The imperial impulse, the author observes, was not all bad one fine moment came when Britain exercised its considerable power to demand that the Greek government compensate a Jewish man born in Gibraltar for damage done to his property during an anti-Semitic riot in Athens. Brendon leisurely tours one imperial outpost after another over the course of two centuries, ending with the reversion of Hong Kong to Chinese rule by way of stops at New Zealand (which, he writes, once contemplated petitioning the United States for admission as a state), Canada, the Transvaal, Palestine and elsewhere across the globe.
Brendon adds that it was merely the first growth of what he calls the “libertarian commitment to trusteeship,” the British administration’s preference for some form of local autonomy that nearly always resulted in the demand for independence. That date, by Brendon’s account, is the beginning of the end of the empire, “an unbeaten revolt of children against parental authority” and the first such rebellion in modern history, though not the last. Historian Brendon ( Eminent Edwardians: Four Figures who Defined their Age: Northcliffe, Balfour, Pankhurst, Baden-Powell, 2003, etc.) opens on October 17, 1781, when Lord Cornwallis surrendered to George Washington’s troops at Yorktown.
A richly detailed, lucid account of how the British Empire grew and grew-and then, not quite inexorably, fell apart.
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