Ghosts of empire : Britain's legacies in the modern world

Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

The ghosts of the British Empire continue to haunt today's international scene and many of the problems faced by the Empire have still not been resolved. In Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria and Hong Kong, new difficulties, resulting from British imperialism, have arisen and continue to baffle politicians and diplomats.

This powerful book addresses the realities of the British Empire from its inception to its demise, skewering fantasies of its glory and cataloguing both the inadequacies of its ideals and the short-termism of its actions.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Publishers Weekly Review

The British Empire, the largest and most diverse the world has ever known, is among the most popular subjects of sociological and political analysis in postcolonial studies. Kwarteng, a British Conservative MP and scholar whose parents were born in Ghana shortly after independence, attempts to provide a perspective from within the halls of power as decisions were implemented half a world away from London. Focusing on six far-flung territories-Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong-this expertly researched and written book analyzes the disparate and often contradictory motivations and strategies of the Crown in relation to its possessions. The young men recruited to oversee the empire came almost exclusively from a small network of boarding schools that fed into Oxford and Cambridge, the pinnacle of a complexly layered class system, and Kwarteng explores how analogous hierarchies were exported to the colonies, often arbitrarily, as in Burma and Iraq, where the British conjured up monarchies largely out of thin air. The effects of these structures can still be seen today, but they did little to foster stability or continuity: as Kwarteng writes, in words that are sharply relevant today, "there was very often no policy coherence or strategic direction behind the imperial government as experienced in individual colonies." Map. (Feb.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

CHOICE Review

British Conservative Member of Parliament Kwarteng presents a sprawling overview of the British Empire from the mid-19th century to the turnover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The book is at once decidedly traditional, focusing on high politics and personality at the expense of structural analysis or much attention to colonial societies themselves, and remarkably fresh, touring the empire's byways and comparative backwaters rather than the more familiar terrain of the Raj and southern Africa. The book's six sections narrate the advent and fall of British colonial rule in a chosen region (Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong, respectively), and then draw some contemporary legacies. Echoing David Cannadine's view, Kwarteng's empire was resolutely hierarchical, with British "notions of intellectual and social elitism, deference and privilege" leading inevitably to policy incoherence and, indirectly, postcolonial trauma. Kwarteng does not break any new ground, but as an episodic political survey of the British Empire, his book is a success. The writing is clear, Kwarteng has a particular talent for pen portraits, and he largely steers clear of imperial nostalgia. Summing Up: Recommended. All levels/libraries. D. P. Gorman University of Waterloo

Booklist Review

Intrigued by administrators of the British Empire, Kwarteng, a Conservative Party member of the House of Commons, looks at their rule in six former colonies: Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong. Such varied places militate against generalization; indeed, different forms of governing were applied in each place. One reason for the constitutional heterogeneity that Kwarteng details was the great latitude enjoyed by an official on the spot. Discussingthis freedom-of-action as he narrates each colony's imperial and postimperial political history, Kwarteng describes the class and educational funnels of Britain, from which a character like Lord Kitchener would emerge to dispose of the fate of Sudan. Similarly self-confident if less famous imperialists populate Kwarteng's account. They decided their assigned country's future as seemed best, frequently triggering unintended consequences that persist to the present, like the India-Pakistan dispute over Kashmir, which originated in local British policies imposed in the 1840s. With his emphasis on individuals, Kwarteng enlivens the perennially popular topic of the British Empire and its lasting historical influence.--Taylor, Gilbert Copyright 2010 Booklist

Kirkus Book Review

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