Volume 28, Number 20 · December 17, 1981
Empire Building
By John Keegan
Revolutionary Empire: The Rise of the English-Speaking Empires from the Fifteenth Century to the 1780s
by Angus Calder
Dutton, 916 pp., $36.00
'Empire' has come to have a fixed meaning for the British in their post-imperial years. It stands, to the exclusion of almost all other memories, for the 'high empire' of the Victorian noon, the empire of the Sepoy Mutiny, the great calm of the viceroyalty which followed it, Kipling's small wars, the naval Pax Britannica. And the memories have living force, for not only do most small British towns and villages still house a band, dwindling but not yet extinct, of retired Indian colonels and colonial judges, but the direct experience of empire still lives in the experience of hundreds of thousands of ordinary people.
Review, 2973 words
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