WRITING a history of the British empire is a supremely difficult task. An author has to master the histories of literally dozens of countries, then build a narrative that follows a linear sequence, while trying to layer in structural and conceptual issues. Any such attempt is bound to fall at one or other of the hurdles. The much praised Jan Morris trilogy sacrificed the kind of discussion that satisfies historians for the colouristic and impressionistic effects beloved of the general reader; the volume by Lawrence James in 1994 did the exact opposite. Denis Judd's book is not without faults, but in point of lucidity and comprehensiveness it bridges the two audiences better than the rival volumes, and for this reason must be accounted the best general history on the subject now available.
No doubt quailing at the enormity of the task before him, Judd has elected to distil the essence of the empire through a series of snapshots: the Indian Mutiny, the opening of the Suez Canal, Queen Victoria's Jubilee, the Easter 1916 Rising in Dublin, the 1924 British Empire Exhibition at Wembley, the Bodyline tour of Australia, and so on. His method in each chapter is to zero in on some dramatic event, then widen the focus and bring in as many associated ideas and themes as possible. This produces results that are always stimulating and absorbing and sometimes, when it is a subject Judd knows realty well, such as the South African War, an unrivalled tour d'horizon. Just occasionally the unworthy suspicion arises that the chapters are Judd's lectures delivered to his students at North London University (where he is a professor) but given a Vermeer finish.
There are two obvious criticisms of this volume. One is that it starts too late and goes on too long. Obviously ill at ease with the 18th century, the author is into the 19th century by page 28 and reaches the 20th having completed just one-third of the volume. We can all play the palour game of choosing the most appropriate date for the end of the British empire. My own choice would be 1945, some would plump for the Suez crisis of 1956, and others for the emergence of the independent African nations in the 1960s. Yet the very latest date must be the British withdrawal from East of Suez in 1968. Nonetheless, Judd devotes another hundred pages to the Commonwealth from 1971 on. But, as his oft-quoted favourite Kipling would say, that is another story. By no stretch of the imagination can the wranglings at Commonwealth conferences be described as part of the "British imperial experience.
The other drawback of the book is that the reader constantly wonders about the lacunae. We leave the history of India in 1857 and pick it up again in 1919, all bar a few general remarks. There is nothing here about the "Great Game", the North-West Frontier, the Afghans and Pathans and the high summer of the Raj. The same applies to the other countries of the empire. All sense of process, change over time and even causality is lost. These are necessary casualties of the "snapshot" system, but some would say they are unacceptable ones.
Most of all, there is no real dynamic sense of what brought about the decline and fall of the British empire. My nutshell answer to this would be the American economic empire and, in particular, the foreign policy of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR, the finest poker-playing statesman of the 20th century, confronted three challenges to American global empire in the 1930s: German bilateralism, especially in Latin America, Japan's "co-prosperity sphere", and the tariff walls of British Imperial Preference. By consummate machiavellianism, he destroyed all three in 1941-45.
There can no more be a perfect book on this subject than there can be a "perfect" performance of Beethoven's Eroica. We should be grateful to Den is Judd, therefore, that in his guided tour of the British empire he has "conducted" with the sensitivity of a Walter or a Toscanini.