When all the globe was pink

EMPIRE: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson (Penguin, pounds 25)

LIKE Niall Ferguson, the author of this brilliant book, I am a child of the empire. My grandfather painted the lionhearted Field Marshal Roberts in Simla and found that he feared cats. My mother nursed in Mesopotamia (Iraq), Nigeria and the Gold Coast (Ghana). My father spent his life in the colonial service on the Gold Coast and my uncles included a governor of Singapore, a missionary in Borneo and a brigadier in the liberation of Burma from Japan.

My great grandfather was recommended for a Victoria Cross in the Indian Mutiny.

All these ancestors were convinced of the rightness of their cause and had no doubt at all that they were assisting backward peoples towards a higher civilisation.

I therefore read Ferguson's Empire with fascination. It is a book entirely worthy of its aims: to measure the imperial achievement, discuss why the empire rose and why it declined, what it left behind, and wonder who are its heirs.

The book begins unpromisingly with a double-page picture of a slave being beaten in the early 19th century.

Slavery did not play such a part in the story to make it appropriate for a book on the subject to begin thus. Our anxieties grow when we see from the list of illustrations that this was a picture of a slave beating in Brazil in 1827!

Ferguson also sometimes lapses into a slangy style. If there's a more serious criticism, it is that we hear more than we may want about why different ventures collapse (the American colonies, for example), rather than what happened before. But the author is so full of energy, imagination and curiosity that we can forgive him such minor lapses.

He's always asking interesting questions: for example, why the British imperial will faltered in the 1920s, leading to heavy defence cuts and to a reluctance to use force at all against opposition.

Rightly, Ferguson gives pride of place to India and asks how it was that 1,000 ICS men (Indian Civil Service) controlled 400 million people of so many cultures for so long - a control which only began to slip when men educated along British rules and standards began to assert themselves in defiance of the maharajahs whom grand viceroys, such as Curzon, cultivated.

The author stresses the contribution made by Indians to victory in two world wars and points out (something not usually mentioned) that it was in the Indian interest not to have been conquered by the Japanese - or the Soviet Union, one might add.

The empire in North America was founded by people anxious to escape a religious orthodoxy at home, unlike the Spanish empire, which was founded to export one. The Caribbean empire was established to meet the domestic demand for sugar.

The African one had behind it, to begin with, a requirement for slaves to serve the Caribbean colonies and then, in the 19th century, the belief that the only way to destroy the slave trade was to control the African coastal principalities and the immediate hinterland.

The post-1919 empire in the Middle East, like that in South Africa earlier, had the defence of the route to India as its preoccupation, oil being a neglected afterthought.

Australia was ideal for convicts.

All these commitments grew, and then declined, between the wars into the Commonwealth, which might just have been turned into a confederal great power rather than a politically correct sports club, in the late 20th century.

That would, however, have required greater foresight and imagination than any statesman of the inter-war era had, the threat of Germany in Europe becoming paramount.

And the legacy? Apart from football and the new Olympic Games - Ferguson could, with advantage, have recalled the obeisance of Baron Coubertin in Rugby chapel before the tomb of Dr Arnold - there is the sense of fair play and a respect for law, the English language and our love of parliamentary institutions.

Whether the United States is really the successor to all this, as Walt Whitman and Kipling both eloquently hoped, is still open to question, as Ferguson thinks. But it is simply not true that Roosevelt and the United States after 1945 were hostile to the British Empire - after all, Canning and the British had the same attitude to the Spanish Empire after 1815 - but the United States does not seem willing to contemplate commitment abroad for unlimited periods.

Nor do the Americans realise that, as Lord Salisbury said of Ireland, some problems have no solutions. One just has to live with them.

. Hugh Thomas's The Spanish Empire will be published by Orion in the autumn.

Copyright 2003
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