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Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British [Hardcover]

Jeremy Paxman (Author)

3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (64 customer reviews)

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Book Description

Release Date: 6 Oct 2011

The influence of the British Empire is everywhere, from the very existence of the United Kingdom to the ethnic composition of our cities. It affects everything, from Prime Ministers' decisions to send troops to war to the adventurers we admire. From the sports we think we're good at to the architecture of our buildings; the way we travel to the way we trade; the hopeless losers we will on, and the food we hunger for, the empire is never very far away.

In this acute and witty analysis, Jeremy Paxman goes to the very heart of empire. As he describes the selection process for colonial officers ('intended to weed out the cad, the feeble and the too clever') the importance of sport, the sweating domestic life of the colonial officer's wife ('the challenge with cooking meat was "to grasp the fleeting moment between toughness and putrefaction when the joint may possibly prove eatable"') and the crazed end for General Gordon of Khartoum, Paxman brings brilliantly to life the tragedy and comedy of Empire and reveals its profound and lasting effect on our nation and ourselves.

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Product details

Hardcover: 368 pages
Publisher: Viking; First Edition edition (6 Oct 2011)
Language: English
ISBN-10: 0670919578
ISBN-13: 978-0670919574
Product Dimensions: 16.2 x 24.2 cm

Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars See all reviews (64 customer reviews)

Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 149,294 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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More About the Author

› Visit Amazon's Jeremy Paxman Page

Jeremy Paxman was born in Yorkshire. He grew up thinking of himself as 'English' despite being one quarter Scottish. He is a journalist, best known for his work presenting Newsnight and University Challenge. His books Friends in High Places, Fish, Fishing and the Meaning of Life, The English, On Royalty and The Political Animal are all published by Penguin.

Product Description

Review

He writes with wit and penetration, and every page of Empire can be read with relaxed pleasure (Spectator )

Paxman is witty, incisive, acerbic and opinionated . . . In short, he carries the whole thing off with panache bordering on effrontery

(Piers Brendon Sunday Times )

A very engaging account...with a good sprinkling of jokes, funny nicknames and sexual references. Paxman makes some very sharp points and writes well (Guardian )

About the Author

Jeremy Paxman was born in Yorkshire and educated at Cambridge. He is an award-winning journalist who spent ten years reporting from overseas, notably for Panorama. He is the author of five books including The English. He is the presenter of Newsnight and University Challenge and has presented BBC documentaries on various subjects including Victorian art and Wilfred Owen.

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3.8 out of 5 stars

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

95 of 105 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars A sparkling account of the British Empire 15 Oct 2011

By Ralph Blumenau TOP 500 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

Jeremy Paxman stylishly, wittily, sardonically and graphically summarizes the history of the British Empire. The Introduction is a treat in itself, and already it shows the author ready to spice his comments with adjectives like "unhinged" (for Gordon's mission to Khartoum) or "cracked" (for Baden-Powell) - there will be more such in the rest of the book.

It is quite a challenge to cover some three and a half centuries and involving every continent - many of which Paxman has visited for the television series to be based on his book - in under 300 pages of text (plus a bibliography of 32 pages! No wonder he pays generous tribute to Jillian Taylor, his researcher). In such a small space, Paxman not only manages to tell the stories - brutalities, heroics and all - with which many members of an earlier generation would have been more familiar than among those who have grown up in our post-imperial days - but he also finds room, in the text or in the footnotes, for the unfamiliar, the illuminating or witty anecdote, and for personal comment or interpretation. There is, for instance, the lovely scene of the first trade mission to the Chinese emperor in 1793 (followed by the weasel words with which the website of Jardine & Matheson conceals the origin of that firm's prosperity in the opium trade); or the extended account of the building of the Uganda Railway, beset as it was by two huge man-eating lions (one of whom had too diseased a lower jaw to kill larger prey - Paxman's comment: "the railway workers were a sort of convenience food.")

