"Empire" by Niall Ferguson

In Niall Ferguson's new book, the British Empire was a good thing for everybody -- and the American empire now being born should take lessons from our stiff-upper-lipped forebears.

By Farhad Manjoo

Apr 17, 2003 | If you happen to come across a world map produced by an Englishman at around the turn of the 20th century, you'll see a planet bathed in red. This was the red of the British Empire, and it was considered a glorious color. Britain reigned over a quarter of the world's territory and its people, making it, as a postage stamp of the day boasted, "a vaster empire than has ever been."

The red on the map touched every continent. Australia and Canada were red. The Indian subcontinent -- which also included present-day Pakistan, Bangladesh and Myanmar -- was red. In Africa, the empire held a contiguous stretch from Cape Town to Cairo and, by the end of the First World War, it had taken control of much of the Middle East as well. The empire's navy ruled the seas, its money swayed economies around the world, and its culture took root far and wide.

The British don't create such maps anymore -- not just because the empire is dead but also because it's understood to be shameful. To the British, as to people in the rest of the world, imperialism's golden age is now considered a stain on human history, an era of slavery and racism and the plunder of native lands and peoples. The notion that imperialism is inherently evil, and that no empire can be a good empire, is an axiom in today's geopolitics.

Niall Ferguson wishes to disagree. Ferguson is an economist and historian at New York University and Oxford, and his latest book is "Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power," a comprehensive history of how the British came to rule the world. But it's more than that, Ferguson insists. In his introduction, the author makes it clear that he intends to do justice to the empire -- to set the record straight on a world power he says was, for all its faults (there were many, and he doesn't shy from them), the chief promoter of progressive thought around the globe for much of the 19th and 20th centuries. So salutary was the British Empire's effect on history that Ferguson suggests the world would do well to get itself another essentially "good" empire to maintain order. The good empire he's talking about is the United States.

That the British Empire was, on balance, "a good thing" is a provocative idea, the sort that has made Ferguson a celebrity in the U.K. Ferguson has written six books during the past eight years, and he has often thrilled in presenting novel twists to what others in the academy consider settled historical fact. That he wears the label "revisionist" proudly was shown most boldly in his book "The Pity of War," in which he argued that Britain should not have entered World War I. According to Ferguson, Germany didn't pose much of a threat, and victory didn't offer enough benefit to justify the cost of war, in either money or lives. The book was judged harshly by critics, but it became a bestseller.

The buzz on "Empire" was that it aspired to similar chart-topping iconoclasm; thankfully, though, it falls short. The author is nowhere near as heretical as he has been in the past. Much of "Empire" is solid historical writing, extensively researched and analytical. Ferguson loves numbers, and he often proves a point in a haze of percentages, so let's do that with this book: Of "Empire's" 389 pages, only about 30 of them -- the introduction and the conclusion -- deal directly with the question that Ferguson says he wrote the book to answer: "Was the British Empire a good or bad thing?"

Ferguson investigates the issue as an economist might -- by calculating the costs and benefits of empire and seeing which way the scales tip. It's meant to be a clean exercise, one most concerned with the economic, rather than the moral and emotional, impacts of imperialism. In the end, Ferguson arrives without much apparent anguish at an answer that pleases him. Was the empire a good thing? Yep.

But it's difficult to agree with him, mostly because the rest of "Empire" -- 92 percent of the book's content -- muddies the issue entirely, and one finds Ferguson's inquiry maddeningly more complex than he makes it out to be. The British Empire stretched over hundreds of years and millions of miles; its legacy hangs over almost the entire world. It was, at times, a force for good. But just as often, people who lived under the British were manifestly worse off for it, and for others -- as in the case of Indians, for whom empire's consequences are hardest to judge -- British rule was at best a mixed blessing. The British may have improved the course of history in some lands, but only at a cost -- in terms of lives and in lost culture -- we would find unpalatable today. Ferguson recognizes these costs, but he can abide them, he says, because other, worse empires might have come into power were it not for the British.

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