Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 »

Piers Brendon is the author of The Dark Valley, among other histories and biographies. He is the former Keeper of the Churchill Archives Centre and a Fellow of Churchill College, Cambridge. He lives in Cambridge, England.

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.

The Washington Post - Karl E. Meyer

[Brendon's] book is in no sense an apologia; it is history with the nasty bits left in. Not one massacre, civil war, famine, racist outrage, covert trick or egregious human-rights abuse is passed over. His chronicle thus serves as a useful counterpoint to the generally upbeat accounts of Britain's imperial era, notably Harvard professor Niall Ferguson's well-written yet almost nostalgic encomiums. Brendon supplements but does not supplant Jan Morris's irresistibly readable Pax Britannica trilogy, published in the 1970s, the critical yet fair-minded standard by which new entries should be judged. This Decline and Fall is strongest in its details; the author seemingly has scoured every available memoir for devastating quips, nicknames, anecdotes, rumors and shrewd assessments.

List of Illustrations Acknowledgements Introduction

1 The World Turned Upside Down
The American Revolution and the Slave Trade

2 An English Barrack in the Oriental Seas
Britannia’s Indian Empire

3 Exempt from the Disaster of Caste
Australia, Canada and New Zealand

4 To Stop is Dangerous, to Recede, Ruin
The Far East and Afghanistan

5 Sacred Wrath
Irish Famine and Indian Mutiny

6 Spread the Peaceful Gospel — with the Maxim Gun
Towards Conquest in Africa

7 A Magnificent Empire under the British Flag
Cape to Cairo

8 Barbarians Thundering at the Frontiers
The Boer War and the Indian Raj

9 The Empire, Right or Wrong
Flanders, Iraq, Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge

10 Aflame with the Hope of Liberation
Ireland and the Middle East

11 Englishmen Like Posing as Gods
West and East

12 White Mates Black in a Very Few Moves
Kenya and the Sudan

13 Spinning the Destiny of India
The Route to Independence

14 That Is the End of the British Empire
Singapore and Burma

15 The Aim of Labour is to Save the Empire
Ceylon and Malaya

16 A Golden Bowl Full of Scorpions
The Holy Land

17 The Destruction of National Will
Suez Invasion and Aden Evacuation

18 Renascent Africa
The Gold Coast and Nigeria

19 Uhuru — Freedom
Kenya and the Mau Mau

20 Kith and Kin
Rhodesia and the Central African Federation

21 Rocks and Islands
The West Indies and Cyprus

22 All Our Pomp of Yesterday
The Falklands and Hong Kong

Abbreviations Notes Sources Index