Fetch The Decline And Fall Of The British Empire, 1781-1997 Picturized By Piers Brendon Presented As Manuscript

of the best history books ever, Period. I am not sure I am going to finish this book, It is rather doomladen and hateful in its prose, The author sees portents of the crumbling of the British Empire in military success of theth century, which is rather a stretch since the empire did not really crumble till after World
War II.


I think I would simply prefer a more objective history of British Empire, The sound of the axegrinding in the background of this book is deafening, and spoils the experience of reading it, In a sane country, Piers Brendons narrative of the British Empire from its apogee to its end would be required reading for Americas current empire builders, publicists and apologists.
That not being the case, Brendons masterful study will be ignored in the United States, which is a pity, for it is a virtual catalogue of the types of delusional, conflicted thinking and behavior that both created the British empire and guaranteed its sloppy dissolution.
As Brendon so aptly suggests, virtually every mistake made by American foreign policy makers from the end of World War II through the latest excesses of our “War on Terror” was first prefigured by Britains repetitive misadventures in colonial America, India, Ireland and other regions too numerous to name.
Although a lengthy tome, "Decline" remains compulsively readable from first page to last and contains much mordant humornot to mention a shocking but diverting cast of fools, idealists and outright madmen that easily put the architects of our current global debacles to shame.
Along the way, Brendon quotes W, Somerset Maugham on the desired style for a chronicler of the Empire: “I would have him write lucidly and yet with dignity I would have his periods march with a firm step.
I should like his sentences to ring out as the anvil rings when the hammer strikes it, ” Brendon, whose admitted literary model was Edward Gibbon,does exactly that here and readers who enjoy "Decline" should also check out two of his other books: "Eminent Edwardians," a worthy sequel to Lytton Stracheys "Eminent Victorians," and "Winston Churchill," the best short biography of that complex and empirebesotted Victorian.
Couldnt stomach the pompous, selfimportant prose that constantly presumes the reader already knows everything the text is talking about, which, for a history book, ya know, is kinda selfdefeating.
So I didnt finish and opted for Lawrence James infinitely more readable and enlightening The Rise and Fall of the British Empire instead.
As other people have pointed out, this book is a farrago of anecdotes, all charmingly relayed, but rarely amounting to much more.


The themes are few, but they poke through the maundering narration every once in a while, The first is that Britain didn't set out to win an empire, As one British historian said as early as, the British seemed to have conquered the world in a fit of absentmindedness.
Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli complained about being dragged into conquest by "prancing proconsuls," but he annexed the Gold Coast and Fiji, the Transvaal in South Africaand the following year took over Cyprus.
Prime Minister Gladstone succeeded Disraeli, and attacked all his unnecessary conquests, yet the following year he sent Sir Garnet Wolesley to put down Colonel Ahmed Arabi's revolt in Egypt, which threatened both British creditors and the Suez canal, and then enforced a suzerainty over the country, which Gladstone claimed was temporary.
Sir George Goldie's Royal Niger Company and its intense but squeamish agent Frederick Lugard signed up preliminary deals with much of what became Nigeria, and Sir William MacKinnon's Imperial East Africa Company also used Lugard to make treaties with swathes of future Uganda and Kenya, but it was only afterfor Nigeria, when Britain worried about French penetration, that the government took over these areas from the companies and turned them into protectorates.
Cecil Rhodes did the same thing with what became Zambia and Zimbabwe and Malawi, mainly to encircle the Boers who were threatening British interests and his diamond minds.
At this very time, the Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury, complained the continent of Africa was "created to be a burden to the Foreign Offices.
" It as an open question of whether anyone in Britain wanted all this land, Often they just didn't want anyone else to have it,

British disinterest is demonstrated by how few British civil servants and officers actually went overseas, As one Indian missionary said, "Our Empire here has existed more upon the opinion that the people had of our strength than upon our force.
" The Indian Civil Service governed tens of millions, but was about,strong, Malaya's was. Themillion people of British Africa, spread overmillion square miles, were run by just,administrators,judges, and a,policemen and soliders, the highest of whom ranked Lieutenant Colonel.


