Timothy Parsons' highly readable new study of the British Empire during the twentieth century begins, fittingly enough, at the end, with the handover of Hong Kong in 1997 and, seemingly, the final collapse of Britain's formal imperial power. Yet, Parsons is too subtle and nuanced a scholar to let the story drop with the ceremonies in Hong Kong. Ultimately, as Parsons is well aware, one could conclude the story of the British Empire in many different ways, and he offers several more possibilities in the course of the book, from the tragedy of the children of immigrants blowing themselves up on the London subway to powerful tales of archival transfer, loss, and resuscitation that have accompanied transfers of political power.
If Parsons wisely leaves the endpoint of empire open, he dates the beginning of this ‘second’ British Empire to 1911, King George V's Coronation Durbar in Delhi. He charts a shift from what he sees as the secure informal empire of the mid-nineteenth century (though many scholars might question how ‘secure’ this earlier empire really was) to a ‘modern’ empire born of anxiety and weakness. What emerges clearly from Parsons' account is how much the British misinterpreted and got wrong, as well as the fundamental fragility and vulnerability of British power abroad during this period. From Parsons' point of view, the central tenets of the second British Empire were contradictory and often irrational (p. 21): one of the many reasons, along with the strains of two world wars that heightened the ambitions of anticolonial nationalists, that Parsons views this empire's demise as both predictable and inevitable (p. 200).
Sketching out the everyday workings of imperial power and some of its grander theories, Parsons is highly attentive to the diversity of this empire. As he argues, it is not productive to search for a single cause of imperial decline, because, ‘in fact, there were several British empires that ended at different times for different reasons’ (p. 5). Among the emerging nations, there was no single definition of ‘self-government’; even when nationalists were united in wanting to end imperial rule, they rarely agreed on what should replace it (p. 26). There was, in short, not a single imperial system, but ‘multiple and overlapping subempires that … followed substantially different trajectories’ (p. 14). Parsons conveys that even the vocabulary of empire's end could be contentious; Sir Arthur Hilton Poynton, the last permanent undersecretary of state in the Colonial Office, ‘did not like the term “decolonization” because it was “flavoured with the garlic of guilt”’ (p. 235).
In the wake of Parsons' book, any myth of a monolithic empire will be impossible to sustain. One impressive element of this study is the way that he deftly weaves together the different fates and futures of colonial sites without sacrificing their historical specificity. Notably, Ireland and the white dominions are not marginalized, but successfully integrated into the central narrative. This strategy takes considerable skill, and Parsons admirably balances the incredible geographic range of his book with a cohesive narrative.
Parsons is a distinguished Africanist: the author of several studies of the nature of imperial power writ large as well as the unpredictable outcomes of this power in specific African locales. Unsurprisingly, the material on Africa is handled particularly well. But more broadly, Parsons introduces themes that have rarely been found in textbook histories of the British Empire. He does not shy away from the question of imperial violence, and he explores the impact of imperial rule on health and the physical environment, from deforestation in South Asia to sleeping sickness in Uganda.
Metropolitan Britain and Britons fare less well in this generally perceptive study, and there are some startling generalizations: for example, that it ‘never occurred’ to British strategists that imperial rule was unacceptable to their would-be subjects (p. 66). Ultimately, for Parsons, one of the most significant legacies of the second British Empire was the production of new or reimagined ethnicities (the trajectory of which the British could not control), and he quite rightly views these proliferating identities as part of his story. But although his efforts to diverge from a more conventional political narrative are commendable, he often leans quite heavily on the work of a single band or sporting event as evidence of cross-cultural borrowing, and his treatment of the cultural history of empire and its aftermath feels too episodic.
Overall, for those who wish to introduce undergraduates to the twists and turns of British imperial power in the twentieth century – which Parsons persuasively portrays as decidedly non-linear – this engaging (and, happily, affordable) book represents a welcome opportunity to do so.
