A Provocative Story of a Great Empire

At the end of this engrossing tale of the great empire that, at its peak, encircled the Earth and held a quarter of its people, Denis Judd sums up his story with a forceful statement about British self-interest:

“The British as an imperial people generally did their best. . . . They did their best, more often than not, to play by the rules--their own rules, naturally enough, but rules all the same. . . .”

The historian’s judgment is, over the great sweep of the last 250 years, just. It would not have seemed so to Indians at the time of the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, or to Roman Catholic Irishmen and women at almost any time or, for that matter, to Americans during the Revolutionary War and its prelude.

But Judd’s emphasis on the British attempt to play by the rules, of an honest and even-handed system of law, of a gradually increasing respect for individual rights--highlights Britain’s principal gift to the modern world. As Britain’s colonies sought independence from 1776 on, they asserted, as they sometimes put it, the English rights they inherited from the mother country.

Judd explains why he begins his history not with John Cabot’s voyage to Newfoundland in 1497, but with events leading to the American Revolution because this is the time when “the British Empire became recognizably the greatest and most dynamic of European imperial structures.”

Judd’s method of telling the story is intriguing and effective. Each chapter relates an event to the “broad context” of the empire’s history. For instance, the chapter “Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee 1897” has the lengthy subtitle “The Uses and Misuses of Empire; an Imperial Triumph, or Whistling in the Dark? Fin de Siecle and the Problems and Opportunities of Empire.”

The chapter includes a vivid description of the jubilee, a survey of Britain’s insistence on maintaining the empire in the face of strains and doubts expressed by Alfred Tennyson and Rudyard Kipling. Judd quotes Kipling’s “Recessional,” written for the jubilee: “Far-called, our navies melt away; / On dune and headland sinks the fire: / Lo, all our pomp of yesterday / Is one with Nineveh and Tyre! . . .

Judd’s chapter on “Sex and the British Empire” deals candidly with the sometimes overbearing relations between the empire-builders, mostly male, and their subjects. The wonderful chapter “Scouting for Boys, 1908,” relates the founding of the magazine by that name and the launch of the Scouting movement.

Judd writes feelingly of the long love affair between the home country and India where, over the centuries, 2 million British died. Yet, he closes with a hopeful chapter, on the inauguration of Nelson Mandela as president of South Africa, May 1994. “Empire” is a provocative survey of a great nation that has had long-lasting effects on the world.