The other big theme is that everyone in Britain saw their empire as analogous to Rome's, which also meant they understood it was destined to fall.
Disraeli touted Roman analogies for every conquest, and celebrated "Imperium et libertas," but also worried about decline, Cecil Rhodes, like many others, was obsessed with Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, and did everything in his power to stave off what he saw as a semiinevitable end.
Winston Churchill was as much a proempire man as any, yet he read Gibbon and knew that "the shores of History are littered with the wrecks of Empires.
"

Thus, despite reaching a territorial peak after World War I, under the League of Nations Mandate system which the British understood as a crude mask for conquest, most understood the cries of selfdetermination that arose from the war were impossible to squelch.
InMichael Collins negotiated a deal with England to leave Ireland, and then was shot by a nationalist for consenting to the division of the North it was onlyyears later that Ireland's constitution formally separated from the Crown.
Inthe Government of India Act ceded most of India to local parliaments and gave Indians increased representation on the Viceroy's Council.
The next year the Egyptian Treaty gave the country nominal independence, Yet after World War II, which both sullied the reputation of the West and drained the British Treasury that protected the "sterling zone," the jig was really up.
Burma, India, and Israel went within five years, and most of Africa and Asia soon after,

The story of theyears of the British empire is a grand story, one with fathomless implications for human civilization across the globe, yet this book presents it as a mass of amusing character sketches, eccentric soldiers, sporting GovernorGenerals, and setpiece battles.
It gives one pictures, but no story, There are innumerable clichés about the British Empire that it was acquired in a fit of absentmindedness by shopkeepers, that it was dismantled in a relatively benign manner, that on the whole it was the best of the Empires.
Reading this book I'm not sure I can agree with any of those statements,

Spanning the years from, just after the loss of the American colonies, up toand the handover of Hong Kong, this book is effectively one long history of acquisitiveness, greed, oppression, brutality and hypocrisy.
I was quite shocked, to tell the truth, British colonial history never formed part of the syllabus at any point in my schooling, so I've never really known much about the Empire past Kipling and 'the white man's burden', the sun 'never setting on the British Empire' and the lingering legacy of the Commonwealth.


The most striking hallmark of the British Empire was, for me, the inherent hypocrisy at its very heart, The enduring claim was that Britain had a 'duty of care' to protect and nurture these colonies until they could mature to independence an incredibly patronising attitude to begin with.
But in actuality the Empire was far more about exploiting these colonies for our own benefits than any interest or duty to its native inhabitants.


The shadow of Rome hangs over this book like a cloud, All of the imperialists were incredibly aware of the fate of Rome, and the idea that the mothernation would inevitably fall along with the Empire helps to explain a lot of the attitudes found in this book.
What of Rome now, the imperialists would say, What of Macedonia and Egypt and Greece They had a mortal fear of Britannia's decline and the notion of Empire was incredibly bound up in that.
That Britannia still stands, more or less, whilst our Empire has long gone, bar a few rocky outposts that still prove a thorn in the side say, the Falklands, is more a testament to the modern era than anything politicians, capitalists and imperialists did.


To be honest, it's a miracle any nation wants to be a part of the Commonwealth, With that kind of colonial legacy I'm amazed they want anything to do with 'Great' Britain, Not as amazing as his book on thes The Dark Valley but full of vivid anecdotes and thumbnail sketches of people and places.
These qualities make it seem like a wonderful basis for a TV series, but does detract

from it as a work of history.
On the matters that I'm more familiar with Indian colonial history and British politics at the time, he is very good choosing people and places with a wonderful sense of their real significance in the flow of events.
I enjoyed this book immensely, It pulls together the saga of the end of the British Empire from the loss of the American colonies through to the independence of India and the African colonies and to the gradual slow reduction of the last few bits in the Caribbean, leaving the odd few islands around.
Writing this review Februaryas the debate over the British exit from the EU plods along, it is both interesting and disturbing that large elements of the present governing party Conservatives retain a nostalgia for the lost days of empire and a naive view that this can somehow be recovered.
This book should be a corrective to that, An epic onevolume history of Britain's protracted, and often painful, twohundredyear withdrawal from her colonies, From America to Hong Kong, Piers Brendon has traced the British empire's waning influence and necessary exit from its once ubiquitous global presence.
With great wit and a terribly engaging voice, Brendon's history reads easily, despite the weight of the topic and thepages.
Although I read it in fits and spurts, I was consistently engaged by the narrative and the characters, tracking the changing colour of a once mostly red map.
Despite an unusual fascination with the moustaches worn by the colonizers, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is a masterpiece of historical writing and ensures that Brendon sits very comfortably beside Gibbon.
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