Volume 56, Number 14 · September 24, 2009
The Pride of Empire
By Roderick MacFarquhar
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997
by Piers Brendon
Knopf, 786 pp., $37.50
Piers Brendon has written a splendid popular history of the British Empire, illustrating yet again the continuing nostalgia for and ambivalence about the glory days of the United Kingdom, when it ruled a quarter of the globe: fifty-eight countries, four hundred million people, fourteen million square miles.[1] One way to obtain a quick calibration of where Brendon's The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 fits among acclaimed British assessors of empire is to compare the reviews in English periodicals quoted on the back of his book with those on the back of Lawrence James's The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, published in 1994 and reprinted five times in paperback.
Review, 3465 words
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