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'While Britain was losing an empire, it was finding itself...' The compelling opening words to The Fate of the Empire, set the tone and agenda for the final stage of Simon Schama's epic voyage around Britain, her people and her past. Spanning two centuries, crossing the breadth of the empire and covering a vast expanse of topics - from the birth of feminism to the fate of freedom - he explores the forces that shaped British culture and character from 1776 to 2000.The story opens on the eve of a bloody revolution, but not a British one. The French Revolution never quite crossed the Channel, though its spirit of fiery defiance and Romantic idealism did, sparking off a round of radical revolts and reforms that gathered momentum over the coming century - from the Irish Rebellion to the Chartist Petition. The great question of the Victorian century was how the world's first industrial society could come through its growing pains without falling apart in social and political conflict. Would the machine age destroy or strengthen the institutions that held Britain together, from the family to the farm? And if the British Empire helped to make Britain stable and rich, did it live up to its promise to help the ruled as well as the rulers? On the way to answering these questions, The Fate of the Empire makes stops at both celebrations, like the Great Exhibition, and catastrophes, like the Irish potato famine and the Indian Mutiny. Amidst the military and economic shocks and traumas of the 20th century, and through the voices of Churchill, Orwell and H. G. Wells, it asks the question that is still with us - is the immense weight of our history a blessing or a curse, a gift or a millstone around the neck of our future?It is a vast compelling epic, made more so by the lively storytelling and big bold characters at the heart of the action. But alongside flamboyant heroes, like Nelson and Churchill, Schama recalls unsung heroines and virtually unknown enemies. Alongside the grand ideas, he exposes the grand illusions that cost untold lives. Schama looks head on at the facts and asks, 'What went wrong with the liberal dream?' The answers emerge in The Fate of the Empire, which reveals the living ideals of Britain's long history, 'a history that tied together social justice with bloody-minded liberty'.… (more)
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The subject of the book may be British imperial history, especially in Ireland and India, but the
But this book, even though it touches on all those issues, isn't detailed enough to provide any conclusive answers to any side of those arguments. And Schama acknowledges that up front, that this is even more of a collection of personal essays on Britain than a detailed history. To be sure, you do get an overview of British history up through WWII. To an American like me, it was nice to see some details about the actual philosophies of Disraeli and Gladstone, that Winston Churchill was not the stereotypical conservative that some Americans imagine him to be, Prince Albert's contribution to Victoria's reign, the controversies of rule in Ireland and India. Still, I got the sense I was exposed to some elliptical references that only an educated Brit would know. Like many general histories, though, it left an appetite for learning more details.
But I'm going to be viewing a bibliography so heavy with titles from the 1990s with suspicion. Especially when I see Schama repeating that hoary feminist myth about a legal "rule of thumb" sanction for husbands to beat their wives. A running theme is the use of British history from Macauley to Winston Churchill and George Orwell, how their perceptions of what the British past was guided their visions for the future, their notions of what war must preserve. I said in my review of the preceding volume in the series that Schama calls himself a "born-again Whig". He didn't just mean subscribing, in part, to a great man of history. (Though you can find that in his portrayal of the great, contradictory Churchill and his defense of the man, warts and all.) He makes clear he mostly means Macauley's notion of an empire bringing democratic liberalism to the world, teaching its subjects, and then releasing them to become brothers in a common culture.
Schama well-nigh rhapsodizes about this gift of empire at the end. In some ways, this book reminded me of Niall Ferguson's Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power. Both attempt to rehabilitate the empire while acknowledging its often emphasized downsides. Unlike the preceding volume, Schama lists many crimes of the British Empire. If he doesn't genuflect at the altar of Imperial Guilt, he pauses for several moments of silence. Unlike Ferguson, he doesn't quite come out and say it was, as a whole, all worth it. Still, Schama approvingly notes we get lovely Indian novels in English, West Indians in London, and Pakistanis breathing liberty in the Sceptred Isle.
Schama's notion of what it means to be British is not a racial notion. He explicitly rejects that. It is what, in American terms, is called a proposition nation. While I appreciated the details of British history Schama gave me, I don't buy this notion of nationhood, a notion that Schama is so passionate about that he lapses, at book's end, into a brief, uncharacteristic bit of incoherence. Empires less liberal than Britain seem to have had trouble with diverse populations. Mass immigration, democracy, and multiculturalism are as unsustainable a combination in Britain as anywhere else. And Enoch Powell, deliverer of the infamous 1968 "Rivers of Blood" speech against mass immigration, now seems less the paranoid ranter of Schama's description and more of a Cassandra.