Volume 29, Number 14 · September 23, 1982
Pecking Orders
By John Keegan
Empires in the Balance: Japanese and Allied Pacific Strategies to April 1942
by H.P. Willmott
Naval Institute Press, 512 pp., $24.95
From Conquest to Collapse: European Empires from 1815 to 1960
by V.G. Kiernan
Pantheon, 285 pp., $16.50
The Pattern of Imperialism: The United States, Great Britain, and the Late-Industrializing World Since 1815
by Tony Smith
Cambridge University Press, 308 pp., $34.50; $10.95 (paper)
War and Change in World Politics
by Robert Gilpin
Cambridge University Press, 272 pp., $19.95
Are empires coming back into fashion? The chief result of the Second World War, the defeat of Hitler obviously excepted, was the dissolution of the European colonial empires. This need not have been a necessary outcome. Indeed, after the First World War, the European colonial empires actually grew in size. Self-determination had then been proclaimed a war aim—when the Allies got around to deciding what their war aims were—but it was a self-determination for Europeans only; and then chiefly for those peoples who had been subjects of the defeated German and Austrian empires.
Review, 2893 words
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