The title of Andrew Thompson’s book is misleading, reminiscent as it is of Ashcroft, Griffith and Tiffin’s The empire writes back from 1989 – a title well established within the postcolonialist canon. But Thompson is no postcolonialist, and his book is intended to transcend what he sees as ‘an increasingly sterile debate between “postcolonialists” (who maintain [the impact of empire] was prevalent and pervasive) and their critics (who are convinced that its influence has been grossly exaggerated’ (p. 9) The book is further directed against ‘elements of both the Left and the Right [who] have long treated imperialism as an “unpleasant aberration” in British history’ – exemplified by what Thompson sees as the ‘Little Englandism’ and ‘the insular and romantic “people’s history” of the History Workshop movement’ (p. 1), and by the Indian ‘historian’ Ashis Nandy’s belief that ‘imperial attitudes were thoroughly internalised by the British’ and worked to stifle ‘the development of a more open and democratic society’ (pp. 201, 223). On the positive side, The empire strikes back? situates itself within ‘a self-consciously revisionist historiography of the 1980s and 1990s’ which has aimed at offering ‘a more expansive view of Britain’s past’ – as exemplified by the series edited by John Mackenzie for Manchester University Press on different aspects of British imperialism.

It is difficult to see in what sense Thompson’s book is ‘revisionist’. It adds to a long tradition of writing on the popularity or not of empire, and on the impact of imperialism on domestic politics, culture and society in Britain. This includes Mackenzie’s Propaganda and empire (1986), but also Bernard Porter’s Critics of empire (1968) and The absent-minded imperialists (2004) (neither of which are mentioned by Thompson – the latter coinciding with his book and covering similar ground). Further examples are Richard Price’s An imperial war and the British working class (1972) and Raphael Samuel’s three-volume collection on Patriotism, from 1989, whose contributions are not duly recognized.

The empire strikes back? is a richly varied survey, whose chapters take the form of interlinked essays on ways in which the context of empire made itself felt in the lives of different classes, in gender discourse, and in the socialization of the young. Other essays examine the influence of imperialism on domestic politics and trade unionism, its significance for ‘Metropolitan Economics’, and its impact on notions of British identity. Thompson gets through a lot of material and organizes it well by focusing his presentation on selected case comparisons, which allows him to go into detail and to make his account attractive for the readership of students, to whom it is primarily addressed.

Thompson is keen to make his narrative balanced, but his attempt at even-handedness makes his conclusions rather vacuous. When discussing the impact of imperialism on British politics, he observes that ‘in the fashioning of a more democratic political culture, the empire arguably proved as much of a friend as a foe’ (p. 154). And when it comes to the importance of the empire for the ‘metropolitan’ economy, ‘the empire’s economic impact was not “entirely negligible”, neither was it decisive’ (p. 178). Overall, ‘[t]he empire … was a significant factor in the lives of the British people. It was not, however, all-pervasive’ (p. 241). Thus – like Bernard Porter in The absent-minded imperialists – Thompson is certainly more on the playing-down than on the exaggerating side.

‘Impact’ is a difficult concept to work with, and the question is in what sense it can be quantified and measured in the manner Thompson’s book implies. He mentions racism and notions of chauvinistic superiority as elements of British identity that may have been influenced by imperialism, but qualifies this by pointing out that ‘national superiority’ has been directed not only against colonial subject races, but also against Jews, French, Italians, and Portuguese (p. 186). Thompson also seems to argue against the prevalence of a ‘colonialist mentality’ in Britain by stating that ‘half of the population of Britain is largely or totally ignorant of its imperial history’ (p. 224). But surely mentalities, outlooks and social psychologies can be impacted upon by trajectories of the past of which they are not fully aware, and impacts and legacies be of a more subtle and qualitative nature?

The empire strikes back? deals with a few instances of views from the other side – those of colonial subjects of their masters. It has a good section on Gandhi’s visit to the Lancashire cotton mills in 1931 and his dialogue with workers and trade unionists. It also mentions a Swazi delegation that came to London in 1894 ‘to ask Queen Victoria for protection against the Transvaal’ (p. 187), and whose members were impressed by ‘the tolerant attitudes’ of the English at home as compared with those of white settlers in southern Africa (p. 190). But it has nothing, for example, on Indian nationalists like Subhas Chandra Bose, who viewed British colonial rule as worse than fascism, and the Bengal famine of 1943 as a crime on the level of the Holocaust. And nothing either on the endless number of other delegations to London from Africa – like the Zulu King Cetshwayo’s in 1882 – who got nothing but a snub and continued dispossession out of their attempts at dialogue with the empire.

It is the main weakness of the book that it focuses so exclusively on Britain. If nothing else, postcolonial studies have at least succeeded in pointing out the parochial nature of such a perspective – imperial voices and representations do not make sense (and cannot be understood as part of global history) unless we also listen to the responses and counter-offensives they were met with. Europe has been – in Dipesh Chakrabarty’s phrase – too far ‘provincialized’ for it to continue to be treated simply as the centre, and accounted for exclusively in its own terms.