Scathing though Paxman is about the materialist motives (often cloaked in beliefs about the superiority of the white man and of his religion) which led to the expansion of the Empire, he pays due tribute when he comes to the high-minded: the Evangelicals who put an end to the slave trade; the genuine outrage about the abuse of power in 18th century India and the subsequent insistence on standards of integrity; the sincerity, endurance, unselfishness and educational work of the missionaries, who often strove to protect the local people against exploitation and sometimes supported the cause of independence; the ethos of pluck, fairness, leadership, team-work, and playing by the rules inculcated in so many colonial district officers on the games fields of their public schools (and, he might have added, the belief in hierarchy, the sense of responsibility and the confidence of command resulting from the prefect system).

Given the space devoted to anecdotes and many extended accounts of picturesque incidents, it is remarkable that almost all the major themes of British imperial history appear in this book. One exception, I think, is the story of how, learning from the loss of the American colonies, the British, between the 1840s and the 1870s, relaxed their grip successively on Canada, the Australian colonies, New Zealand and Cape Colony, giving them "responsible government" - essentially what would now be called autonomy or Home Rule - so that, by the outbreak of the First World War, they were all but independent. The British declared war on their behalf in 1914, but effectively acknowledged their full independence when it invited them to sign the Treaty of Versailles. That treaty gave Britain yet more territories to control - acquisitions by which Paxman considers "the reach of empire finally exceeded its grasp."

And so we come to the decline of the Empire. Paxman mentions diminishing lack of public interest as early as 1924, when the Empire Exhibition at Wembley was rather a flop. There was some anti-imperialism on the left; but that was as nothing compared to the influence of anti-imperialism from outside: from the United States (critical at Suez), the Soviet Union, and of course the increasingly vocal nationalist opposition in the colonies themselves, which had begun in India as early as the foundation of the Congress Party in 1885 and the Muslim League in 1906.

The Empire survived the First World War, but, as Paxman says, it was the Second World War which "really sank" it. At its end, Britain recovered the lands she had so shamefully lost to the Japanese; but, like France and Holland, she was too exhausted to hold on to what she had regained and, during the next two decades, to hold on to almost all her other colonial territories. Today, Paxman tells us, there are just fourteen tiny specks left; the most important of these are Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands, reconquered from the Argentinians.

Paxman thinks that Dean Acheson's 1962 dictum that "Great Britain has lost an empire and has not yet found a role" is still true today. In a rather acid conclusion, he writes that, though Britain no longer has an Empire and has even all but forgotten it, she still thinks that this island nation is so different from her European neighbours that she stands aside from it; that the work of her colonial subjects had brought her wealth that, according to him, still makes her feel that the world owes her a living; and that this has made her economic decline steeper than it might otherwise have been. A sparkling book ends on this rather depressing note. Read more ›

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Empire:What Ruling the World Did to the British 23 April 2012

By David C

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

As you would expect from the acerbic Newsnight presenter Jeremy Paxman, this is a wry, sardonic and unflinching look at the history of the British Empire. He looks at the arrogance and brutality of the British, the horrors of the slave trade and the opium wars with the outrage of a 21st century journalist but also at the compassion and achievements of the Empire. More than that he attempts, as the title suggests, an insight into how the countries forming the Empire in their turn influenced and moulded the British character even after the Empire itself was long gone.

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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars interesting, well written history 19 Mar 2012

By golfer

Format:Kindle Edition|Verified Purchase

Jeremy Paxman commands his facts and encourages the reader to acccept his comments as accurate and objective. The British did much good throughout the world but, it seems that their agenda was not always philanthropic. Cecil Rhodes and others were clearly driven by the desire for personal power and wealth, hiding behind the facade of bringing progress and prosperity to the peoples of the underdeveloped world.

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16 of 18 people found the following review helpful

4.0 out of 5 stars Very entertaining 21 Jan 2012

By M. D. Holley TOP 1000 REVIEWER

Format:Hardcover

There is not enough discussion of the British Empire. Generations of British children have grown up with a view of history which focuses too much on Hitler and Stalin, while remaining ignorant of the Empire. As a young schoolchild in the late 1960s and early 1970s some of our (older) schoolbooks still spoke proudly of the Empire, and we even had on the wall a map of the world with the Empire coloured in red. But by my teenage years the subject had been mysteriously airbrushed out of existence. So this book is especially welcome.

Paxman's book is very well written. It is lively and informative. He has an unerring eye for picking out the juicy and entertaining episodes, so the interest never flags. He keeps a good balance - criticising the racism, greed and violence where appropriate, but pointing out some positive aspects too. I note that in the Amazon reviews some accuse him of being an apologist for the Empire, and others make the opposite claim that he is unpatriotic and too politically correct. That suggests he's probably got the balance about right.

