The Empire Project is a very impressive achievement. Drawing inspiration from works by Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, John Darwin presents a bold analysis of the consolidation and ultimate dissolution of the British Empire between 1830 and 1970. The book displays the virtues that have long characterized his scholarship: an astonishing range of knowledge, enviable powers of analysis, sweeping intellectual ambition, and limpid prose.

Darwin excels in delineating the “chaotic pluralism” of the imperial order (3). Repeatedly attacking monolithic, totalizing accounts of empire, he effectively dissects its political, economic, and legal forms, and exposes the contradictions and ambiguities at its heart. Most importantly, he develops a compelling argument about the interweaving of political economy and geopolitics, embedding the British Empire in a truly global frame. In so doing, he utilizes the interpretive framework he also later employed in Unfinished Empire, his wide-ranging popular historical account. The durability of the planet-spanning empire that emerged during the nineteenth century and collapsed in the twentieth was dependent on benign political conditions in Europe, a “passive” East Asia, and a largely introverted United States (5). Its unraveling was a consequence of the dissolution of this fortuitous alignment, a fate “largely determined by geopolitical forces over which the British themselves had little control” (649). To make this argument Darwin conceptualizes the empire as part of a wider British “world-system,” structured by the interdependence and functional differentiation of its main parts—the British Isles, India, a distended “commercial republic” centered on the City of London, and the globe-spanning assemblage of British settler colonies (3–5, 144–45). This fruitful analytical strategy is sure to influence future scholarship on the macrohistorical dynamics of the empire.

There is also much to query in Darwin's account. In this comment, I probe the status of violence in his explanatory schema, focusing especially on his discussion of settler colonialism in Part 1, and conclude with some brief comments on the vexed relationship between historical writing and moral critique.

Once the staple of imperial historiography, the colonies dropped below the horizon during the 1980s and 1990s. This was partly a reaction to their exaggerated role in older constitutionalist narratives, partly an unintended consequence of the postcolonial emphasis on regimes of racial difference, in which India at times seemed to function as a synecdoche for empire. Darwin has been a leading figure in the welcome revival of interest in the settler empire, and The Empire Project, as well as Unfinished Empire, rightly dedicate much space to “the great auxiliary engines of British world power” (xi), which by the turn of the twentieth century formed a privileged subsystem within the wider order. Alongside James Belich's monumental Replenishing the Earth (2009) and Gary Magee and Andrew Thompson's Empire and Globalization (2010), The Empire Project makes the strongest case yet for the pivotal importance of the “British world.”Footnote ¹

Figured as radically different from—and often politically, economically, and culturally superior to—other imperial spaces, the settler colonies engendered contrasting modalities of justification and governance.Footnote ² Darwin unpicks the knotty constitutional, diplomatic, and economic dimensions of the colonial order with forensic skill, though his account of the ideological armature that helped legitimate the enterprise is not as well developed. Here, as throughout, he is more convincing when discussing the geopolitics of empire than when anatomizing ideologies and cultural discourses. While his discussion of “Britannic nationalism” is a useful antidote to exaggerated claims about colonial nationalism, it is weakened by the lack of attention paid to shifting understandings of race—social Darwinism is absent, for example—and how such discursive shifts molded the transnational visions of white supremacism that circulated throughout the Anglo world.Footnote ³ It is at moments like this that Darwin's pointed refusal to engage with work in the “new imperial history” is most apparent.Footnote ⁴ This is a missed opportunity.

British settler colonialism was a powerful compound of intraracial egalitarianism and interracial exclusion and domination. By the 1870s, colonists were typically imagined as always already civilized, and as such they were seen simultaneously as facsimiles (or not-quite-facsimiles) of those inhabiting the “mother country” and radically different from and superior to others they encountered—especially those they invaded and dispossessed. This account of identity underpinned an argument for political autonomy. As the historian C. P. Lucas once put it, “[t]he ground of self-government is, that those who are in the colony are on the same level in physique and intelligence with those who are in the mother country, and that, being on the spot, they are best able to take care of themselves.”Footnote ⁵ The original inhabitants were in turn pictured as incapable, immature, lacking in both rationality and competence, and thus unworthy of political or social equality. Settler colonialism enacted a version of what Charles Mills terms the racial contract: a vision of the just polity predicated on the ascription of basic political equality to whites and its concurrent denial to nonwhites. It expressed a form of Herrenvolk ethics, a normative system intended to structure settler societies as racially exclusive polities.Footnote ⁶ Indigenous peoples continue to suffer its pernicious effects.

