The British Overseas

REVIEWS 99 explanation lies in Miss Wallerstein's willing rejection of aesthetic pleasure in the service of ideological inquiry. If so, we cannot applaud the sacrifice, particularly when Marvell is misquoted in a kind of indifference to even his words. This reviewer, at least, does not believe that All around about us lie Deserts of vast eternity can replace the original or that And yonder all before us lie Desarts of vast Eternity As if his highest plot To tend the Bergamot will serve for Marvell's As if his highest plot To plant the Bergamot either in sound or in sense. It palliates nothing that Miss Wallerstein is no beginner but an eminent scholar. All the more is expected of her. We say of religion without the love of God that it is fruitless. What shall we say of a humanistic critic without a sense of style? THE BRITISH OVERSEAS* J. B. ' CONACHER Mr. Carrington's The British Overseas is an ambitious and, on the whole, successful attempt to write history on the grand scale-the sort of book that is to be welcomed in an age of specialization. It is well named for it is not a formal history of the British Empire. Rather it is the story of the restless activity of the British people wherever they have gone under the British flag. Nineteen of its twenty-one chapters are devoted to the period after 1783 since the author is primarily interested in the Empire that survived to the present century. The explorations of the sixteenth and the colonization of the seventeenth centuries are therefore dealt with in perfunctory fashion. There is a tremendous amount of factual information packed into the thousand-odd pages of The British Overseas, and for this reason the general reader will not easily sit down to read it through from cover to cover. It will be a useful book for undergraduates studying imperial history, for it contains an excellent narrative of events, a copious supply of maps and illustrations, and a useful *The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers. By C. E. CARRINGTON. Cambridge: At the University Press [Toronto: The Macmillan Company of Canada Limited]. 1950. pp. xxiv, 1092. $9.00. 100 THE UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY summary or "argument" at the beginning of each chapter, but it is to be regretted that there are no suggestions regarding more specialized reading on the numerous topics that are treated; Mr. Carrington 's guidance here would have been very valuable. In short this is both more and less than a textbook. It would seem that the author's prime aim was to write a scholarly and convincing apologia for the British Empire, whose history he knows and loves so well. "The permanent settlement of the British in the empty lands of the temperate zone" he regards as the major achievement in the Empire's history (p. xix). His central thesis is to be found in the statement (p. 496) "that the common belief in an Empire which gradually grew without direction is quite unjustified." "Almost every British colony," he continues, "was deliberately founded by a body of settlers according to a preconceived plan and, generally speaking, the more complete the plan the more successful the colony." The settlers are his first interest but he also devotes a good deal of sympathetic consideration to the work of the British Protestant missionaries, whom he shows to have played a very important role in the opening of the new lands, even though their concern for the natives often brought them in conflict with the ideas of the colonists. On the whole, Mr. Carrington is most persuasive, but occasionally he will antagonize non-British readers with what they may consider an attitude of self-rigbtousness or complacency. For instance, of Ghandi he says that "any other government would have hanged him" (p. 949). His judgments are Jess detached and his Conservative bias more pronounced as he approaches the history of his own generation. He makes out a convincing case for the Boer War but does not consider at any length the arguments of the Little Englanders against it. He allots forty-five pages to the causes...