‘Empire’: Did Britain Make the Modern World?
A review of ‘Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World’; Penguin, 2003.
To speak of the British empire in tones of anything but total disapproval tends to make people upset. Nigel Biggar, the Regius Professor Emeritus of Moral Theology at the University of Oxford, said he was ‘cancelled’ for proposing that we Brits had reason to feel pride, as well as shame, about our past. But the historian Niall ( ‘Neel’) Ferguson, who says much the same and more in his book on empire, was writing in 2003, not 2023. And in those less febrile times, it seems, a historian could suggest such a thing.
The title of his book, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, gives the game away. For Ferguson, it wasn’t all bad. He tells the story of how a tiny, windswept little archipelago in the North Atlantic somehow came to control almost a quarter of the world, giving rise to the saying that ‘the sun never sets on the British empire’. (One response I heard: ‘God doesn’t trust the English in the dark.’)
He tells the story of how a tiny archipelago managed to control nearly a quarter of the globe.
Ferguson traces the history of that empire from its status as a second-rate kingdom to its standing as world superpower in the 19th and early 20th centuries. During this time, the British formed colonies, set up trade routes, exported Western values and forced order on what Ferguson believes were chaotic, backward parts of the world. We Brits were reluctant imperialists, Ferguson says: dragged into a position of dominance by our own success. As the British moved through India, Africa, Australasia and North America, the empire grew more and more rich and powerful. As it did so, it laid the groundwork for democracy, the free market and globalisation – viewed by Ferguson as unqualified goods.
Which is not to say that he avoids the darker side of empire. He acknowledges the evils of slavery, the brutality of the opium trade, the violence of the put-downs of revolts like the Indian Mutiny, as well as the sheer exploitation of colonies for economic gain. But he frames these as regrettable by-products of the pursuit of a bigger and, in the end, positive project: to modernise the world. He is quick, too, to shift from the bad to the good. Britain was deeply involved in the transatlantic slave trade, for instance, but then Britain also led the charge to get rid of it. In a 1999 paper, the historians Chaim Kaufmann and Robert Pape judged that, accounting for the loss of business and trade, the policing of the slave trade by Britain cost 1.8 per cent of our GDP between 1808 and 1867. It was, those researchers claimed, the most costly moral act in modern history.
Ferguson is also fond of setting Britain against the other empires of the time. The evils carried out by Belgium in the Congo, or by France in Algeria, are now infamous; by contrast, Ferguson says, the British were restrained. Indeed, he argues, events like the Amritsar massacre, when British troops shot unarmed protestors, were special cases: exceptions to the rule and not the rule itself: unhappy lapses in an otherwise fair-minded system whose creators did not need to turn to violence very often to control vast, unruly parts of the world.
He is also fond of setting Britain against the other empires of the time.
So Ferguson’s claim is, basically, that the British empire was on the whole a force for good. He supports this now-contrarian claim by flooding us with facts. He draws on economic data, cites accepted military history, and sprinkles a few anecdotes on top for good measure. He has since been accused of cherry-picking his evidence – though we must recall that all argument involves choosing the most relevant, persuasive proof. We cannot include everything; the key question is whether we have left out glaring evidence that runs counter to what we are claiming. But at any rate, Ferguson likes to be provocative. He seems to write – and his writing flows along well enough – with the aim of goading those who hold a more conventional view of the British empire – the kind of view Orwell, a former imperial policeman, set forth explicitly in his writing but in fact comed across most forcefully in narrative essays like ‘Shooting an Elephant’.
In other words, Ferguson is having fun. And he has the most fun not just when he is going against the grain, but when he is describing the apparatus of empire. How, he seems to ask, did this thing keep going for so long? It is an administrative nightmare. Clearly he is impressed with its ability to sustain itself. He describes it as a slick, finely tuned bureaucratic machine that ran on a strong sense of national selfhood and a culture that taught submission to and respect for one’s superiors. It is Ferguson’s passion and provocative style, as well as his breadth of learning, that makes Empire a good read, whether you are sympathetic to his central claim or not. It will anger some, offend a few, and intrigue others. But Ferguson is, if nothing else, a gifted storyteller who likes grand arguments, great men, hinge moments in history and going dead against the accepted take on events.
