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The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 | 
 enlarge | Author: Piers Brendon
Publisher: Knopf
Category: Book
List Price: $37.50
Buy New: $22.00
You Save: $15.50 (41%)
New (46) Used (9) from $22.00
Avg. Customer Rating:  4 reviews
Sales Rank: 14391
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 816
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.7
Dimensions (in): 9.4 x 6.5 x 2.1
ISBN: 0307268292
Dewey Decimal Number: 909.0971241
EAN: 9780307268297
ASIN: 0307268292
Publication Date: October 28, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
A magisterial work of narrative history, hailed in Britain as “the best one-volume account of the British Empire” and “an outstanding book” (The Times Literary Supplement).
After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. But over the next 150 years it grew to become the greatest and most diverse empire the world has ever seen—ranging from Canada to Australia to China, India, and Egypt—seven times larger than the Roman Empire at its apogee. Britannia ruled the waves and a quarter of the earth.
Yet it was also a fundamentally weak empire, as Piers Brendon shows in this vivid and sweeping chronicle. Run from a tiny island base, the British Empire operated on a shoestring with the help of local elites. It enshrined a belief in freedom that would fatally undermine its authority. Spread too thin, and facing wars, economic crises, and domestic discord, the empire would vanish almost as quickly as it appeared.
Within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, sometimes amid bloodshed. This rapid demise left unfinished business in Rhodesia, the Falklands, and Hong Kong. It left an array of dependencies and a ghost of an empire overshadowed by a rising America. Above all, it left a contested legacy: at best, a sporting spirit, a legal code, and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife.
Brendon tells this story with brio and brilliance; covering a vast canvas, he fills it with vivid firsthand accounts of life in the colonies and intimate portraits of the sometimes eccentric British officials who administered them. It is all here—from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments. Panoramic in scope and riveting in detail, this is narrative history at its finest.
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| Customer Reviews:
 Empires are inherently bad... January 5, 2009
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
The author's premise is that empires and the spreading of western civilization is inherently bad. He chooses to emphasize the parts you would expect a liberal ideologue to, such as massacres, slavery etc. He ignores that expansionism is human nature for the strong. I think his premise, as one other reviewer put it, that empires collapse because they are inherently illegitimate is full of his own political views and not facts. Empires have always existed and always will in one form or another, the strong will always use their strength to force their will upon the weak. That is human nature, there is no way to get around it. It is a well written book, and enjoyable to read, which is why I give it 3 stars and the author presents his point of view well. Ultimately, I find it unconvincing.
 OCCUPATION(=COLONISATION) OUT, FREEDOM-IN ! BRILLIANT HISTORY!! December 29, 2008
0 out of 2 found this review helpful
Piers Brendon has written a masterpiece on a very important subject, namely:why nations abhor occupation throughout history.To quote Edward Gibbon who said that "there is nothing more adverse to nature and reason than to hold in obedience remote countries and foreign nations, in oppposition to their inclination and interest"-words which also sum up Brendon's argumentations about the British Empire's failure regarding its attempt to subjugate a quarter of the world.
The thesis of the author is simple:from its inception, the Brits were doomed to finish- sooner or later- their brutal occupation on hundreds of millions.True, they were not alone;other countries such as France, Spain, Portugal, Holland have also experimented with oppressing others in the name of white man's (supposed)civilization.The will to force and enforce their mentality upon others is not something new :it had its origins in ancient history via the Roman Empire, which crumbled after a thousand years.
The British thought that by imposing their manners, language, education and culture on other peoples they would succeed where others had failed.They were excruciatingly wrong.Not only were they mocked, spit upon,underestimated,despised,but they were also ridiculed and brought to farcical situations.
Read this wonderful book and will will enjoy each sentence and page of it. Brendon is extremely skilled with words, and his opus has plenty of vignettes ,metaphors, anecdotes and lots of humour.Add all these to his vivid language and well- structured chapters containing depictions of folly and decadence, irony and devastation and will immediately want to re-read this superb piece of history.
