In this intricate work, Timothy Parsons dives deep into the day-to-day experience of the British Empire in the twentieth century while endeavoring to maintain adequate perspective for meaningful generalizations about its legacy. Parsons does an admirable job of this, though he succeeds more in the former than the latter. He shows there was never one unified, tidy imperial system in any decade or era, let alone century. Instead, there were “multiple, overlapping sub-empires, with vastly different policies and trajectories” (14). Empire was incoherent; imperial influence was often tenuous or illusory. Administrators were beset by poor communications, enduring a fragile existence in the peripheries, relying more on persuasion than power (13). Citing a frequent sense of reluctance on the part of British representatives, Parsons depicts a delicate, disjointed realm. He uncovers recurrent admissions of weakness or uncertainty on the part of imperial officials, noting the necessity of local collaboration to preserve influence.

Like any scholar of empire, Parsons must confront the quandary that, for an entity so prone to high praise or harsh disapproval, it was actually an empire of profound specificity, from region to region, town to village, continent to continent, that almost entirely resists generalization. Exploring the great variety of colonial configurations in each imperial locale, he demonstrates clearly that this was an empire beset by acknowledged weakness, in absolute numbers as in real power. Roaming around the globe decade by decade, Parsons chronologically categorizes the bewilderingly wide-ranging power dynamic social groups experienced in Africa, Ireland, India, the former Ottoman Empire, and elsewhere.

Parsons rightly illustrates that any intentions or outcomes Britain's empire produced were borne of a context in which other Western nations expanded globally too. Britain's Second Empire was a “short-lived engine of globalization that left behind new and vital networks of migration, commerce and cultural exchange” (26). Few would argue. Aside from its frailty, empire, he argues, was not even worthwhile economically, except for a few beneficiaries. Indeed, most in the metropole had no idea what was going on in the larger empire (15–16). And when it all crumbled following World War II, Parsons shows, no simple transfer of power occurred. Instead a bidirectional negotiation occurred between metropole and colony. Since much of the twentieth century saw the end or final days of empire, he scrutinizes the still sociologically important modification to Britain itself, when after World War II, imperial migrants arrived to shape a brand new Britain.

Parson contends it is more important to explore empire's legacy than to judge its morality. This is where perhaps he is disinclined to veer near the living ghost of Niall Ferguson or others who put empire in positive light. This is also where he is both too cautious and too critical. As British history, this is sound, descriptive scholarship. But since it is part of the publisher's Critical Issues and World and International History series, it should accept the greater responsibility of placing empire in wider context. Doing so might make it harder to condemn imperial actors, as most present-day scholars are almost dutifully prone to do. To be fair, Parsons states that empire was neither thoroughly good nor bad and cannot simply be labeled positive or negative for humanity. Yet he concludes by nodding toward George Padmore's conception that Western empires were a central part of that crucially twentieth-century form of global rule, totalitarianism (238–39). This is surely to lump British exertions or intentions on the wrong side of history.

If, as the title suggests, empire doddered, declined, and died in the crucible of the twentieth century, then it was scarcely totalitarian. In world historical context, was the comparative legacy of all this imperial inefficiency, confused ethnology, endless mapping and economic investment/exploitation comparable to that of the other empires or expansionist states in the century's scorched crucible? How do British imperial buffoons compare to Ottoman administrators in Armenia, Russian Apparatchiks almost everywhere, European or Asian authoritarian officials on foreign soils, nearly all postwar African, Middle Eastern, and Chinese despots and administrations? How do all those single-party personal regimes, instances of ethnic violence, proclivities toward corruption, authoritarianism, and human rights abuses worldwide alter how we judge early or mid-twentieth century imperial British bureaucrats?

If mid-century colonial officers such as Arthur Creech Jones felt they had “nothing to apologize” for, could it have been due to the insurmountable complexity of administering an incoherent, inherited structure (134)? Perhaps in so complex and contradictory an empire, with those running it at constant cross-purposes, evidence of well-intended governance might be gleaned (21)? When other twentieth-century powers planned more competently and concentrated their rule more precisely, the consequences were rarely positive for subject populations. If it was “asking a great deal of the first generation of nationalist rulers to respect constitutions and the electoral process,” then is it not asking a great deal of imperial British actors to have done more than they did (195)? Parsons gives the impression that British administrators were always scheming or supercilious, whereas tribal chiefs or local administrators are either innocently upright or unfailingly well intentioned. Could the ghosts of imperial administrators communicate to Parsons, they might well proclaim, “We tried our best!”

What then do we learn about the second British Empire? Exploring the disordered power relations of empire since 1900, this book is an archival goldmine of the imperial experience. Approaching the specificity of almanac, Parsons tells us a great deal about its particularity with archival precision. Though this detail may not be pleasing on the eye, it is pleasingly apt for something so perplexing as the British Empire. Yet, perhaps as time goes by, and in wider comparative context, empire's very reluctance, multiplicity, and inconsistency might earn it more praise than scholars afford it now.