The Empire Project is the most impressive sustained analysis of the geopolitics and political economy of the British Empire yet. John Darwin's breadth of knowledge is humbling. At the core of his narrative are myriad detailed considerations undertaken by actors in very different sites across a 130-year period. Most impressively, Darwin's real innovation is to avoid focusing only inwardly on the British Empire, instead relating its fortunes to the major geopolitical shifts of the wider world. He seems as much at home weighing up the claims of historians of fascism in Europe and of China's imperial history as he is interrogating the debates among British colonial secretaries and dominion prime ministers. In this sense his analysis departs significantly from that of the “canon” of imperial historians, such as Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher and P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, from whom he draws inspiration. Rather than trying to identify the key British driving force behind empire, he locates the main determinants of British imperialism's fate outside of Britain and the British Empire (both formal and informal) altogether. In a sense, Darwin calls for the decentering of empire within British imperial history.

As Antoinette Burton points out in her introduction to this roundtable, Darwin thus works empire into a global scale of analysis. If his spatial vision is extensive, so too is his temporal span, especially when we consider Darwin's other recent big books. Not only does After Tamerlane decenter Western empires as a whole relative to Asian ones, it also extends back to the fifteenth century. While focusing largely on the territorial extent of the British Empire, Unfinished Empire covers a more modest but still impressive three hundred years. Darwin weaves in particular ways between the locally based decision making of officials in various colonies and that of imperial rulers at the “heart” of empire throughout all three of these accounts and so he cannot, like some scholars, be accused of obscuring local social relations entirely through a preoccupation solely with the global. Before I address this issue of scale within a more general imperial historiography, however, it is important to set out first the conceptual architecture of The Empire Project.

The book's key concept is that the British “system” was constituted by four main “elements”: the resources of Britain itself, the financial clout of the City of London, the settler colonies/dominions, and British India. These were structural supports without which Britain's global influence was vulnerable. Established from the 1830s and reoriented in the Edwardian period, their loss led to that influence's unexpectedly rapid collapse in the mid-twentieth century. It was not so much a coherent empire through which Britain projected its world power as it was an open system of symbiotic partnership among these elements. Rather than limiting his analysis to the four elements and their interrelations, though, Darwin explains how the functioning of the system was contingent on processes and events that lay outside of British control. The book rests on an impressive cast of characters populating a world in which geostrategic assumptions were enacted, economic fortunes waxed and waned, rival powers emerged and declined, and throughout it all, the British Empire was buffeted by certain systems as much as it domineered over them.

By the late nineteenth century, Darwin explains, “[t]he peculiar evolution of the British system, and the secret of its viability … depended upon two vital corollaries. First, that a strategic balance would prevail in Europe, precluding a single continental empire in West Eurasia. Secondly, that East Asia would remain ‘passive,’ more acted upon than acting, confined within its regional bounds, with its sea communications under foreign control” (482). Accordingly, particular attention is paid to the continental European powers and, later, Japan, whose empires at first coexisted uneasily with Britain's, but whose rulers’ ambitions proved so disastrous for British power in the twentieth century. The United States also gained sustained attention as a key extraneous determinant of imperial fortunes, its actions intricately tied up with the British “system's” periodic crises and revitalizations through the twentieth century, which is Darwin's major temporal preoccupation. His extended field of analysis meant that Darwin had to be as familiar with the work of the British Treasury, Foreign Office, War Office and Admiralty as he is with that of the Colonial and India Offices.

Within the bounds of the British Empire, Darwin shows similarly, the fate of one region pivoted upon that of others. One of his most effective devices, lending coherence to a massive and otherwise potentially chaotic narrative, is that of pausing periodically to take stock of the economic and geopolitical strengths and weaknesses (almost a strengths-weaknesses-opportunities-threats analysis) of the entire “system” at certain critical moments. He does so most extensively just before and after the two world wars, enabling him to remind us of the shifts in the bigger picture of a global political economy within which an imperial system could be sustained (or not).

