CapitalistImperialistPig

Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power is much better on the rise than the demise. Also, the so-called Lessons for Global Power are little more than a few paragraphs of moralizing on behalf of an activist or perhaps neocon American foreign policy. Overall, the book betrays its origins in a television series in a rather superficial treatment of many points, especially the loss of the empire. One cardinal point that deserved more consideration was the inherent contradiction between imperial exploitation and the notions of free trade and self government at the heart of the British ethos. Ferguson blames the post World War II imperial collapse on the financial effects of the conflicts with other empires and especially on U.S. opposition, but I think that's way too simple. The case of India is probably most instructive. India was the cash cow of Empire and the source of many of the soldiers for its other imperi...

Live blogging Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson. After World War I, the British Empire had one last spasm of expansion, scarfing up big chunks of the formerly Ottoman Middle East, German's African colonies, and more of the Pacific. The Imperial impulse was largely exhausted though, and the Empire was starting to cost more money than it made. The lesson of the American rebellion had been absorbed much earlier and resulted in the white and protestant colonies winning a large measure of self-rule and independence - privileges not extended to the earlier colonies of Ireland and India. India had played a major role in the British war effort - one million Indian volunteers had fought for Britain, and many of the English educated Indian intellectuals, including Gandhi, had supported it. After the war, first Ireland and then India had asked for the same deal that Australia, Canada, etc had got. The new Arab coloni...

By Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, the British Empire sprawled over five continents and hundreds of islands. It was by far the largest empire that had ever existed. The war of revenge against the dervishes - Salafis in the Sudan - culminated in the slaughter of Omdurman. Machine guns and artillery beat spears and muskets. But signs of rot were already showing up. The turn of the twentieth century war against the Boers in South Africa was brutal, difficult, and was conducted ultimately with a policy of burning farms and imprisoning women and children in concentration camps, where poor food and sanitation killed tens of thousands. Of course this was a small scale slaughter compared to some previous colonial wars, but this time the victims, or many of them, were white Europeans. The peace would be a technical victory but mostly a loss. Disgust with the conduct of the war combined with the well-founded suspicion that it had been fought for the benefit of a tiny number of rich ...

Niall Ferguson argues that the average stay-at-home, working class Brit did not get a whole lot of economic benefit out of the empire. Of course the plunderer's made their fortunes, and trade brought jobs, but emigration to Australia or Canada had a higher payoff and lower taxes. Supporting Army, Navy, and Empire was not free. One popular product they did get was vicarious adventure. There was an endless appetite for books and magazine stories of plucky/lucky Brit's triumphing over beast and foe in exotic locales. Wars were a kind of amplified adventure fiction, especially when the hapless foes couldn't inflict many casualties with spear and musket vs. machine gun. Britain averaged more than a war per year during Victoria's long reign. The favorite crackpot science of the day, eugenics, held that by eliminating the weak, such wars actually improved the human race - a theme later taken up by A. Hitler.

Whatever fit of morality seized England in the abolition of the slave trade seems to have abated by the latter nineteenth century, as they rushed pell-mell into Africa. The powers of Europe (England, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia) agreed to divy Africa. In part this was Bismark's strategy of playing England vs. France, but Prussia grabbed a piece too, just to confuse the map a bit. Once again, technology and money were the key players. As in India, private enterprise led the way, armed with credit and the new Maxim gun - an early machine gun. Cecil Rhodes found the Kimberly diamond mines a proper capitalist competition, with hundreds of small companies competing and driving down prices. Armed with Rothschild money, he and Lord Rothschild were able to buy up the lot and make serious money the old fashioned way, as the De Beers cartel. Rhodes used some of the profits to fund his overthrow of the Matebele and start his own country - Rhodesia. Proof of the unsatirizability...