"Empire" by Niall Ferguson

Ferguson makes a similar Britain-was-better argument when he grapples with slavery, certainly the worst legacy of the imperial age. In the empire's early years, the British, like the world's other powers, were deeply entrenched in international slavery. The export economies that the empire had built in the West Indies and the American colonies were dependent on slaves. But in the late 1700s, moral clarity, in Ferguson's view, suddenly struck Britain. Britain became the first empire to abolish slavery, and it took to the task with zeal, stationing the Royal Navy off the coast of Sierra Leone to disrupt the Atlantic slave trade to, among other places, the newly independent United States.

"It is not easy to explain so profound a change in the ethics of a people," Ferguson writes. "It used to be argued that slavery was abolished simply because it had ceased to be profitable: in fact, it was abolished despite the fact that it was still profitable. What we need to understand, then, is a collective change of heart." Ferguson delves deep into what might have caused this change, and he discovers a fact of being British that he uses more than once to justify the empire: The British are an essentially good people.

That is perhaps too cynical a reading of Ferguson's analysis, but one is at times reduced to such cynicism. Again and again in "Empire," Ferguson champions the Britons at home, the people far removed from geopolitical decisions, who invariably, after an imperial outrage, pressed their government to do the right thing, or set out themselves on missions to remake the world. This is certainly something Ferguson wants to get across: Racism, plunder, massacres, all those inevitable woes of imperialism, were redeemed, in Britain, by a fundamentally enlightened populace.

Which brings us back to Ferguson's nagging question: Were the Brits good for the world, or bad?

Ferguson is an adherent of what he calls "counterfactual" historical inquiry, the practice of asking theoretical what-if questions about past events, such as "What if there had been no American Revolution?" and "What if John F. Kennedy had lived?" (He edited a book called "Virtual History" that is filled with such explorations.) Ferguson's only real defense of the empire hangs on a counterfactual line of thought: If there had been no British Empire, other regimes would have come to rule the world, and those empires weren't steered by the virtuous British people.

The evil empires he focuses on are the Germans and Japanese in World War II. (The crimes of the Germans are well known; to judge Japanese imperialists, read up on the Rape of Nanking.) In 1939, Hitler floated the idea of a nonaggression pact with Britain in which he would leave the empire intact if it allowed him to have his way in Europe. "But if England will not have it any other way, then she must be beaten to her knees," Hitler is reported to have said. The plan was appealing to some in the British War Cabinet, but Winston Churchill, "to his eternal credit, saw through Hitler's blandishments," Ferguson writes. Despite terrible odds, Churchill decided to fight Hitler, in order that the world be saved from Nazism. And, Ferguson asks, "Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's sins?"

The problem in pursuing this line of inquiry, however, is the same problem that exists in all counterfactual investigations. Can we thank the British Empire for saving us from the Nazis? Sure. But that doesn't mean we should forgive the British their faults, or be thankful that the world ever lived under British rule. There's strong evidence, in fact, that German militarization was pursued directly in response to the threat the Germans saw in the British Empire. And, as Ferguson himself has argued before, it's possible to fault Britain for entering the First World War, whose messy resolution led to the Second. With that in mind, here are some counterfactual questions that Ferguson doesn't answer but ought to: If there had never been a British Empire, would there have been a German Empire? Would we have endured two world wars?

Nobody knows the answers to those questions, of course, which is what makes it so difficult to agree with Ferguson that the British Empire was "good." We can't ever say for sure what sort of world we'd have had without the Brits. But the even bigger problem with asking whether the British Empire was "worth it" is that most of us who enjoy its benefits didn't have to pay the costs. Even if you agree with Ferguson that without Britain we'd have had Nazism, is that any consolation to the thousands of people who died for British expansion? In the Sudan in 1898, for example, in an event Ferguson says was the "acme of imperial overkill," the British gunned down 10,000 desert tribesmen who'd been seen as linked to the assassination of a British general. The British did not do this because they wanted to make the world safe for democracy 40 years later. It happened, as imperial massacres do, in a fit of absolute power, in the certainty all colonialists have that they have the right to decide the course of history for subject peoples.

Ultimately, it's this arrogant certainty of colonization, the presumption of an obligation to guide the destiny of the world, that is the central stain of imperialism. But the problem goes unremarked by Ferguson, who seems to consider imperialism a kind of natural yearning of man. Not once does he ask whether it was right for anyone other than an Indian to rule India; as he told the BBC, that was never an option. If the British didn't take over the world, others surely would have. And, these days, if the Americans don't do the same, others very well might.

Ferguson believes it's naive to think that the people of one land should not have a say in the lives of people in others. And, after all, in a globalist age, what happens Over There clearly affects us all Over Here, a point proved starkly by Sept. 11 -- an event spawned, in a small way, by the Soviet ("Evil Empire") colonization of Afghanistan and the U.S. proxy-war response to it. Because of this, Ferguson says, the United States, which he believes is the only country capable of righting the ills of the world, should now try to control more directly what happens Over There.

Ferguson spends only about four pages (or 1 percent) of the book discussing this idea, so it's not clear what exactly he'd like the role of the United States to be. Does Ferguson want the U.S. to colonize the lands that are a threat to us? Not really. Instead, he'd like a beefed-up American presence in the world, a greater willingness on the part of the lone superpower to leverage its strengths -- its money and its guns -- in the service of its interests. The sort of campaign the United States is pursuing in Iraq would thrill Ferguson greatly (though he doesn't say it in "Empire," because the war began after the book was published). This war is not exactly colonization, as President Bush says, but it's very close to it. We're not trying to make Iraq safe for American settlers but, instead, to make the region safe for American interests and the country safe for Western-style democracy -- a chief stated aim of past empires.

Ferguson does concede that Americans have always been reluctant imperialists, people inclined to "fire some shells, march in, hold elections and then get the hell out -- until the next crisis." But that, he points out, is also how the British started out.

"Like the United States today, Britain did not set out to rule a quarter of the world's land surface." In time, it just happened. Good or bad, such a rise to power may be happening again.

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