The implication throughout is that the British system was at its most efficient and productive when liberal values and unrestrained commerce connected and sustained its four main elements. These conditions, however, appeared only fleetingly in between crises such as the Great Depression, which “demanded illiberal solutions: protection, autarky, or aggressive imperialism” (418). Again, on the eve of World War II, “[e]conomic resentments, nationalist fervor, racial antipathy, religious antagonism and the appeal of class hatred … threatened to pull the system apart at the seams” (474). While the contrast between such illiberal tendencies and the operation of British colonialism may not have seemed so evident to many of those colonized by Britain, Darwin's subtle gist (nowhere near as crude as Niall Ferguson's assertions) is that the British “system” was fundamentally a liberal one, and that these forces, by conspiring against liberalism, were also conspiring against its empire.

Before proceeding to critique it, I think it is most productive to read this book as a definitive statement of the need to consider governmentality as the key to any imperial history. The exercise of imperial government involved considerations of aggregated metropolitan and imperial economics, rival government ambitions, and of global strategic scenario playing, that made it very different from those other pursuits upon which so much of the recent colonial and imperial historiography has settled—projects such as evangelism, humanitarianism,Footnote ¹ settler capitalism, or scientific inquiry. Before critiquing what Darwin leaves out, those of us who have focused on such projects, partly in attempts to foreground the new racisms, gendered practices, and diverse forms of exclusion, marginalization, and oppression fostered by Britain's empire should perhaps ask what lessons we can learn from Darwin's substantive geopolitical and economic analysis.

There has, to my mind, been an entirely understandable pendulum effect in the recent imperial historiography away from narratives of Great White Men. By no means uniformly, but in some instances, this reaction has gone so far as to generate an unhelpful avoidance of the role of elite men's governmental activities in configuring the unequal conditions in which more “ordinary” men, women, and children lived. In focusing, for instance, on the ways in which metropolitan and colonial culture was infused with imperial racial assumptions, or missionary discourse and practice was framed, or imperial immigration policies developed, we have perhaps also neglected the ways that Britain and its empire were unevenly financially integrated, and the consequences of such integration for our imperial subjects’ everyday lives.Footnote ² If it is time to “rematerialize” our social and cultural histories of empire, Darwin's book presents an excellent, overarching framework.

Where Darwin's style of analysis is particularly helpful, I think, even for more overtly critical historians of empire, is in pointing the way towards a more effective analysis and critique of contemporary forms of Western imperialism. These forms are motivated by the same concerns of governmentality—geostrategic and global economic flows and beneficiaries—that underpin Darwin's analysis. Surprisingly, perhaps, given his Marxism, David Harvey's analysis of early twenty-first-century US global influence shares many of the characteristics of Darwin's liberal analysis of the British system that preceded it. The irony of immediate post-9/11 neoconservative US foreign policy is one that would not be lost on Darwin. As Harvey points out, it has actually severed many of the networked connections, both financial and other kinds, upon which US influence across the globe relied thus far.Footnote ³ Adopting a Mackinderesque, or perhaps Darwinesque, turn of phrase, Harvey claims that “whoever controls the Middle East controls the global oil spigot and whoever controls the global oil spigot can control the global economy, at least for the near future.”Footnote ⁴ All this is very reminiscent of British involvement in the same region fifty years beforehand, when, as Darwin notes, Hugh Gaitskell worried that “[s]hould Russia over-run this area, there would not merely be insufficient oil for Britain but for a large part of the rest of the world” (542).

However, I would suggest that while Darwin's analysis of British, and Harvey's of contemporary US imperialism, are persuasive in terms of state strategy, they both tend to downplay something that is just as crucial. This is something that many social and cultural historians of Britain's empire have quite rightly insisted on in their own accounts, but that very rarely makes it into the kind of grand history read by nonacademics in search of explanations of how the current world order came to be. I am referring to the complex of cultural discourses that enabled both nineteenth- and twentieth-century British interests, and the twenty-first-century neoconservative US state, to postulate their strategies as being not only in the material interests of their subjects, citizens, and companies but also in the universal interests of humankind.