The brutal violence and insidious racism at the core of the Victorian empire play little role in Darwin's analysis. This is not unusual. Richard Drayton observes that sidestepping imperial violence has been a recurrent theme in the historiography of the British Empire. (If I were writing The Idea of Greater Britain afresh I would place more emphasis on it). While Robinson and Gallagher's seminal interventions dissolved the complacent Whiggism of their predecessors, they continued to underestimate the frequency and significance of imperial violence and brutalization.Footnote ⁷The Empire Project likewise presents a rather sanitized picture. The danger of placing so much explanatory weight on the contingency, heterogeneity, and chaotic pluralism of the empire—vitally important as these are—is that the visceral reality of its formation and functioning can be obscured. Yet torture, extrajudicial killing, sexual cruelty, indentured labor, coercive displacement, the annihilation or radical disruption of existing traditions, institutions, and forms of life, even mass murder and genocide, were all integral to that chaotically plural system.Footnote ⁸ And the Victorian empire itself was partly built on the back of an Atlantic slave trade that maimed and killed millions.Footnote ⁹ While The Empire Project catalogues numerous wars and frontier conflicts, and brilliantly analyzes the impact of the two twentieth-century world wars on imperial high politics and the international economy, little space is dedicated to the broken and abused bodies—almost invariably black or brown—on which the empire was erected.

Modern settler colonialism, British or otherwise, is premised on violence against indigenous peoples and everyday forms of humiliation, exclusion, and racial segregation, some informal, some sanctioned by law. Violence was its formative act, its original sin. As Patrick Wolfe argues, it is an “inclusive, land-centered project that coordinates a comprehensive range of agencies, from the metropolitan center to the frontier encampment, with a view to eliminating Indigenous societies.”Footnote ¹⁰ Colonial eliminativism encompasses assorted practices, including assimilation, displacement, legal domination, intimidation, and the use of lethal violence. The purpose is to secure territory while destroying the sense of peoplehood of those supplanted by the settler community. This is not to suggest that all settlers, politicians, colonial advocates, and London-based officials necessarily thought of it in those terms—far from it—but that was what it entailed.Footnote ¹¹ In the zone of greatest destruction, the population of Aboriginal Australians fell from over 750,000 to less than 50,000 during the colonial period. In the penal colony of Tasmania (once Van Diemen's Land) the local population was almost exterminated between 1803 and 1850 in a prolonged nightmare of rape, torture, disease, and murder.Footnote ¹²The Empire Project does not discuss this episode of colonial genocide.Footnote ¹³ While this was the most extreme example, it was no aberration. Even the most purportedly “benign” forms of erasure often resulted in devastation. “Here, in essence, is assimilation's Faustian bargain—have our settler world, but lose your Indigenous soul. Beyond any doubt, this is a kind of death.”Footnote ¹⁴ Moreover, settlement is not an autochthonous founding moment superseded by postcolonial state formation, but rather a continuous process of domination with effects that continue to shape the lifeworlds of indigenous populations long after the formal age of empire. Invasion is a “structure not an event.”Footnote ¹⁵

Darwin is hardly unaware of the prevalence of imperial violence. In Unfinished Empire he writes that “the essential truth remains that more or less organized violence played a huge part in British expansion,” and he observes that relations between settlers and indigenous peoples were sometimes marked by “extreme and indiscriminate violence.”Footnote ¹⁶ In The Empire Project such violence is very rarely described or (more importantly) analyzed, despite its centrality to the expansion, consolidation, and routine governance of the system. Darwin could of course reply that his main aim is to explore the terms of “political association” in the British “world-system,” and that he cannot cover everything, but those terms were fundamentally structured and reproduced by violence and its threat (8). The empire was, as that irascible imperialist Winston Churchill noted, and Darwin reminds us, “mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force” (268). Without widespread violence there would have been no “world-system.” It was its condition of possibility.

Throughout his recent writings Darwin has been scathing about those who seek to blend historical accounts of empire with moral critique.Footnote ¹⁷ In Unfinished Empire he dismisses much recent imperial historiography, which he argues is based on a mistaken assumption: that “empires are abnormal, a monstrous intrusion in a usually empire-free world.” Once we acknowledge empire as the “default” form of political order in world history, he continues, this critical stance loses plausibility.Footnote ¹⁸ In The Empire Project he scorns the “fashionable notion” that the “least attractive aspects of modern British culture can be traced directly to its unsavoury imperial past”—such a view, we are told, only appeals to those “who like their history simple” (15).

