From the Publisher
Acclaimed British historian Ferguson (The Pity of War) takes the revisionist (or perhaps re-revisionist) position that the British Empire was, on balance, a good thing, that it "impos[ed] free markets, the rule of law... and relatively incorrupt government" on a quarter of the globe. Ferguson's imperial boosterism differs from more critical recent scholarship on the empire, such as Linda Colley's Captives and Simon Schama's A History of Britain: The Fate of Empire.
Ferguson's gracefully written narrative traces the history of the empire from its beginnings in the 16th century. As Ferguson tells it, by the 18th century British consumers had developed a strong taste for sugar, tobacco, coffee, tea and other imports. The empire's role was to supply these commodities and to offer cheap land to British settlers.
Not until the late 18th century did Britain add a "civilizing mission" to its commercial motives. Liberals in Britain, often fired by religious feelings, abolished the slave trade and then set out to Christianize indigenous peoples. Ferguson gives a wonderful account of the fabled career of missionary and explorer David Livingstone.
The author admits that the British sometimes responded to native opposition with brutality and racism. Yet he argues that other empires, especially those of Germany and Japan, were far more brutal (a not entirely satisfying defense). Indeed, Ferguson contends that Britain nobly sacrificed its empire in order to defeat these imperial rivals in WWII. His provocative and elegantly written account will surely trigger debate, if not downright vilification, among history readers and postcolonial scholars. 25 color illus., b&w illus., maps.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Content Highlights
On India and Britain in 1700
"India's share of total world output at that time has been estimated a 24 per cent - nearly a quarter; Britain's share was just 3 per cent. The idea that Britain might one day rule India would have struck a visitor to Delhi in the late seventeenth century as simply preposterous."
On France and Britain in the 18th Century
"It was victory based on naval superiority. But this in turn was possible only because Britain had one crucial advantage over France: the ability to borrow money. More than third of all Britain's war expenditure was financed by loans. The institutions copied from the Dutch in the time of William III had now come into their own, allowing Pitt's government to spread the cost of war by selling low-interest bonds to the investing public. The French, by contrast, were reduced to begging or stealing. As Bishop Berkeley put it, credit was "the principal advantage which England had over France."
On the Annihilation of Distance
"How on earth did 900 British civil servants and 70'000 British soldiers manage o govern upwards of 250 million Indians?".
"The telegraph cable and the steamship route were two of three metal networks that simultaneously shrank the world and made control of it easier. The third was the railway."
On Trade
"In the age before steam power, India had led the world in manual spinning, weaving and dyeing. The British has first raised tariffs against their products; them demanded free trade when their alternative industrial mode of production had been perfected."
On Australia and Britain
"The great paradox of Australian history is that what started out as a colony polulated by people whom Britain had thrown out proved to be so loyal to the British Empire for so long. America had begun as a combination of tobacco plantation and Puritan utopia, a creation of economic and religious liberty, and ended up as a rebel republic. Australia started out as a jail, the very negation of liberty. Yet the more reliable colonists turned out to be not the Pilgrims but the prisoners."
Victorians' Mission
"The Victorians had more elevated aspirations. They dreamt not just of ruling the world, but of redeeming it. It was no longer enough for them to exploit other races; now the aim became to improve them. Native peoples themselves would cease to be exploited, but their cultures - superstitious, backward, heathen - would have to go. In particular, the Victorians aspired to bring light to what they called the Dark Continent."
" For two hundred years the Empire had engaged in trade, warfare and colonization. It has exported British goods, capital and people. Now, however, it aspired to export British culture."
Imperial War Contribution
"Fully a third of the troops raised during the First World War were colonial (...) In the autumn of 1914, around a third if British forces in France were from India; by the end of the war more than a million Indians had served overseas."
On Germany's War Strategy
" (..) the German strategy lacked realism. What the Germans needed were men like Lawrence, human chameleons with the ability to penetrate non-European ultures. But to produce such men requires centuries of Oriental engagement. (...) German defeat was exogenous, not endogenous: it was the inevitable result of trying to fight a global conflict without being a global power."
The Peak
"In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, Queen Victoria reigned supreme at the apex of the most extensive empire in world history. (...) the British Empire now covered around 25 per cent of the world's land surface. (...) Some 444 million people in all lived under some form of British rule."
Terms of Trade
"Britain was also the world's banker, investing immense sums around the world. (...) With her huge earnings from overseas investment, not forgetting other "invisibles" like insurance and shipping, she could afford to import vastly more than she exported."
The Costs of Empire
"Perhaps the most remarkable thing about all this was how cheap it was to defend (..) the total defence budget for that year (1898) was (...) a mere 2.5 per cent of net national product. That is not much higher than the relative burden of Britain's defence budget today."
" This was world domination on the cheap."
After World War I
"True, the Empire has never been bigger. But nor had the costs os victory (...) No combattant power spent as much on the war as Britain (...) The cost of running Iraq, to give just one example (...) amounted more than the total UK health budget."
The Decline of Empire
"Before 1914, the benefits of Empire had seemed to mos tpeople, on balance, to outweigh the costs. After the war the costs suddenly, inescapably, outweighed the benefits."
"Britain, the biggest single beneficiary of the first age of globalization, was unlikely to gain much from its end. In the 1920s the old and tested policies no longer seemed to work. Paying for the war had led to a tenfold increase in the national debt. Just paying the interest on that debt consumed close to half of total central government spending by the mid-1920s."
"The assumption that the budget should nevertheless be balanced (...) meant that public finance was dominated by transfers from income tax-payers to bondholders. The decision to return to the gold standard at the now over-valued 1914 exchange rate condemned Britain to more than a decade of deflationary policies."
Brief Recovery
"What brought recovery was a redefinition of the economics of Empire. Britain had gone back onto gold at the old rate parity out of fear that the dominions would switch to the dollar if the pound were devalued. In 1931 it turned out that the pound could be devalued and the dominions would gladly follow. Overnight the sterling bloc became the world's largest system of fixed exchange rates, but a system freed from its gold mooring."
"Thus it was that even as the political bonds between Britain and the dominions were loosened by the Statute of Westminster (1931), the economic bonds grew tighter (...but) the irony was that even as the Empire grew more economically important, its defence sank inexorably down the list of political priorities."
After World War II
"The Empire had to go as the price of victory (...) The foundations of empire had been economic, and those foundations had simply ben eaten by the cost of the war. Meanwhile, the 1945 Labour government had ambitions to build a welfare state, which could only be afforded if Britain's overseas commitments were drastically reduced."
"The irony was that even as the Empire grew more economically important, its defence sank inexorably down the list of political priorities."
"Exhausted by the costs of victory, denied the fresh start that followed defeat fo Japan and Germany, Britain was simply no longer able to bear the costs of Empire."
"It was at the bank of England that the Empire was effectively lost."
Empire Christmas Pudding
"With the Empire, there could be Christmas pudding. Without it, there would be only breadcrumbs, flour and old beer. Or, as Orwell said, en Empire-less Britain would be just a "cold and unimportant little island where we should all have to work very hard and live mainly on herring and potatoes."
