Product Description

This astoundingly successful, superbly reviewed book vividly recreates the excitement, brutality and adventure of the British Empire. Ferguson's most revolutionary and popular work, EMPIRE is a major reinterpretation of the British Empire as one of the world's greatest modernising forces. It shows on a vast canvas how the British Empire in the 19th Century spearheaded real globalisation with steampower, telegraphs, guns, engineers, missionaries and millions of settlers.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #1750 in Books
• Published on: 2004-04-29
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 448 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Niall Ferguson's compelling tour de force, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World is published to coincide with a Channel 4 TV series. Ferguson, author of The Pity of War and The Cash Nexus, does not so much provide a synoptic survey of the British empire since the 17th century, as an arresting argument about why it arose, and how it fell. Ferguson's emphasis throughout is on the pursuit of economic profit and military might.

Piracy overseas and a taste for sugar and spice at home, combined with an unerring ability to vanquish rival European powers such as the Dutch and French in the dash for stash and status across the globe. But Ferguson is also alive to the peculiarities of British dominion: the manly and Christian civil service--less than a thousand strong--who ruled India, missionaries such as Livingstone, who explored and mapped as they preached and the barons of empire--Rhodes, Curzon, and Kitchener--who found in empire an outlet for their homoeroticism.

The book is brilliant and persuasive on trade and buccaneering before 1750, on India, on the late Victorian imperial mentalité, and on the two world wars, but less convincing on the empire of white settlement, and strangely silent on the most difficult colony of all, Ireland. In the end, Ferguson's penchant for polemic gets the upper-hand--the book closes with a controversial balance-sheet of the gains and losses of the British imperial experience--but he provides a riveting read nonetheless. --Miles Taylor

Review
How did Britain come to rule the world? What would today?s world be like now if it hadn?t? In Empire, Niall Ferguson sets out to answer these questions. He focuses on the history of globalization ? of pirates, planters, bankers and missionaries ? as promoted by Great Britain and her colonies, and examines the legacy that the British Empire has left behind. He portrays an empire in which it was easy to see who got rich, but less easy to see who paid the price. By the last years of Queen Victoria there seemed to be no limit to what could be achieved by British firepower and finance. Ferguson argues that throughout the twentieth century the principal threats to and the most plausible alternatives to British rule were not national independence movements but other empires. He concludes that the empire was dismantled not because it oppressed subject peoples for centuries, but because it took up arms against far more oppressive empires. Ferguson reminds us that today?s American empire was yesterday?s British colony and that for better or worse, the modern world is the product of Britain?s age of Empire. Ferguson?s style is argumentative and highly entertaining ? a revolutionary reinterpretation of this fascinating subject. (Kirkus UK)

The British empire didn't exactly disappear, writes superstar scholar Ferguson (Economics/NYU; The Cash Nexus, 2001, etc.), it just moved its capital westward to Washington and Manhattan. "The Americans have taken over our old role without yet facing the fact that an empire comes with it. . . . Like it or not, and deny it who will, empire is as much a reality today as it was through the three hundred years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world." So asserts Ferguson at the close of this lucid, heavily illustrated survey of British imperial history, which serves at one level as a handbook for how to rule the world humanely and, in the main, intelligently-even cost-effectively, for those fans of downsizing. British control over India, for instance, was effected by a small number of men, perhaps no more than a thousand civil servants governing a multiethnic patchwork nation of hundreds of millions; one former administrator even quipped that India "was really governed by confidential correspondence between the Secretary of State and the Viceroy." Britain's empire was not won without bloodshed and suffering, from the devastation visited upon Ireland to the staggering casualties wrought by the Boer War, which Ferguson likens to the Vietnam conflict "in two respects: its huge cost in both lives and money . . . and the divisions it opened up back home." Yet, he continues, the British empire also bore sweet fruit in the rise of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law around the world in places unlikely to have conceived such things without the force of British arms to back them up. These fruits were but a few products of the "remarkably non-venal administrations" that governed such a huge part of the world for so long-whose qualities and ideals, Ferguson suggests, latter-day empire builders would do well to study. Lively and thoughtful: provocative both as history and forecast. (Kirkus Reviews)

The FT Weekend, January 4, 2003
an excellent guide to ... the imperial experience... an impressive synthesis, it is also a perceptive and original work ... this marvellous book