Both arguments are flawed. Acknowledging the centrality of empires in world history does not abrogate the possibility of (or need for) moral evaluation quite as easily as Darwin implies. His argument itself depends on an unpersuasive assumption: that since phenomenon X was the norm, X cannot legitimately be subjected to moral judgment. But he does not present a plausible argument for why we should accept this contentious claim about moral epistemology. Historical ubiquity does not translate into normative justifiability or itself underwrite moral neutrality. Slavery, too, was a commonplace in world history, but unraveling its multifaceted history does not, and should not, preclude moral revulsion or recognition of its insidious contemporary legacies. The same could be said of the histories of racism and of the subordination of women. While there are certainly dangers in moralism—an overemphasis on the moral dimension of a phenomenon at the expense of other important features—it does not preclude moral evaluation, especially (though not exclusively) in cases where accounts of alternative worlds and courses of action were articulated at the time, and where there are strong causal connections linking the phenomenon under discussion to features of the present world.Footnote ¹⁹ The former highlights that what occurred was itself the product of choice, and thus human agency, the latter that we cannot evade questions of moral responsibility as we continue to benefit or suffer (or sometimes both) from past conditions. Indeed the status of moral evaluation is especially pertinent for those of us who live in societies that have been profoundly shaped by the very institutions and belief systems that structured the empire.

Darwin's denunciation of the “fashionable notion” eviscerates a caricature. One need not think that every unsavory aspect of Britain—or its former imperial spaces—are traceable directly to the empire to accept that some are, and that others are indirectly affected. Given the centrality of the empire in modern history, it would be odd if it had not left a deep legacy. Bernard Porter praises The Empire Project as “the first truly post-imperial imperial history” insofar as it is not “weighed down by most of the baggage that attached to earlier efforts, especially moral judgments.”Footnote ²⁰ But our world is not postimperial: it continues to be structured by the inheritance of centuries of (mainly) European imperialism, as Darwin himself recognizes. The view that it is now possible to stand above the fray, casting a neutral eye over the recent past, is itself highly questionable. This is as much a political claim as an epistemological one, whether intentional or not. The problem, then, is not Darwin's failure to condemn the brutal reality at the heart of empire—how he chooses to write its history is of course up to him—but rather that he is so dismissive of those who do so, and more importantly that he seems to think that historical verisimilitude and fierce moral condemnation are somehow incompatible, that one has to choose between them. This is a false choice. It is possible, though difficult, to attempt both.

The Victorians were often less reticent about discussing imperial violence than the historians who later came to chart their stories. The settler project incited much debate. Some celebrated the cleansing violence of its professed “civilizing” mission, while others damned it. The violence was often naturalized, imagined as an inevitable fate for “savages” who came into contact with superior peoples—a sad but necessary feature of historical progress.Footnote ²¹ Aboriginal protection societies sprang up, and colonial officials tried to rein in the worst of the violence, though such campaigns rarely stopped the attempted extirpation of existing communities. “[I]n spite of their human likeness,” the Tasmanians, H. G. Wells wrote in the prologue to The War of the Worlds (1898), “were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants in the space of fifty years.”Footnote ²² Such criticisms were articulated in different genres and idioms. Over half a century earlier, the political economist Herman Merivale was equally clear about the consequences of settler colonialism: “Desolation goes before us,” he lamented, “and civilisation lags slowly and lamely behind.” South Africa, Van Diemen's land, Newfoundland, the interior of the United States, New Zealand: all were marked by the “ferocity and treachery” of “civilised” men and governments.Footnote ²³ The recognition of colonial ultraviolence could even be invoked to legitimate empire. Highly critical of the treatment of the Australian “nature-people,” the Cambridge theologian and philosopher Alfred Caldecott argued in a university textbook that the British had an obligation to continue the educative mission of empire: in India, “we may redeem the past.”Footnote ²⁴ Only future empire could erase the moral stains of past empire. Merivale was optimistic that the “ferocity and treachery” in the colonies could be ameliorated. “Our errors are not of conception so much as of execution.”Footnote ²⁵ By locating (or deflecting) responsibility in this manner, such arguments denied the systemic character of the violence, reducing it to the excessive, localized behavior of a few. Call this the “bad apple” theory of moral responsibility—we are all too familiar with its easy invocation by our own political leaders. It obscured the true role of violence in colonialism, just as it obscures its contemporary iterations.

Imposing, insightful, and provocative, The Empire Project offers one of the most compelling account of the political economy and geopolitical dynamics of the empire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It will be debated for many years to come, which is surely one of the highest compliments that can be paid to a work of historical scholarship.