This assumption of universality is, of course, closely connected to the question of scale, with which this roundtable began. Although Darwin moves nimbly between the local and the global, he does so, in concrete terms, largely by tracking the correspondence between governing men. Darwin does indeed provide a networked scalar analysis, then, but one confined to the project of governmentality. It is the fact that governmentality coexisted with and codetermined other networked social relations constituting empire that is given short shrift in The Empire Project.

Within geography and broader political economy, it is only since the 1970s that a shift occurred from a broadly horizontal imagination of global divisions, informed by Immanuel Wallerstein's model of core, semi-periphery, and periphery (which mirrored the spatial thinking of imperial history), to a vertical and more scalar understanding of the local, urban, regional, national, and global.Footnote ⁵ Furthermore, new scales of relevant analysis have been added, for example, by feminist historians and geographers who draw attention to the home as a significant site of social reproduction.Footnote ⁶ Across a range of disciplines, what might seem to be naturally occurring scales of analysis, from the household to the global, are being seen as the products of particular projects, pursued through networks of varying geographical reach, and involving combinations of human and nonhuman agency. Scales are understood as “the provisionally stabilized outcomes of scaling and rescaling processes; the former can be grasped only through an analysis of the latter.”Footnote ⁷

As Burton shows in her introduction, there has been considerable attention of late among imperial and global historians to networks that operated at a “global” scale, connecting disparate nodal points around the world. But there has been relatively little examination of the concept of the “global” scale itself. If we consider the emergence of this apparently natural, but actually manufactured scale as something worthy of investigation in its own right, it is obvious that imperial forms of government had much to do with it. In Stephen Legg's analysis of the divisions of sovereignty between British India and the League of Nations, for instance, institutions like states, leagues, and federations are “considered as assemblages kept together by the practices of scalar apparatuses [while] the impression is created that these scales are exclusive (non-overlapping), hierarchical (nested and tiered) and ahistorical.”Footnote ⁸ Like gender, race, and class in poststructuralist historical thinking, we might productively think of scales as entities constructed through particular projects with real effects in the world. These are the “effects of networked practices.”Footnote ⁹

Lucy Chester's work on the processes through which Radcliffe's partition line came to be drawn across the Punjab in 1947 serves as a good example of the ways that a multiscalar analysis does not have to confine itself solely to the exercise of governmentality. The global can be thought about as much through social and cultural histories of “subaltern” experience as it can through the global imagination of statesmen. As Chester explains, Radcliffe's partition line “marked the beginning of a global trend towards decolonization” and “inaugurated Indo-Pakistani tension” leading to three wars and the threat of a subcontinental nuclear war.Footnote ¹⁰ Yet her analysis focuses as much on the disruption that the line presented to the “ordinary” inhabitants of the region that it bisected as it does on these wider geopolitical concerns. Chester begins her narrative in London during the hard winter of 1946–47, drawing a picture of coal and food shortages, of British families dispersed across the empire awaiting demobilization, of a recognition on the part of governing men that the Palestinian-Zionist conflict was proving irresolvable, and of the pressure from both Indian nationalists and the United States. This complex of pressures and trajectories confronting both “ordinary” people and men in government is the starting point for explaining the rush to decolonize in India whilst maintaining a facade of planned order and consultation. The narrative then crosses between locations in India and Britain, but also ranges up and down conventional scales of analysis from the global and transimperial considerations of officials in London to the experiences and expectations of Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim villagers on either side of the eventual dividing line. Each scale of analysis in this account is integral to developments at another scale. The book shows how historians must move across space, up and down through constructed but effective scales from the household to the global, becoming intimate with selected and often dispersed locations, in order to tell the most meaningful stories of empire. The resulting narrative can combine “the intrigue of high politics with the tragedies experienced by those on the ground and the influence of the rapidly transforming international scene with the role of local society, culture and tradition.”Footnote ¹¹

