Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World

"Kwasi Kwarteng’s Ghosts of Empire: British Legacies in the Modern World does not paint a rose-tinted view of the past or view the rulers of the British Empire as titans. Quite the contrary. He may be thinking about the role of US imperialism in the modern world, but his book is saved from facile comparisons by his scepticism about the merits of imperialism in general, and the failings of the British Empire in particular. He looks at the British role in Iraq after the First World War, British involvement in Kashmir and the annexation of Burma and locates the chronic political malaise of these and other territories in the failures of British policy in the 19th and early 20th century. In turn he roots these failures in the British attempt to govern through local elites in harness with a small and very self-consciously elite British ruling class. The resulting system was far from democratic and left too much to the whim of individual politicians, civil servants and soldiers, whose often capricious and short-term handling of events on the ground had deleterious long-term consequences. The lesson is that the past sometimes holds no obvious lessons."