Message from Dean - May 8th 2007
I am currently testing out a new version of the APF Bridge Component - If you notice any errors within this demo store please drop me a line.
List Price: $37.50Amazon.com's Price: $24.75 You Save: $12.75 (34%)Prices subject to change.
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Binding: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.0971241
EAN: 9780307268297
Edition: 1
ISBN: 0307268292
Label: Knopf
Manufacturer: Knopf
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 816
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
Publisher: Knopf
Release Date: October 28, 2008
Studio: Knopf
Alternate Versions: Click to Display
Related Items:
Browse for similar items by category:
Editorial Review:
Product Description:
A magisterial work of narrative history, hailed in Britain as “the best one-volume account of the British Empire” and “an outstanding book” (The Times Literary Supplement).
After 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.
Brendon tells this story with brio and brilliance; covering a vast canvas, he fills it with vivid firsthand accounts of life in the colonies and intimate portraits of the sometimes eccentric British officials who administered them. It is all here—from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments. Panoramic in scope and riveting in detail, this is narrative history at its finest.
Average Rating: 
Rating:  -
We Americans decided against the British Empire over two centuries ago but we have been imperialistic in our own more successful way. The question is not whether empires are good, justifiable, necessary. They will always happen for geopolitical reasons. The real question is what kind of empire are we discussing and what did it accomplish. Our author here presents a radical criticism of the British Empire over two and one half centuries, and while it is amusing often, painful frequently, and always enlightening it is basically very one-sided. It is difficult to read 700 pages of negative commentary about the moral, intellectual, social and cultural defects of British officials and personnel in India, Africa, and Asia without sceaming finally, ENOUGH! It is unrelieved pain and suffering not only for the natives but for the well-meaning reader. Britain did much harm to India, Africa and other lands but the evidence is not so clear that these benighted peoples would not have done even ... Read More
Rating:  -
The author's premise is that empires and the spreading of western civilization is inherently bad. He chooses to emphasize the parts you would expect a liberal ideologue to, such as massacres, slavery etc. He ignores that expansionism is human nature for the strong. I think his premise, as one other reviewer put it, that empires collapse because they are inherently illegitimate is full of his own political views and not facts. Empires have always existed and always will in one form or another, the strong will always use their strength to force their will upon the weak. That is human nature, there is no way to get around it. It is a well written book, and enjoyable to read, which is why I give it 3 stars and the author presents his point of view well. Ultimately, I find it unconvincing.
Rating:  -
Piers Brendon has written a masterpiece on a very important subject, namely:why nations abhor occupation throughout history.To quote Edward Gibbon who said that "there is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in oppposition to their inclination and interest"-words which also sum up Brendon's argumentations about the British Empire's failure regarding its attempt to subjugate a quarter of the world.
The thesis of the author is simple:from its inception, the Brits were doomed to finish- sooner or later- their brutal occupation on hundreds of millions.True, they were not alone;other countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Holland have also experimented with oppressing others in the name of white man's (supposed)civilization.The will to force and enforce their mentality upon others is not something new :it had its origins in ancient history via the Roman Empire, which crumbled after a thousand years.
The British ... Read More
Rating: -
Piers Brendon was not being whimsical when he titled this book after Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike Americans, who never considered themselves imperialists, the British took their imperial duties seriously. The sons and daughters of empire saw themselves as present-day Romans. They were steeped in the classics, they learned the languages of their subject peoples, and they prepared to spend many years abroad in the service of the Crown. Brendon makes the case (as did Niall Ferguson in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire) that they saw themselves on a civilizing mission, that their empire - unlike Rome's - was a liberal empire. The British Empire would be a caretaker government until the locals were deemed capable of self-government. The conflicting goals of developing self-government and maintaining loyalty to the Crown manifest themselves often during this period in the form of uprisings and rebellions.
The story begins with ... Read More
Rating: -
The message of Piers Brendon's magnificent history of the British Empire is that its fall was inevitable and that that is the fate of all other empires, past and future. Because empires are founded on brutality and illegitimacy, says Brendon, their fault lines in the end prove too great. Brendon starts his account of the British Empire's fall with defeat at Yorktown in the American War of Independence - more than a century before the Empire reached its geographical apogee - because it was in America that the trust between Britain and its colonial peoples was first undermined. He carries on through the watershed of the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 19th-century colonisation of Africa. The First World War badly shook the edifice, the Second World War sent it crashing down: in the two decades following 1945 Britain went from an empire of 700m people to one with very few subjects indeed. Something of Brendon's ambition can be seen in his Gibbon-echoing title and it's not hubris: this is a wonderful ... Read More
Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
|
Amazon Store 