![empire small](https://quadrant.org.au/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/empire-small.png)
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…
Madam: Archbishop Fisher (July-August 2024) does not resist the attacks on his church by the political, social or scientific atheists and those who insist on not being told what to do.
Aug 29 2024
6 mins
To claim Aborigines have the world's oldest continuous culture is to misunderstand the meaning of culture, which continuously changes over time and location. For a culture not to change over time would be a reproach and certainly not a cause for celebration, for it would indicate that there had been no capacity to adapt. Clearly this has not been the case
Aug 20 2024
23 mins
A friend and longtime supporter of Quadrant, Clive James sent us a poem in 2010, which we published in our December issue. Like the Taronga Park Aquarium he recalls in its 'mocked-up sandstone cave' it's not to be forgotten
Aug 16 2024
2 mins