It is not so much for a lack of attention to the local, then, that I would critique Darwin's globally scaled analysis, but rather for the kind of “local” that is imagined—the local imperial official. I would argue that Darwin's admission that he has “not found much space for an explicit discussion of imperial culture” (794) is most damaging in this context. Throughout, Darwin draws inspiration from a canon of established imperial history writing, some of which dates back to the early twentieth century itself. He is consistently wary of iconoclastic critiques of this canon, such that neither the “new imperial” history, nor networked analyses of imperial projects in particular colonies have any interest for him. The preoccupation that characterizes a whole generation of scholarship launched with the constructive critique of Edward Said's politically engaged Orientalism is dismissed with a reference to the shortcomings of Anne McClintock's Imperial Leather. The impressive cast of characters populating Darwin's account may be globally distributed but it is overwhelmingly male, elite, and white. There is little on the histories of racially discriminatory education, legal, and health systems that helped constitute everyday life for local people beyond officials in many colonies, and little suggestive of the experience of being violently colonized.

Darwin's perspective on the British “system” is largely that of the British imperial administrator; his use of certain terminology is a giveaway. When he writes of “shared political value and … common protection against external attack by European rivals or predatory locals” (29, my emphasis), or of “colonies” rather than specifically British settlers and officials within those colonies “depending on Britain for strategic defense or for military aid in a localized struggle” (3), he implies that such “locals” are not themselves the subjects of the imperial historian. Such language, as Frederick Cooper has pointed out in another context, makes sense only if, we examine “Canada minus the Native-Americans … Australia minus the Aborigines … New Zealand minus the Maori, India minus the Indians, Africa minus the Africans.”Footnote ¹² It is the classically colonial projection from the self-interest of imperial societies to universal principle that Derek Gregory focuses on so astutely in his own account of recent British and American imperialism in Iraq, Palestine, and Afghanistan.Footnote ¹³ Such a projection enabled the British empire to be so widely seen as a “good thing” by Britons in the nineteenth century (and by many of them today), and currently enables so many in the United States and elsewhere to sustain US imperial ventures with moral and political support.

Emphasizing the geopolitics of empire, which Darwin does so well, is not something that we should set at odds with an analysis of the destructive ideologies of empire and the violence and counterviolence with which they are associated: each is quite fundamental to the interrogation of the other. Ironically, it was Churchill who perhaps summed up best the need to be aware of the consequences of imperialism for colonized people, as well as of its driving and sustaining forces. Darwin quotes him as telling his cabinet colleagues in 1914 that “[w]e have engrossed to ourselves an altogether disproportionate share of the wealth and traffic of the world. We have got all we want in territory, and our claim to be left in the unmolested enjoyment of vast and splendid possessions, mainly acquired by violence, largely maintained by force, often seems less reasonable to others than to us” (268). If we cannot understand the willingness of both Americans and Britons to have countenanced so recently the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq without identifying the cultural disposition that makes the occupation of certain countries (and not others) seem legitimate in response to a specific terrorist attack, neither can we comprehend the disastrous outcome of those interventions, unless we trace the ways that imperial intrusions beget antipathy and resistance.

To recognize the intrinsic violence of imperialism is not to fall into the trap, which Darwin finds so irritating, of portraying British “hegemony” as all-encompassing, nor to insist that violence was everywhere, and always the precondition for colonial relations. As Darwin points out, in many instances British rule was seen as preferable to the “actually existing” alternatives by many of its subjects, and critical scholars often need to be reminded of this. But there is still the point to be made that, fairly universally, people do not like to have their communities occupied and governed by outsiders and that the establishment of such an occupation, even of governance by “remote control” in its absence, is often so resented that force has to be continually threatened and occasionally employed to effect it. During the crisis of 1942, Anthony Eden remarked that “[o]ur history and geography demand that we should remain a world power with world-wide interests” (quoted in The Empire Project, 515). That this statement still does not seem antiquated suggests that analyses of imperial cultural dispositions are as relevant for our times as for the nineteenth century. Such analyses, especially if they draw upon Darwin's acute awareness of the geostrategic considerations of such men, may enable us better to challenge assertions such as those of Max Boot, Wall Street Journal editor, who, after 9/11, declared that “Afghanistan and other troubled lands today cry out for the sort of enlightened foreign administration once provided by self-confident Englishmen in jodhpurs and pith helmets.”Footnote ¹⁴