The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 (Vintage) [Paperback]

Piers Brendon (Author)

Book Description

Release date: February 9, 2010 | Series: Vintage

After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. Yet it grew to become the greatest, most diverse empire the world had seen. Then, within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, a rapid demise that left an array of dependencies and a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire covers a vast canvas, which Brendon fills with vivid particulars, from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments.

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

*Starred Review* The title, taken from Gibbon’s immortal work on imperial Rome, was chosen since British imperialists consciously compared their empire to the Roman imperium. Despite the title, this is no dreary tale of imperial decay and collapse. Instead, Brendon, a fellow at Churchill College, Cambridge, has written a colorful and often brilliant examination of the imperial experience from the American Revolution to the return of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty. He combines the genres of narrative history, travelogue, and biographical sketch to capture the richness, majesty, squalor, and injustice that created and maintained a vast edifice that has left an indelible imprint on the contemporary world. The narrative ranges across imperial settings in a successful effort to illustrate how both ordinary and extraordinary people lived, thrived, and often suffered under the British flag. Of course, decline and ultimate fall is part of the story. As a liberal empire based (in spirit if not always in practice) on the ideals of political liberty and even equality, it was an empire that contained the seeds of its own destruction, as citizens from America to India took those ideals to heart. The breadth, diversity, greatness, and failures of the British Empire have rarely been portrayed as well. --Jay Freeman --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

A Washington Post Book World Notable Book

“Brilliant. . . . A splendid popular history of the British Empire. . . . Brendon [has] a gift for catching the moments of history that people treasure.”
—The New York Review of Books
 
“Hair-raising. . . . Pointed, sharply drawn, wide in its sweep. . . . Many accounts of the British empire have appeared in recent years, but few are as entertaining as this.”
—Boston Globe
 
“Entertaining. . . . Lucid and well informed. . . . Every page is consistently readable and stimulating. . . . [Brendon] doesn’t draw a purely bleak picture, or present a bill of indictment. He captures the nuanced relations between the English and the peoples they ruled.”
—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Splendid. . . . Brendon’s book is history with the nasty bits left in.”
—The Washington Post Book World
 
“Sharply drawn. . . . A rich panorama of triumph, splendor and folly that is truly global in scale.”
—Newsday
 
“Only a very confident historian with a massive, comprehensive, and thoroughly researched manuscript would willingly invite comparisons with the British historian Edward Gibbon. [Brendon] fits that bill.”
—Foreign Affairs
 
“Magnificent. . . . Provocative. . . . Marvellously readable.”
—Financial Times
 
“An outstanding book. . . . Compelling reading from start to finish: it is the best one-volume account of the British Empire. . . . At once popular and scholarly, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire demonstrates a thorough command of the historical literature.”
—Times Literary Supplement (London)
 
“A narrative masterpiece. The settings are exotic, the cast of thousands full of the most eccentric, egotistical, paranoid, swashbuckling players you are likely to meet in any history. . . . Endlessly engrossing and disturbing.”
—The Sunday Telegraph (London)
 
“[Brendon] spins an epic yarn of heroes, villains, dreamers and fools who risked and often lost their lives to establish and maintain an empire for the glory of the crown; and who often enriched themselves in the process.”
—The Washington Times
 
“A compelling and spectacularly detailed retelling of imperial ‘rise’ as well as fall. . . . Not since Jan Morris’s Pax Britannica trilogy has anyone recounted these events with such sustained panache. . . . Remarkable.”
—The Guardian (London)
 
“Magisterial. . . . A huge and hugely impressive book, mighty in scale as its subject, elegantly written and rigorous in its research.”
—The Daily Telegraph (London)
 
“Brendon packs his narrative history of Great Britain with adventures, eccentrics, and other interesting characters.”
—National Geographic
 
“Readable and highly provocative. . . . This is not a dry, blow-by-blow account of Britain’s impact upon the outside world. . . . This is the story of the British Empire, warts and all.”
—The New York Sun
 
“While there may be many books on the British Empire, this is undoubtedly the most entertaining and the best. . . .  A book of enormous range and complexity, driven by a powerful narrative engine and leavened with a splendid sense of wit and irony. It takes courage to emulate the great Gibbon, but Brendon succeeds magnificently.”
—The Evening Standard (London)
 
“Unlike some recent chroniclers of empire, Brendon has no agenda. . . . [This] is, quite simply, a masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon’s research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose.”
—Literary Review
 
“Prodigious. . . . Stuffed with myriad spectacular examples of human vanity, folly, depravity and greed—and is all the better for it. . . . [Brendon] persuasively demonstrates that so much of the contemporary Middle East crisis can be laid at the door of the Foreign Office. . . . A brilliant account.”
—The Observer (London)

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 848 pages
• Publisher: Vintage; 1 Reprint edition (February 9, 2010)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0307388417
• ISBN-13: 978-0307388414
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 1.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (31 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #142,079 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

45 of 50 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars British Empire Casts a Long Shadow December 2, 2008

By Izaak VanGaalen

Format:Hardcover

Piers Brendon was not being whimsical when he titled this book after Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike Americans, who never considered themselves imperialists, the British took their imperial duties seriously. The sons and daughters of empire saw themselves as present-day Romans. They were steeped in the classics, they learned the languages of their subject peoples, and they prepared to spend many years abroad in the service of the Crown. Brendon makes the case (as did Niall Ferguson in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire) that they saw themselves on a civilizing mission, that their empire - unlike Rome's - was a liberal empire. The British Empire would be a caretaker government until the locals were deemed capable of self-government. The conflicting goals of developing self-government and maintaining loyalty to the Crown manifest themselves often during this period in the form of uprisings and rebellions.

