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  • Entrails of Empire
  • Andrew Whitehead (bio)
Richard Gott, Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt, Verso, London, 2011; pp. vi + 568; 978-1-84467-738-2
Benjamin Grob-Fitzgibbon, Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, 2011; pp. xv + 478; 978-0-230-24873-1
Kwasi Kwarteng, Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, Bloomsbury, London, 2011; pp. xi + 465; 978-0-7475-9941-8

Empire still has sufficient afterlife to bite at the heels of modern Britain: court cases and compensation claims by elderly Kenyans once held in Mau Mau-era detention camps; hidden colonial records disclosed only under legal duress; the revival of Argentina’s claim to what it calls the Malvinas and Britain calls the Falkland Islands. That’s part of the aftermath. Yet in many more ways, the map of much of the world has been made, or fractured, by colonialism – and that is still exacting a price from those whose forebears were unwillingly caught up in Europe’s imperial ambitions.

The dovetailing chronologies of the histories of Britain’s Empire reviewed here cover the gamut from the first stirrings of native American resistance to colonial armies, through to the British handover of Hong Kong and war in Iraq. They focus, respectively, on resistance to Empire in its first hundred years (Gott); the end of Empire and the brutality with which Britain sought to protect its perceived interests with the end of colonial rule (Grob-Fitzgibbon); and the individualism of Empire, the haphazard and inconsistent execution of colonial administration, and the manner in which that has bedevilled some of the most troubled of one-time Imperial arenas (Kwarteng).

The most substantial and innovative of these books, Grob-Fitzgibbon’s Imperial Endgame: Britain’s Dirty Wars and the End of Empire, argues that liberal imperialism was quite prepared to be illiberal in pursuit of its larger goals. From 1948 – with India independent and Palestine slipping out of British control – Britain recognized the growing national consciousness in its colonies, and prepared to transfer power as long as the recipients were minded towards democracy and the west. Where insurgencies erupted, however, Britain was quite willing to engage in ‘dirty’ wars to defeat rebel movements. By and large, says Grob-Fitzgibbon, this approach achieved its goals. So in Malaya, Kenya and Cyprus, power was transferred to [End Page 247] governments which remained within the Commonwealth; of the colonies whose progress towards breaking free from London is recounted here, only Aden came to rest outside the fold.

Grob-Fitzgibbon suggests that while security policy, and progress towards a handover of power, was often greatly influenced by those in charge on the ground, there was an over-arching strategy, and in particular a counter-insurgency policy that was ‘carefully calculated to allow decolonization to occur on British terms rather than those of the indigenous people’. Having briefly stated this broad argument, Grob-Fitzgibbon then immerses the reader in a detailed and engrossing account of Britain’s pull-out from Palestine. It was a sharp learning curve for the post-war Labour government, whose 1945 election manifesto contained just one sentence about Empire. In security policy, in attitudes towards negotiations with armed groups, in public-relations management, and in securing international diplomatic support, the burst of violence in and around what became Israel was a formative experience.

Imperial Endgame is organized along broadly chronological lines, though inevitably it deals with one field of operation at a time – looking principally at Israel/Palestine, Malaya, Kenya, Aden and Cyprus. Occasionally a passing reference draws out the extraordinary coincidence, perhaps concatenation, of events across these areas of conflict, and in places Grob-Fitzgibbon discusses how experiences in one part of the world moulded policy in another. Yet the reader is left wanting a fuller sense of what was involved in executing contested decolonizations: did Britain learn from experience, or did London and its agents in Nairobi, Kuala Lumpur and elsewhere simply lurch from one crisis to another, coming out mostly on top just because they had the upper hand in resources and military strength? Grob-Fitzgibbon believes that there was some commanding intelligence and strategy operative...

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