This Sceptred Isle: Empire [Hardcover]

I recently remarked to a close friend that the art of history seemed to be in serious decline. Histories written 50 or more years ago seem to be far more erudite, analytical and well written. He posited that this was the simple result of natural selection; the wheat remained to us still prominent while the chaff had fallen through the intellectual sieve. If his conjecture is true (and I hope it is), 50 years hence this book is destined to be found on the remotest shelves of only those libraries chartered for comprehensiveness. All those with limited space will have consigned it to the bargain table long before.

The thesis is the old but still interesting question. What are the origins of the Empire of Great Brittan? Was its creation an act of design, or happenstance resultant from the greed-motivated acts of individuals? The author asks the questions repeatedly early on but never get around to any answers, instead wandering ever further from them. He almost stumbles into the answer when he briefly splatters around the Empire of Henry II, but considering Henry in any depth is far beyond his abilities and he retreats rapidly back to much shallower waters. Finally, the thesis is lost entirely.

It seems reasonable that one might expect some temporal coherence when reading a history. This does not mean that topics must proceed rigidly in chronological order, but that they flow with some logical consistency. Not here. This is because the author has made no effort to meld together the individual stories taken from original source documents, frequently letters, that comprise the main body of his history. His occasional attempts to knit thing together with little - by the way such-and-so was doing such-and-such at the same time - fall far short. But, if the book has anything good about it, it is these individual letters and legal documents that he quotes at length. The documents do give wonderful brief glimpses into the way these forefathers (and a few foremothers) of ours were thinking. The comments about the quotes are constantly irritating. The author feels a juvenile politically correct necessity to apologize for the words and actions of our predecessors. `Oh they really did not mean to be so terrible when they called people savages - it was just their way', as if the audience has absolutely no idea that slave trading Europeans of the 17th century were racially bigoted.

It is a popular history, not an academic text, so I shan't grouse about the informal style. But, what really rankles is that the author has so little to say that he insists on saying it over and over again. He feels compelled to frequently recapitulate the story. This is because the text was originally written as episodes for a BBC broadcast. And, he constantly retells us incidentals. Just how many times must we be told that "East Indies" derives from East of the Indus River or that Drake's seizure of Dutch navigational charts was pivotal to the success of British enterprise. Yet worse, with typical PC self-flagellation he constantly generalizes that the English were incompetent sailors, bad planners and Johnny-come-lately foreign traders. Well, they were quite good enough to conquer one-quarter of the globe. There are even some historical errors, particularly in the treatment of the settlement of Raleigh's colony in North Carolina, Jamestown and Cornwallis' campaign in the South.

If you recently earned a BA from Columbia or NYU in Fem Lit with a GPA of 2, you might actually find this book challenging and entertaining. But, if you have a desire for a real understanding of the origins of the British Empire and an attention span of more than 15 minutes, search out some of the histories of people who were actually part of it, Churchill, Raleigh, or early 20th century professors from OxBridge. Leave this mess to languish on the remotest shelves of the Library of Congress or the BBC archives.