Brendon is describing the atrocities perpetrated by the British in many instances, such as the Amritsar butchery- all this in the name of progress and Western ideals.His twenty-two chapters are treated both chronologically and are divided thematically by the respective countries where the British had ruled.
It is a pity that the editor did not include some maps showing the inexperienced reader where many exotic places are to be found.
The only conclusion the reader comes after reading this book is that occupation of others is a crime against humanity-no matter where, when and how.The human race has always aspired for freedom and there was not, is not,and will never be a force in history to alter this.
In short: this book will be the ultimate reference source, the alpha and omega of the decline and fall of the British Empire for years to come.
This is a masterpiece with thousands of eccentricities and odd fellows swimming throughout its pages.Enjoy!
British Empire Casts a Long Shadow December 3, 2008
11 out of 11 found this review helpful
Piers Brendon was not being whimsical when he titled this book after Edward Gibbon's The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Unlike Americans, who never considered themselves imperialists, the British took their imperial duties seriously. The sons and daughters of empire saw themselves as present-day Romans. They were steeped in the classics, they learned the languages of their subject peoples, and they prepared to spend many years abroad in the service of the Crown. Brendon makes the case (as did Niall Ferguson in Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire) that they saw themselves on a civilizing mission, that their empire - unlike Rome's - was a liberal empire. The British Empire would be a caretaker government until the locals were deemed capable of self-government. The conflicting goals of developing self-government and maintaining loyalty to the Crown manifest themselves often during this period in the form of uprisings and rebellions.
The story begins with the surrender of Cornwallis to Washington at Yorktown in 1781 and ends with the British handover of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Ironically, the British thought that their empire had started to decline with the loss of the colonies in America, instead their most glorious - or most infamous - days were still ahead of them. After the Napoleonic Wars, the other European powers were greatly weakened. For the British the years from 1815 to 1914 were indeed the British Century. The Empire reached its apex during the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria in 1897. It was an Empire on which the sun never set, consisting of a quarter of the world's population and habitable land.
Being an inherently contradictory enterprise, liberal empire naturally had its seamy side. Brendon does not shy away from recounting the exploitation, racism, brutality, and the massacres that occurred. There was the Indian Rebellion, the Mau Mau uprising in Kenya, the uprising in Ceylon in 1818, to name a few of the most brutal. In other words, Brendon presents enough evidence of violence and tragedy in this book to disabuse anyone of the merits of trying to impose a liberal empire. The question of which side was civilized and which side was savage comes to mind often.
That being said, Brendon paints some memorable portraits of the larger-than-life characters that animated the Empire. He seems especially fond of the Victorians in all their excesses. There were the arch-imperialists such as Cecil Rhodes, Lord Cromer, Kitchener, HM Stanley (and Dr Livingstone, I presume) with their outsized views of themselves. There were also colorful literati such as Rudyard Kipling, Richard Burton, and Joseph Conrad who were great travelers, as well as great writers.
This book is well worth reading as the endgame of the British empire is still unraveling today. Many of ongoing conflicts being played out today in Pakistan, India, Iraq, Isreal, Palestine, etc. were to some degree set in motion when the British forces withdrew from those areas. The British Empire - like the Roman - still casts a long shadow.
Empires inevitably fall; but leave legacies February 22, 2008
39 out of 45 found this review helpful
The message of Piers Brendon's magnificent history of the British Empire is that its fall was inevitable and that that is the fate of all other empires, past and future. Because empires are founded on brutality and illegitimacy, says Brendon, their fault lines in the end prove too great. Brendon starts his account of the British Empire's fall with defeat at Yorktown in the American War of Independence - more than a century before the Empire reached its geographical apogee - because it was in America that the trust between Britain and its colonial peoples was first undermined. He carries on through the watershed of the 1857 Indian Mutiny and the 19th-century colonisation of Africa. The First World War badly shook the edifice, the Second World War sent it crashing down: in the two decades following 1945 Britain went from an empire of 700m people to one with very few subjects indeed. Something of Brendon's ambition can be seen in his Gibbon-echoing title and it's not hubris: this is a wonderful piece of narrative history. [...]
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