John Darwin’s book is a history of British imperial power from the early Victorian era until the empire’s demise. It is above all a study in geopolitics and foreign policy; of military, financial, andcommercial resources; and of the politics ofempire both in Britain and its dependencies. The author is clearly not much impressed by cultural historians of empire. Nor does he discuss atany length empire’s impact on its subject peoples. But a lifetime’s thinking and scholarship has gone into this book, which is an outstanding synthesis and interpretation, clearly written and structured, packed with information, and always thought-provoking.

In Darwin’s view, the key geopolitical factor underpinning Britain’s empire was the European balance of power. With the continental great powers jealously watching and balancing each other, no European superpower and no coalition of powers was likely to threaten British security. For that reason, between 1830 and 1900 British defence costs were very low by historical standards and Britain could concentrate its resources on expansion overseas. In the twentieth century, German and then Soviet might forced Britain to commit more and more resources to European security, thereby undermining the British empire project.

At the same time Darwin well understands the importance of developments on the extra-European ‘periphery’, meaning above all the decline of the great Asian empires and the void that they bequeathed and that Britain filled. In this book, he emphasizes above all the decline of the Qing, which makes sense given the fact that he begins this volume in 1830, with the Opium War just over the horizon. A slightly longer timescale would have allowed the decline of the Mughals and the Ottomans to enter the story. After all, the key to a good deal of British foreign and imperial history was that the British displaced the Mughals but were able to stop Russia from doing the same to the Ottomans. Darwin puts heavy stress on the role of the British and native garrison in India, paid for by local taxpayers but deployed not just to guard Britain’s key base in Asia but also to defend and project British interests all the way from the Arabian Gulf to the coast of China.

Alongside traditional geopolitical, diplomatic, and military issues, Darwin also writes extensively about the impact of British financial and commercial power. He acknowledges his debt to historians of ‘Gentlemanly capitalism’, and his discussion of this aspect of British power is therefore to some extent a familiar one, but he links it to British grand strategy and foreign policy in illuminating fashion, especially in his discussion ofthe dilemmas facing British government in the 1930s.

The other key element in the book is the discussion of imperial Britishness, in both the United Kingdom and its white colonies. The obvious point here is that, at the time when his story commences, the white colonies added very little to British power and were to some extent an encumbrance. This was most obviously true of Canada, which made minimal contribution to imperial defence or resources but embroiled London in the defence of its immensely long border with an aggressive and expansionist USA. The evolution of the USA from geopolitical and ideological enemy to saviour, stepchild, and undertaker of the British empire is not ignored by Darwin but more might perhaps be made of it. The contrast between the view of the USA entertained by Lord Salisbury and that of his nephew Arthur Balfour illustrates a crucial shift in British ideology and power. On the other hand, the author has an excellent discussion of the strength and the ingredients of imperial Britishness, above all in the white colonies, whose contribution to British victory in two world wars was immense.

As is now the fashion, the Industrial Revolution does not feature greatly in Darwin’s story of British imperial power. Similarly, historians of the causes of the Industrial Revolution are inclined to stress purely economic factors and to leave politics and power to the side. Maybe this is correct but, if so, it is rather remarkable that Britain simultaneously became the world’s greatest empire and first industrial nation without the two developments having much to do with each other. No doubt the City was of overriding importance in the British world system but it is a little surprising, for example, to find so little mention even of the British shipbuilding industry in a study of power and empire. When one thinks of Germany’s extraordinary endurance in two world wars, surely this owed something to its superiority over Britain in many areas of industrial science and technology.

My only other quibble about this remarkable book is that its title is misleading. It seems to me that Darwin begins his work at a time when the British world system was actually approaching its apogee. Its rise belongs to an earlier era. The geopolitical foundations of the British world system were already in place by 1815. Seriously threatened by French, Spanish, and Dutch naval power in the 1780s, by 1815 Britain ruled supreme on the seas and had defeated Napoleon’s threat to the continental balance of power. No serious alternative threat was to emerge in the rest of the nineteenth century. By 1815 also, Britain dominated India and the Qing were in evident decline, so the Asian geopolitical foundations of the British world system already existed. If the Industrial Revolution was only just coming over the horizon in 1815, British financial and commercial power was already in full flower. So maybe John Darwin will one day write a first volume, on the rise of the British world system, to complement his remarkable study of its nineteenth-century apogee and twentieth-century demise.