Professor Good, Empire Bad

A cataclysm of violence and a miasma of hypocrisy are the twin targets in Caroline Elkins’s simplistic and somewhat naive account not, despite the title, of the history of the British Empire, but instead essentially of British imperialism since the 1750s and of what she terms “liberal imperialism”. “This book will open up the empire’s iron fist,” she says of Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire while also attacking “liberalism’s perfidiousness”.

Diatribes are to the fore throughout the work, one that very much reaches to the present in an aggressive account of apparent relevance. Thus, with no real analysis other than accumulative slapdash, we have Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, an attack on the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities chaired by Tony Sewell, an account of Brexit that presents it as racism—“the British government’s configuration of white power clearly jettisons prospects for a federation of Western states”, and as…