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  • The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970
  • Susan Pedersen (bio)
The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970, by John Darwin; pp. xiii + 800. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009, £32.00, £18.99 paper, $39.00.

Quite a few hefty one-volume histories of the British Empire have been published recently, and I can't pretend to have read all of them. I doubt I'm alone in this. Few academics find works of this sort speak to their own specialist research interests; fewer still have the kind of encyclopedic knowledge to be able to judge whether the author has dealt properly with Sri Lankan independence, the battle of Majuba Hill, Canadian views at the Peace Conference, the Great Game in Afghanistan, and the impact of the 1929 slump on sterling balances. Most such books aren't aimed at scholars anyway, their intended audience being those elusive general readers and undergraduates in survey courses on British imperial history. Yet, some such works are significant for scholars as well, offering new interpretations and seeking to reorient research agendas and paradigms.

John Darwin's The Empire Project is such a book. It aims to be accessible to general readers and assignable in survey courses while also offering a revisionist critique to scholars in the field. The revisionist claim is encapsulated in the title, in which Darwin identifies his subject, unusually, as the "project" of Empire, rather than an Empire; the marketing ambitions are clear from the jacket endorsements, which come not only from two of imperial history's academic gatekeepers (Roger Louis, Andrew Porter) but also from one of the field's most successful popularizers (Piers Brendan). Are Darwin's ambitions realized? Is this a must-assign and a must-read book for the readers of Victorian Studies?

On analytic grounds, Darwin's work is a rousing success. Two aspects of this book's well-conceived framework are particularly welcome. First, the book offers a useful corrective to a kind of reification of empire as a coherent and willed thing that has taken place as the living reality recedes from view. Darwin will have none of this. Since very few if any generalizations about the nature of imperial rule would hold equally for Newfoundland, Burma, Uganda, and Aden, what is to be explained is not some putative logic of rule, but rather that mix of interests and affiliations that bound such disparate and differently governed territories together. Empire, in other words, can be understood only as a "project"—as a flexible and integrative network of relationships, "not so much ruled as [End Page 321] managed from London" (477)—aimed at maximizing Britain's global power in an era of great power and imperial competition. This "Empire project" gained strength in the Victorian era as more territories were forced into, or understood their interest to be served by, closer integration; it waned when geopolitical competitors and global conflicts led or forced those component parts to pursue new alliances or the dream of independence. Military conquest and formal control certainly played a part in sustaining this project, as did racial solidarity and a kind of idealism (especially in the dominions), but they did not simply cause it, and its fate, Darwin rather provocatively asserts, "was largely determined by geopolitical forces over which the British themselves had little control" (649). If they had a hand in constructing the global distribution of wealth and power on which that system rested, that broader balance—and not British actions per se—was determinative. Thus, when that balance shifted decisively in the mid-twentieth century, the British "world system" would unravel in turn.

Contingent but necessarily global, Darwin sees that British system as resting on four pillars: an industrially, politically, and demographically vital imperial center; a militarized Indian sub-Empire indisseverably bound to Britain but acting as an expansive power of its own; a financial and trading network that kept invisible earnings flowing to London; and a far-flung awkward squad of troublesome but intensely loyal settlement colonies. A scholar who identifies himself as working in Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher...

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