second reservation about Mr. Brendon's "Decline and Fall." In his introduction, the author argues, convincingly, that, since the Thatcher era, members of the British media and academy such as John Charmley and Niall Ferguson have created "an unhealthy neo-imperialist climate," and have played down the seamier aspects of the history of the empire. In his book, Mr. Brendon promises in the very same paragraph, "less emphasis is placed upon the triumphs than upon the disasters that undermined the fabric of the Empire." Of course, the author is entitled to his own emphasis, and both students of the empire and general readers can surely benefit by reading this book alongside the less critical accounts of recent years. But it is important to recognize that Mr. Brendon is deliberately swinging the pendulum, and intends "Decline and Fall" to be a provocative work. Even beginning the "decline" story with Cornwallis's ignominious surrender at Yorktown, in the very era when British troops were advancing across northern India, not long before seizing the Cape, New Zealand, Singapore, and Hong Kong, and a full 142 years before the Empire reached its largest extent —this is a choice intended to startle the reader.

As I finished reading Mr. Brendon's epic the other evening, I could not help recalling that marvelously funny scene in Monty Python's "Life of Brian" where the Jewish Zeolot leader (played by John Cleese) exhorts his fellow revolutionaries with the cry: "What have the Romans ever done for us?" Tentatively, some of his followers offer various answers — the aqueduct, the sewers, the roads, law and order, and so on. This fast-increasing chaos provokes Mr. Cleese into one of his most famous and absurd remarks:

"All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?" The audience suggests,

"Brought peace?"

To which Mr. Cleese replies, testily, "Oh, peace — shut up!"

Of course the Monty Python gang were sending up the much acclaimed benefits of Roman administration, just as, in his own way, Mr. Brendon is trying to prick the balloon of recently revived and uncritical pride in the former British Empire. But there was a lot of truth in that madcap movie scene. Just think of re-doing the Monty Python scene as a debate among Indian nationalists... "What have the British ever done for us?" Well... The railways, the roads, the telegraphs, the harbors (India still has the largest rail network in the world, not much of it built after 1947); the English language, a supreme advantage over China; a really good judicial system, police service, and regimental army; a parliament, and cricket! The lasting legacies of lengthy imperial rule may be a lot more positive than radicals and nationalists thought at the time of its collapse.

Mr. Kennedy is professor of history at Yale University and author or editor of 19 books, including "The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers" (1988).