This excellent new survey of the British Empire rests upon an old foundation of seminal scholarship. John Darwin states in his select bibliography, “The starting point for any serious study of the subject of this book [is] J. Gallagher and R. Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade,’ Economic History Review, New Series, 6, I (1953)” (793). One can see in The Empire Project the influences of this and other works by John Gallagher and/or Ronald Robinson, especially (with Alice Denny) Africa and the Victorians: The Official Mind of Imperialism (London, 1961), and Gallagher's 1974 Ford Lectures, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire (Cambridge, 1982). Darwin likewise focuses on the “Official Mind,” or, as Gallagher and Robinson put it in 1953, “the men in London”: those ministers and government officials who created policies for the formal and informal empires in reaction to lobbies, the intractable initiatives of “men on the spot,” and geopolitical forces beyond their control. The most salient points of Darwin's chronology are reminiscent of those that Gallagher cogently laid out in his Ford Lectures, though Darwin starts and ends later. Working on a large canvas and writing with flair, Darwin offers his canonical reprise as a rejoinder to interdisciplinary studies of imperial culture and power that lack “careful reconstruction of economic and political contexts” (7) and display a “flimsy dependence upon a handful of texts” (15).

An arguable weakness of this book is that it does not introduce students to scholarly innovations in the study of imperial history over the past forty-odd years. Social history, gender studies, the imperial turn in British domestic history, the study of race, subaltern studies, and scholarship on colonial nationalisms make few appearances in the text, the endnotes, or the bibliography. As a result, Darwin refers often to the “British public” as a vaguely rendered figure in the backdrop of the grand stage upon which the men in London perform; he refers to only two women by name (Gertrude Bell and Margery Perham); he gives scant attention to the critically important labor and migration of Asians and Africans, and his treatment of nationalist movements outside of India is cursory. This book nonetheless brings a compelling order to the miscellany of British imperial principles and practices, illuminating how the Official Mind responded to formative events at the bridgeheads in order to advance or defend its primary interests in geopolitics and global commerce.

Following the gaze of the men in London, Darwin is most attentive to British relations with the white-settler colonies/dominions; India; and, after 1882, Egypt. He then situates these relations in a still larger frame, showing how the course of empire was decisively shaped by geopolitics and finance. He thus combines the approach of Gallagher and Robinson with that of P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins, whose two-volume British Imperialism, 1688–1990 (London, 1993) both challenged and complemented the former with its emphasis on “gentlemanly capitalism” and the City (xii). Regarding geopolitics, Darwin demonstrates that the success of the British world system depended upon “a ‘passive’ East Asia, a European balance, and a strong but unaggressive United States” (5), all of which enabled Britain to station large numbers of troops in India and enjoy freedom of the seas. In 1882 Egypt, and the Suez Canal, became the fulcrum of this system, but then Japan's defeat of Russia in 1905 put the whole system at risk by introducing “the grand dilemma of imperial strategy in the twentieth century: how to safeguard British interest simultaneously in Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia” (83). This dilemma became all the more pressing, and ultimately unmanageable, due to competition for oil, World War II, and the cold war threat of Soviet expansion. In a related vein, Darwin addresses finance as a source of private fortunes and government revenue before 1914, then as the Achilles’ heel of the British world system between the wars, and finally in terms of the intermittent threat of British bankruptcy after 1942.

One cannot understand decolonization without recognizing that after 1945 the government's top priority was “full employment” at home, to which end the government attempted to strengthen the economy through close cooperation with the sterling bloc of Commonwealth countries, which depended, in turn, on strengthening the pound against the dollar. In the twenty-five years after the war, Britain experienced numerous currency crises, as in 1947, at the same time that its position in India was rapidly deteriorating (537), and in 1951, prior to its portentous confrontation with nationalists in Cairo over the Canal Zone (562). President Eisenhower was able to stop the British invasion of Egypt in 1956 by threatening to devalue the pound, and the Labour government's humiliating decision to devalue sterling against the dollar in 1967 contributed to Britain's decisive turn away from the Commonwealth and toward the European Economic Community in the hope of stabilizing its economy (644–48).

Scholars of the British Empire will find much in this book to admire and debate, but students might find the book's usefulness limited in particular respects. As noted above, Darwin overlooks a variety of historiographical developments that have significantly influenced the field of British imperial history in recent decades. Moreover, the secondary literature cited in the select bibliography provides uneven coverage of the book's contents, and the index features incomplete entries and misses numerous topics and names in the text, ranging from the once-mentioned Bell to the prominent figure of Lord Lugard. These factors do not, however, detract from an argument that displays remarkable breadth and coherence in a field that now militates against the big picture. Darwin successfully explains how a British world system emerged without a master plan and, in so doing, he invites the reader to reconsider the merits of histories of the British Empire that were written within the time frame of his own survey.