The story begins with the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown in 1781 and ends with the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Ironically, the British thought that their empire had started to decline with the loss of the colonies in America, instead their most glorious - or most infamous - days were still ahead of them. After the Napoleonic Wars, the other European powers were greatly weakened. For the British the years from 1815 to 1914 were indeed the British Century. The Empire reached its apex during the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. It was an Empire on which the sun never set, consisting of a quarter of the world's population and habitable land....

Being an inherently contradictory enterprise, liberal empire naturally had its seamy side. Brendon does not shy away from recounting the exploitation, racism, brutality, and the massacres that occurred. There was the Indian Rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the uprising in Ceylon in 1818, to name a few of the most brutal. In other words, Brendon presents enough evidence of violence and tragedy in this book to disabuse anyone of the merits of trying to impose a liberal empire. The question of which side was civilized and which side was savage comes to mind often.

That being said, Brendon paints some memorable portraits of the larger-than-life characters that animated the Empire. He seems especially fond of the Victorians in all their excesses. There were the arch-imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cromer, Kitchener, HM Stanley (and Dr Livingstone, I presume) with their outsized views of themselves. There were also colorful literati such as Rudyard Kipling, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad who were great travelers, as well as great writers.

This book is well worth reading as the endgame of the British empire is still unraveling today. Many of ongoing conflicts being played out today in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Isreal, Palestine, etc. were to some degree set in motion when the British forces withdrew from those areas. The British Empire - like the Roman - still casts a long shadow. Read more ›

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Good show! June 30, 2009

By John Nordin

Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase

I lived in post-colonial Africa for two years, and saw firsthand the complicated legacy of the British Empire. Brendon's book has been well received but attacked bitterly by a few who seem to think he only looks at the negative side of occupying a country, coercing people, forcing them to learn a new language, changing their religion, regarding them as less than human and stealing their land. Where is the positive side of this?

Well, I have a small, but only a very small, amount of sympathy for that critique. The value of this book is that he shows, relentlessly and with a thousand examples the careless racism of the empire, the vast parade of eccentrics sent off to manage it and the injustices that would be bizarre, ironic and comic if people hadn't died from them.

For make no mistake, freed from their original society, the whites sent to the empire often behaved oddly, badly, weirdly. And they still did in Kenya in the 80s.

What I miss in Brendon's book is the wider sweep of empire. His is a political history with occasional forays into cultural and religious issues. So the minor officials of the empire, the rank and file missionaries, the ordinary expatriates do not figure much here. And it is among those people (as a generalization) that you find those who loved their foreign country they were posted to and who were advocates for its people - at least some of the time.

So, while he does not make up the racism and oppression of the empire, he does underplay the complexity and that even in a colonialist system, something positive did get left behind to go with the oppression.... I'm glad for his documenting of the contempt of the whites for the locals, the way they misplayed minor movements for reform into full scale rebellions and their utter disregard for human values. I only wish that, in addition to this, he'd given us more of how people, in the midst of an evil system, found ways to be human. Read more ›

56 of 68 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Empires inevitably fall; but leave legacies February 22, 2008

By Douglas Doak

Format:Hardcover

The message of Piers Brendon's magnificent history of the British Empire is that its fall was inevitable and that that is the fate of all other empires, past and future. Because empires are founded on brutality and illegitimacy, says Brendon, their fault lines in the end prove too great. Brendon starts his account of the British Empire's fall with defeat at Yorktown in the American War of Independence - more than a century before the Empire reached its geographical apogee - because it was in America that the trust between Britain and its colonial peoples was first undermined. He carries on through the watershed of the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 19th-century colonisation of Africa. The First World War badly shook the edifice, the Second World War sent it crashing down: in the two decades following 1945 Britain went from an empire of 700m people to one with very few subjects indeed. Something of Brendon's ambition can be seen in his Gibbon-echoing title and it's not hubris: this is a wonderful piece of narrative history. [...]

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Wordy Chronicle of Imperial Aggression April 26, 2011

By michael mcgreevy

Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

This is a good summation of the impact the British nation had on a number of subject states during a period of 220 years. Said simply it is a saga of imperial aggression which was powered by a superior military who in turn were supported by a country which was governed by elitists and latter day "Romans."

You may find this a useful reference volume to assist you in understanding the early histories of those countries whose current tragedies fill our daily headlines. Shamefully many of their woes had their origin under British rule.

One final note: this vast volume could have benefited from more aggressive editing both in length and in grammar. The author has a tendency to turn simple thoughts into strained, entangled and wordy utterances.