‘Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain ’ by John Darwin

During the five centuries in which the British came astonishingly close to ruling the world, it was often said, to the point of cliche, that “the sun never sets on the British Empire,” extending as that empire did literally around the globe. In this remarkable history of the empire, John Darwin goes an important step further: “ ‘Once the British Empire became world-wide,’ it was once shrewdly remarked, ‘the sun never set on its crises.’ ” That may have been merely a scholarly witticism, but it succinctly summarizes the central theme of “Unfinished Empire”: that rather than a carefully assembled and cleverly operated system controlled out of powerful offices in London, the empire was a tatterdemalion construction fashioned in great measure by accident, improvisation and luck, one that came under never-ending challenge by crises both internal and external.

Darwin, who teaches at Nuffield College, Oxford, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s leading authorities on the history of empire, is no Churchillian sentimentalist when it comes to the British Empire that is now irretrievably lost, but neither is he among those “historians of empire [who] still feel obliged to proclaim their moral revulsion against it, in case writing about empire might be thought to endorse it.” He does not regard empires as inherently evil, indeed believes their formation to be a natural outgrowth of basic human instincts: possession, control, territoriality, domination. Empires have almost always been with us — since World War II there has been an American empire, consisting more of military presence than of possession — and if the common tendency is to see them as exploitative, Darwin argues that they can be productive as well, helping places develop their trade relationships and internal economies.

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(Bloomsbury) - ’Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain’ by John Darwin

Assembling an empire, though, is anything but an orderly process. The “decisive act of imperial expansion” may be “the annexation of territory,” but in the case of the British Empire it was accomplished not only by the government, but also by individuals and organizations that had their own interests foremost in mind. At times they were at cross purposes, and it was often the role of London to sort them out and keep them more or less under control:

“It is not always clear what possession actually meant, both for those who rushed to exploit its promise and those on whom possession was imposed — sometimes . . . without their knowledge, let alone their consent. The results of taking possession — so often presented as creating order from chaos — were often extremely untidy, a mass of loose ends, contradictions and unfinished projects. Empire-building was always a work in progress, like a house extension in which the design, the builders and even the building materials were constantly changing.”

Though there were many in London who sought to maintain the empire as a manageable undertaking — not only in government but also in banks, trading companies and other private enterprises with interests in overseas investments — it was rarely possible to do so in a calculated and efficient way. Both empire building and empire management were surprisingly reactive processes in which the conquerers (if that really is the word for them) had to deal with the unforeseen and the unwelcome. Whether the territory in question was a small island in the Caribbean or an expanse as vast and heterogeneous as India, each one presented its own problems from the moment of first contact: