Book Review

No pity for the honest imperialist

The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997

This is a great book, vitiated, to my mind, by a great fault. Its author has claimed that it does for the British Empire what Gibbon did for the Roman. He may well be right. It is a monumental work, the product of virtuoso academic knowledge supplemented by prodigious research: but alas, there is an emptiness at its core.

The book rehearses the imperial story from the defeats of the American Revolution to the abdication from Hong Kong, and nobody has written a volume quite like it. Its 22 hefty chapters range the vast empire not just historically, or geographically, or even chronologically, but culturally too. Piers Brendon, who is a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge (and author of, among other books, The Dark Valley: a panorama of the 1930s and of biographies of Churchill and the Cornish parson-poet Hawker of Morwenstow), is as interested in Afghan princes as he is in nabobs of Calcutta, or Jewish terrorists, or Anzac soldiers on the beaches of Gallipoli, or colonial governors, or for that matter colonial moustaches.

The scale of it all is tremendous, and it is enlivened throughout by anecdotage and gossipy detail. Ronald Storrs, Governor of Jerusalem, "wore his learning lightly but ostentatiously". Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana, financed his activities by diamond smuggling and paraded through his capital beneath a State umbrella of red, white and green velvet. Sir Charles Eliot, Commissioner of the East Africa Protectorate, was an expert on sea slugs. James Connolly of the Dublin Easter Rising was "round-headed, pot-bellied, bandy-legged". At the outbreak of the Second World War the Mother Country was reassured by a loyal message from one of its lesser possessions: "Barbados is behind you".

But it is not of course the incidentals, however deftly used, that give this book its power. It is the epic vision of the project - two centuries of tumultuous history, pursued from the Plains of Abraham to Ootacamund, Botany Bay to Vimy Ridge, with inexhaustible richness of detail. The multitudinous players in the drama, whether imperialist or anti-imperialist, are slotted skilfully into the narrative, and any conscientious reader of the book may well feel that, when it comes to the facts of the great story, he need read no more.

When it comes to the facts - ah, there's the rub. It is almost impossible for any writer about the British Empire to be consistently impartial. The events are so tangled, so much time is covered, motives are so often contradictory, so many nuances of morality must be considered, that hardly an event in the whole imperial progress will not pull our emotions one way or the other. What seemed just to one generation can seem criminal to another. He is a liar or a simpliste who can say that the British Empire was a good thing, or a bad thing, and any frank imperial historian must admit as much.

Brendon certainly honours the principle of balanced judgement. He has said that the British Empire was "better than any other", its main weakness being its principal virtue, namely a paradoxical dedication to the idea of liberty. On the other hand he agrees with his master Gibbon, as nowadays we all must, that the subjugation of one people by another is essentially cause for misery. He pulls no punches in his criticisms of British imperialism, but now and then throughout his narrative he recognises the worth of an imperial policy, or the merit of an individual imperialist.

Not often, though. By and large the book is a protracted condemnation of British colonial and imperial attitudes, whether expressed in popular racism or in public horrors like the massacres of the Indian Mutiny,

Amritsar or Hola. Of course Brendon is right to emphasise those aspects of the imperial saga that he thinks most historically significant - he is an academic historian, after all, whose judgements are liable to be correct, and which he has a duty to enunciate. As far as I know he exaggerates none of the iniquities of the British Empire: he merely gives them the prominence he believes they deserve.

What weakens his book for me, though, is its arid lack of generosity. There is nothing in it to move you, with empathy or with pity - nothing to suggest that bad acts could be the result of good intentions, or that what seemed benevolent a century or two ago can seem downright evil now. Honest fallibility of belief does not enter Brendon's calculations; he does not seem to recognise equal sadness in the slaughter of a feathered Zulu and the death in battle of an English country gentleman.

Even his liberal assessments are expressed with a sneer, or at least with a patronising air of superiority. A visitor from Mars, reading The Decline and Fall of the British Empire as part of a galactic education, would be truly astonished to that find that nearly a quarter of the world, and a quarter of its population, had once been mastered by such a collection of bumbling and laughable incompetents. He would learn nothing here of the everyday diligence and efficiency of British Empire-builders down the generations, or the diurnal slog of a thousand nameless functionaries simply doing their best in what they thought was an honourable cause.

No tear to the eye then, for readers of the new Gibbon, no sense of the deeper pathos of it all - so many lives wasted, so many beliefs discredited, so many unnecessary enmities, so much impotent splendour. Dr Brendon (born 1940) is too young to have experienced the imperial emotions for himself, or now to glimpse in retrospect any beauty, even illicit beauty, in the exercise of imperial power. He has given us a tremendous work of scholarship, but a work with no heart.

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