Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain
Founded in a fit of absentmindedness, as the saying goes, the British Empire was never a monolithic polity but had different circumstances surrounding the establishment, growth, and rule of its colonies. Combine the variations in its parts and the range of historical opinion about it, from praise to condemnation, and one wonders whether a single-volume history of it is even possible. Darwin confidently forges one, however, that accentuates the decentralized character of the centuries of its expansion, which proceeded in tension with the links of trade, law, and military power between an outpost and London. If imperial control varied from colony to colony, it waxed and waned in a general sequence everywhere. British contact with a foreign land was followed by growth of a colonial society, assertions of autonomy or rebellion, and eventual independence. To contemporaries at all times, the worth and justice of the empire provoked debate that Darwin quotes amid his accounts of empire building in America, Africa, India, Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. Vast and controversial though his subject, Darwin raises all key historical issues in this solid survey of British imperialism. --Gilbert Taylor