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

by: Paul Kedrosky November 28, 2008    
Paul Kedrosky

Paul Kedrosky

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I haven't made any book recommendations here for a while, but here is one that I just finished in my recent travels. It is highly appropriate for the current saddening debacle in capital markets: The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997.

Here is the Random House blurb:

declineAfter the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. But over the next 150 years it grew to become the greatest and most diverse empire the world has ever seen—ranging from Canada to Australia to China, India, and Egypt—seven times larger than the Roman Empire at its apogee. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth.

Yet it was also a fundamentally weak empire, as Piers Brendon shows in this vivid and sweeping chronicle. Run from a tiny island base, the British Empire operated on a shoestring with the help of local elites. It enshrined a belief in freedom that would fatally undermine its authority. Spread too thin, and facing wars, economic crises, and domestic discord, the empire would vanish almost as quickly as it appeared.

Within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, sometimes amid bloodshed. This rapid demise left unfinished business in Rhodesia, the Falklands, and Hong Kong. It left an array of dependencies and a ghost of an empire overshadowed by a rising America. Above all, it left a contested legacy: at best, a sporting spirit, a legal code, and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife.

I won't bore by telling you that there are many important parallels to a certain modern empire, but there are, and that's one of the reasons why it's so worth reading.

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This article has 8 comments:

  •  
    Nov 28 11:22 PM
    The Chinese classic "Three kingdoms" begins by saying "empires wax and wane". We now see the relative decline of America although it is still the dominant economic and military superpower.
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  •  
    Nov 28 11:36 PM
    When I first saw the review title, I assumed that the United States was a continuation of the British Empire, and now our influence is waning. Britain's influence since WWII has been cultural, and very recently economic. America's has been military, economic, and cultural to a far greater extent, but we are the British Empire, Part 2.
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  •  
    Nov 29 08:55 AM
    Is the book better than the blurb? I ask, because the loss of what became the United States was not devastating to England. Its Caribbean island colonies were much more lucrative, and the rest of the world beckoned. (See Barbara Tuchman's "The First Salute," only $2.95!)
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  •  
    Nov 29 09:22 AM
    britain's industrial base became overshadowed by germany's after 1871, and was allowed to wither after 1920.

    the country with the most modern & efficient industrial base will be top dog. will it be china?

    rudyard kipling in 1898 foresaw the waning on england's dominance and wrote about it. did anyone listen?

    france lost an empire in north america, then lost an empire in india, and later lost an empire in africa. now they are overrun by algerian economic refugees.

    today the u.s.a is undermined by the economic illiteracy of the reagan & 'bush 43' administrations.
    > jack
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  •  
    Nov 29 10:13 AM
    General Willoughby, General MacArthur's intelligence chief, once attempted to point out why things had not turned out the way we wanted in Korea. In his words, "the balance of weaponry had shifted". That was only partially true, but it had shifted enough so that we lost our advantage.

    Now it's not just the balance of weaponry, but also - to some extent - the balance of morality. John Gordon is right: putting people like Reagan and Bush in the highest office in the country is not going to work in the long run. How can they manage something that they can't understand, and in the case of Reagan didn't want to understand? This was true for the British government immediately after WW2.

    But I don't see any reason to give up, Certainly it must be clear to just about everyone that a nice strong dose of creative intelligence is really all that it will take to turn things around.
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  •  
    Nov 29 02:49 PM
    Interesting that the book's title equates the end of Empire to the handing back of HK in 1997. Long in decline, the Empire in my opinion came to a definitive end at one particular point in time some four decades earlier : the Suez crisis of 1956. The US President explicitly informed the British and French prime ministers that if they persisted with the invasion of Egypt (thereby intensifying the risk of a stand-off with the Soviet Union) the USwould take active steps to undermine their economies, starting with the respective currencies. They of course withdrew, and the last pretence of imperial freedom of action on the world stage had vanished.

    I can't help wondering who in Beijing might be aware of this little-reported but now publically documented historical titbit.
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  •  
    Nov 29 04:52 PM
    korea - in 1953 the chinese army was bogged down on the penunsula with a typhus epidemic. d.d.eisenhower quietly let it be known that if they didn't come to the conference table he would drop a nuke on them. they came, & we still have a conference tabel.
    > jack
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  •  
    Nov 30 11:12 AM
    If you like this book, I also highly recommend Niall Ferguson's "The Ascent of Money". A brilliant and excellent historical explanation of what happened this year.
    Ferguson is a professor of Finance AND history at Harvard. Also a Hoover Fellow and Oxford.
    This book will be turned into a PBS special airing in January.
    Many very good Ferguson interviews are on YouTube. Here is a 45 minute interview on Bloomberg that is well worth listening to:
    www.youtube.com/watch?...
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