A Sweet Taste of Empire

Lately, Britain's globe-trotting, crowd-pleasing telechefs have been losing air time (and book sales) to a new breed of celebrity: the telehistorian, serving up entertaining, easy-to-digest lessons about the past. In rapid succession, Simon Schama's blockbuster A History of Britain has been followed by Adam Hart-Davis' What the Tudors and Stuarts Did for Us and David Starkey's Six Wives: The Queens of Henry VIII

Now, with the timing of a busy sous chef, Niall Ferguson, Professor of Political and Financial History at Oxford University, launches Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World (Allen Lane; 392 pages) upon a nation again being readied for war abroad, where the legacy of Empire is everywhere to be seen and, politically, almost nowhere to be heard.

Ferguson knows how to wrest contentious conclusions out of painstaking research. In The Pity of War (1998), he argued that the World War I was a fight Britain should have ducked. In Empire (and an accompanying six-part series on Britain's Channel Four), he charts how, over a span of 300 years, Britain laid claim to a quarter of the planet's land surface and its people. The tale he tells is astonishing — but what really astounds is Ferguson's glowing praise. Contemporary historians routinely decry the Empire's sins; Ferguson celebrates it for dragging the world into the modern age.

As an economist, Ferguson is particularly good at explaining how the assets seized by Elizabethan buccaneers fed, in the 18th century, the habits of an emergent consumer society hooked then as now on sugar, coffee and tobacco; how Britain evolved a system of national debt to build a vast navy; how the East India Company's ports and forts seeded a global system of trade — which he dubs Anglobalization — that still thrums today.

But Ferguson's Empire balance sheets show some creative accounting. Though he dutifully frowns on the horrors of slavery or, say, the Battle of Omdurman, Sudan, in 1898 (in which 10,000 Muslims were annihilated in five hours by Lord Kitchener's Maxim guns), few such moments make it into the debit column. "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish," Ferguson writes. "It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity." There might have been, he admits, but he clearly doubts it.

Of all the benefits bestowed on the colonies, Ferguson prizes the English language and "the idea of liberty" most. Yet, one after another, their peoples decided to make that idea a reality, whether or not they thought it in English. Some legacies were kept and cherished, others got squashed or squandered. But what the former colonies rarely offered — and what Ferguson seems to demand — was their thanks. That will be a long wait. Ferguson even proposes that Britain altruistically sacrificed her empire in World War II to stop the Germans, the Japanese and the Italians from keeping theirs. "Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?" he asks. Evidently he expects a yes.

Ferguson's rendition of the Rule Britannia riff is sure to rouse a few roars from the old lions. When, last November, Britain's Foreign Secretary Jack Straw mildly ventured that "a lot of the problems that we are having to deal with now are a consequence of our colonial past," right-wing commentators and historians lined up to dismiss his remarks as "guilty screams about the past." Their outrage underlines the novelty of hearing a British minister even voice the doubt.

Ferguson is spot-on when he holds that the Empire is as much a reality today as ever. Between the 17th and mid-20th centuries, 20 million people — some of them chancers, most of them economic migrants — left Britain's shores while a reverse wave of immigrants in the last 50 years in turn changed the home country forever. They and their descendants need to hear that story, but deserve a more wholesome and less saccharine dish than this.