![]() ![]() One only has to remember the Belgian Congo to know what he means. In his Introduction he acknowledges - though I think rather grudgingly from what follows - that it was “much better than any other”. Gibbon, whose title he echoes, is an important influence he has taken to heart Gibbon’s axiom that “the history of empires is the history of human misery.” Yet Brendon is too balanced an historian – even, perhaps, too fair-minded (that much-vaunted virtue of Empire) – to interpret the history of this period merely as a chronicle of greed and hypocrisy, an interpretation that is fashionable in our shrunken and post-imperial island. ![]() ![]() In his 22 chapters Brendon vividly chronicles the vicissitudes – and the eventual loss- of every red area of the globe on which, as Lord Palmerston once grandiloquently remarked, “the sun never set”. At almost 800 pages it is a massive work of painstaking scholarship, beginning with the loss of the thirteen colonies on the American seaboard in 1781 and ending with the return of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Piers Brendon, Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge, has clearly made this subject his life’s work. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |