The Second British Empire: In the crucible of the twentieth century by Timothy Parsons (review)

Timothy Parsons’ The Second British Empire is a survey history of the British Empire in the twentieth century, written on a global scale. He traces the tension between Britons’ liberal democratic impulses and the autocratic nature of imperialism as the empire gradually declined from an early century peak to its dissolution in the decades after the Second World War. The book is a sequel of sorts to Parsons’ The British Imperial Century: 1815–1914: A world history perspective, also published in Rowman & Littlefield’s Critical Issues in World and International History series. Survey histories are difficult to write. While their authors seek to convey a body of historical knowledge, equally important are the selection of material, the book’s comparative focus, an overarching argument which provides a sense of coherence, and a tone which speaks to specialists, students, and general readers alike. Parsons meets each of these criteria in this well-written and carefully argued work.

Survey histories of the modern British Empire are numerous, and generally adopt either a firmly narrative approach (such as Bernard Porter’s The Lion’s Share) or a thematic structure embedded within a chronological overview (such as Philippa Levine’s The British Empire: Sunrise to sunset).¹ Parsons’ approach is firmly narrative, though he is attentive to important issues such as gender, race, trade and migration throughout the book. The book is also primarily a political history of the British Empire, with politics understood in the broad rather than narrow, high political sense. Parsons knits together his chapters through a series of vignettes on imperial culture and ceremony, stretching from the 1911 Durbar through to the music of the multi-racial ska band The Specials and the 1997 transfer of Hong Kong to China.

He begins in the early twentieth century, with a survey of the empire at its greatest territorial and demographic expanse. Chapter 3 examines the interwar years, when Britain’s limited imperial reforms exacerbated ethnic divisions across the empire. Chapter 3 covers the 1940s, addressing not only the Second World War’s seismic impact on the empire, but also the postwar reconceptualization of imperial citizenship signified by the British Nationality Act (1948), Labour’s various (often futile) colonial development initiatives, the Partitions of British India and Palestine, and racial discrimination across the colonial empire. Chapter 5 continues the decolonization narrative. It surveys the path to independence taken across the colonial empire, successive post-war British governments’ imperial policies of multiracial cooperation and development colonialism, and the push for federations in Southeast Asia, Central Africa and the West Indies. Parsons also notes the connections between late-colonial policy and the emergence of international development, a transition long recognized by social scientists and recently examined historically in Joseph Hodge’s important work.² An important theme which cuts across the entire book is the British proclivity to equate poverty with cultural inferiority in the colonial world, and the detrimental consequences which often flowed from this outlook. Parsons concludes by examining some of the empire’s legacies. These are apparent both throughout the postcolonial world, where the empire shaped migration patterns, urbanization and forms of cultural interaction such as cricket, and in Britain, where as historians such as Jordanna Bailkin and Wendy Webster have variously demonstrated, immigration from the “new Commonwealth” helped create multi-ethnic Britain.³ He wisely avoids the reductive “cost and benefit” approach to assessing the British Empire, instead conceptualizing it as a collective set of contact zones, both spatial and interpersonal, in which imperial subjects interacted with each other.

There is a strong focus on Africa throughout the book, with the longest and most nuanced sections on East Africa, reflecting Parsons’ specialist expertise. India arguably deserves more attention than it gets in the early chapters, and the settlement colonies, the focus of much “British World” scholarship, play a minor role in the narrative. Both Ireland and the Caribbean, which often tend to fade from historians’ view after the nineteenth century is covered, are...