The blatant racism of the empire builders, reaching quite far into the twentieth century, is rather shocking to our modern selves. Reading here some of the quotes from the time, one wonders whether Nazi ideology was a little more mainstream in the first half of the twentieth century than we are led to believe today. And the chapters which describe how the Empire reached its largest extent in the 1920s and 1930s are interesting - I guess it is more comfortable to imagine the Empire as something from the very distant past.

The one weak part of the book is the conclusion. A longer discussion of 'what ruling the world did to the British' (it is in the title after all!) would have been welcome. Read more ›

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19 of 22 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Erudite, educational and entertaining 11 Mar 2012

By R. Parry

Format:Hardcover

You would have to be a very mean-spirited critic (even more vicious than a Newsnight presenter on a bad day) not to like this book. The British Empire combined the ludicrous and laughable with the impressive and the inspiring. The thesis of the book is that its very creation and collapse shaped the nation that is Britain today. Empire tells the story of development and decline and does it with the skill of a great writer on top form.

Jeremy Paxman (helped by a lifetime of practice) has a wonderful way with words and tells his chosen story with wit, verve and skill. The characters he introduces to us like Kitchener, Gordon, Rhodes and Baden-Powell are intriguing and captivating. The stories of Sudan, Rhodesia, India and the rest are told here with a greater levity but no less insight than would be in a more formal history. Events such as the comic farce of the first navel battle of World War One, which took place in colonial Africa on Lake Nyasa, illuminate almost every page. The book is probably greatly helped by its association with a BBC television series as this has enabled an enormous volume of research which provides the rich stream of detailed anecdotes. On a more serious note the book explains the context for much of the present days political strife from Ireland to Israel; from Iraq to Iran. All can trace their roots to British colonial decisions.

The premise that building the Empire has changed the British themselves is not wholly explored and indeed it feels a bit like a publishers gimmick to provide a catchy subtitle but this book must be judged as a popular work of non-fiction rather than a PhD thesis. As such it is 100% successful and worth every penny. Read more ›

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› See all 64 customer reviews (newest first) on Amazon.co.uk

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› Go to Amazon.com to see all 12 reviews 4.5 out of 5 stars

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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars Easy to digest

Written with much scholarship and covering an enormous amount of ground, Mr. Paxman makes it easy to read and learn. Although the truths are not nice to hear! Read more

Published 2 months ago by Peter Munn

4.0 out of 5 stars Informative read.

Yet another view of the Empire written by Paxman. The book is well researched and enjoyable, but I would also recommend further researech for a well balanced view of the Empire,... Read more

Published 4 months ago by Paul

3.0 out of 5 stars Purchased as a gift

I have no idea as to what this is about as it was purchased as a gift and have not had any reports on it

Published 4 months ago by David

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but with mistakes

Paxman's ideas are sound but he repeats some classic historical howlers in this entertaining retelling of the British empire. Read more

Published 5 months ago by W. Black

5.0 out of 5 stars An easy read, a difficult subject

This book lays out how the British got their empire, what they did with it, and then how they got rid of it. Read more

Published 5 months ago by Smallstar

5.0 out of 5 stars Fine

Good read!

Published 6 months ago by Mr Blobby

5.0 out of 5 stars excellent overview

I really liked the way Mr Paxman sets out his material. It really gives a very good view of how the British Empire "just happened" over two centuries through trade, and... Read more

Published 6 months ago by Twyla Ferris

5.0 out of 5 stars A bit of a Tome!

Well worth reading to bring home just how bad Britain was in the past, but what made us great now! Not normally my type of reading (mostly crime! Read more

Published 6 months ago by florid065

3.0 out of 5 stars Surprisingly dull effort

I expected better from JP but it was turgid, repetitive and frankly not all that interesting. Disappointed - readable but not a page-turner.

Published 7 months ago by Peshtimbo

5.0 out of 5 stars accessible, forthright and acerbic

A witty, engaging, informative account of The British Empire in all its glory, valour, hypocrisy and horror. Read more

Published 8 months ago by Nigel Marshall

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