Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

About a decade ago Niall Ferguson wrote an economic history of early 20th century Hamburg. This got him the respect of his fellow historians, but not lots of money. In 1998 he published "The Pity of War" which, while less thoroughly researched, earned him considerable public notice. Ferguson became one of the most prominent historians in Britain, and he has now published "Empire". This book purports to show that the British Empire was an ultimately beneficial endeavour that benefited the world by showering it with the benefits of globalization and free trade in labor and capital. As such, it is a model the United States should consider as it faces the threat of Al-Qaidya. Empire is not a vulgar apology for imperialism. Indeed, it is not much of an apology for anything, since argument doesn't play that much of a part in it. This is a book for a television series, and, ultimately, is not much more than a coffee table book. [It seems] More care has been taken to choose the illustrations than provide a coherent narrative. What we have basically is a narrative that starts with Sir Francis Drake and then hits the high points up until the Suez crisis. It is very much a "great man" history. We learn a lot about Dr. Livingstone and his missionary efforts. We learn little about the people he converted, or for that matter the vast majority he didn't convert. We are told that there were racists, but we learn little about racism or nationalist ideologies. Nor does Ferguson mention the many colonial subjects who immigrated to Britain, and their effect on the country. Come to think of it, various parts of the empire flit in and out of the narrative for half-centuries at a time, whether it is the Caribbean, South Africa, Canada or Burma. (And did Ferguson ever actually mention Nigeria, a country whose 130 million people is that of Britain's?) With its focus on battles and spectacles, this might make an interesting television series, but it adds nothing to our knowledge of the empire. For a historian known for his enthusiasm for neoclassical economics, Ferguson does not really draw up a balance sheet for empire. To be fair, it's not that he ignores the dark side. Weren't the Pequots and Tasmanians massacred? Pretty much, he says. Weren't the Caribbean colonies founded on the vicious exploitation of hundreds of thousands of slaves? You can't deny that. What about the Irish Potato famine and the Boer concentration camps? Pretty bad. Once emancipated, weren't the Caribbean slaves denied political liberty and forced into new unjust economic arrangements? Yeah, that's not pretty. What about the Indian famines in the late 19th century that killed anywhere from 12 to 30 million people? Yeah, that wasn't nice. What about Imperialist opposition to Home Rule for Ireland? Ok, that was wrong. Didn't Baden-Powell, founder of the Boy Scouts, systematically starve the native population of Mafeking so that the white settlers could live out the Boer siege in comfort? Now that you mention it, that's kind of embarrassing. There are some interesting details, such as the 6,000 servants for the Viceroy's Palace in India, of whom 50 were employed solely to shew birds away. We aren't told how many people were killed when the British suppressed the Sepoy rebellion in 1857, but Ferguson tells us that they hanged 150 people from one very large tree in Cawnpore alone. We listen to Anthony Trollope say with pseudo-stoic Tory humbug of the Australian aborigines that "it was their fate to be abolished." We learn Hitler's view that if he ran the British Empire he would have Gandhi summarily shot. Ferguson actually suggests that much of the notorious "Thugee" murders were not caused by the infamous Kali cult but by demobilized soldiers engaging in humdrum highway robbery. Ferguson tries to make an argument that British rule was good for India. Irrigation boomed, there were new coal and jute industries. But he also admits that India basically stagnated for two centuries, at a time when British living standards more than quadrupled. The truth is even worse. In 1750 India had a quarter of the world's GDP. By 1900 it had only 1.7%. And its industrial production collapsed. Rather feebly, Ferguson points out that independence didn't help China, although elsewhere he notes British aggression and interference in that country. (The most outrageous being the Opium wars, in which a Liberal Britain forced China to import narcotics.) More important he ignores the counter-example of Japan, which is clearly better off for avoiding imperialist rule altogether. He manages to ignore a whole host of historians of India, such as Parthasarathi, Guha, Sarkar and Hardiman, while the late Christopher Thorne is also missing from his shallow bibliography. The most Ferguson can say is to suggest that "things might conceivably have been worse" under native rule. The same problems occur in his conclusion when he suggests that immigration would have been less without a British empire, though in the 19th century immigrants overwhelmingly went to the United States. We are told that capital exports and free trade are unalloyed benefits, though whether Latin America has ever benefited from Britain and the United States' financial arrangements is very much open to question. He writes that Britain sacrificed their empire to defeat Hitler and asks rhetorically "Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?" Leaving aside the fact that Churchill did not know he was making this sacrifice in 1940, I can't help but notice that the Soviet Union sacrificed even more. Where the British lots hundreds of thousands, they lost tens of millions. What atonement will Ferguson give them? So if the British received absolution for their conquests, aggressions, famines and genocides they got it at an excellent bargain. And it is a bargain that, like so much in the history of the "good" empire, the British paid with other people's lives.