Dutifully mentions downsides and excesses, but this is basically a vanilla history of the Empire

Review of Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

Today, rather than ideological diatribes about colonialism, revisionist histories are appearing based on fresh evidence, perhaps the best of them is Legacy of Violence. They portray the colonial period as one of destruction that corrupted the mother country as they repressed the culture and will of subject peoples. There is a lot to this, but I wanted a more establishment perspective to balance it out. So, I turned to Ferguson, a notorious conservative, and wasn’t disappointed. These books should be read in tandem.

Ferguson states in his introduction that, sure, there was racism, violence, and exploitation, but the colonial period also led to the “triumph of capitalism as the optimal system”, the Anglicanization of N. America and Australia, the “internationalization” of the English language, the “enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity”, and the “survival of the Parliamentary institutions”. Not only would the alternatives have been worse (e.g. Nazism), but he believes that the new nations that arose from the British colonies were set on a superior path when compared to France, Belgium, and others. In this book, he makes this case. I was pretty tired of it by the end, but must admit that it has some validity.

Of course, Ferguson acknowledges there were over-zealous or greedy officials, that racism was developed and used systematically to justify the imposition of new cultural norms, and that administrators used divide and conquer tactics because there were so few of them. To his credit, he doesn’t gloss over these issues. He just argues they are not the essence of what the British stood for and certainly not their express intention. Indeed, it is the opposite of what Elkins argues in her Legacy of Violence, which is a masterpiece of historical research. Ferguson’s book has a simpler sensibility, if not quite Panglossian, and is not based on new research but is more of a well written synthesis of the conventional wisdom.

My review of Elkins’ book: