Customer Reviews

Chains of Empire: English Public Schools, Masonic Cabalism, Historical Causality and Imperial Clubdom

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It takes a vast amount of creativity and expertise to take what could be an amorphous topic, like the British Empire and Public Schools, and make it very specific by careful analysis. For that you need a theme, and tracing Masonic and other aspects of "Clubdom" is a potentially colorful one for sure; but would be very difficult to pull- off. Dr. Paul Rich is terrifically successful at doing just that in this wonderfully varied book. His analysis brings in elegant moments of philosophical reflection and sociological analysis, as well as general intellectual high -style, to produce a result which has a rigor of conclusion that one would scarcely expect from such a broad topic. By unflinching investigation he shows some valuable attributes to the ritual -making of an Empire, whose inner workings are usually written off as funny colonial characters in pith helmets. By dint of this analysis the reader can then draw his own conclusion about the relation of this ritual capacity to the better or worse aspects of that imperial character. But Rich's analysis is so ample that one can insightfully do so in both directions thanks to the same unflinching investigation. In this sense this colorful book avoids both political correctness, or by contrast, nostalgia. In this sense this must be one of the most cannily honest and careful books on the British Empire ever written.