One Fine Day
Britain's Empire on the Brink
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4.0 • 1 Rating
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
'Breathtaking... vital and important. A wonderful read' PETER FRANKOPAN
'Marvellous... escapes the inane, balance-sheet view of Empire and sees its full complexity' SATHNAM SANGHERA
'Excellent... his mastery of detail is impeccable' DOMINIC SANDBROOK, Sunday Times
'Extraordinary... [brings] the world of a century ago to fresh, vivid life' ALEX VON TUNZELMANN
THE STORY OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE AT ITS MAXIMUM TERRITORIAL EXTENT
On Saturday 29 September 1923, the Palestine Mandate became law and the British Empire now covered a scarcely credible quarter of the world's land mass, containing 460 million people. It was the largest empire the world had ever seen. But it was beset by debt and doubts.
This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels: from a remote Pacific island facing the removal of its entire soil, across Australia, Burma, India and Kenya to London and the West Indies.
In some ways, the issues of a hundred years ago are with us still: debates around cultural and ethnic identity in a globalised world; how to manage multi-ethnic political entities; racism; the divisive co-opting of religion for political purposes; the dangers of ignorance. In others, it is totally alien. What remains extraordinary is the Empire's ability to reveal the most compelling human stories. Never before has there been a book which contains such a wide spread of vivid experiences from both colonised and coloniser: from the grandest governors to the humblest migrants, policemen and nurses.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Parker (Panama Fever) offers a panoramic view of the British Empire on September 29, 1923—the day Britain began administering the territories of Palestine and Transjordan and the empire reached its "maximum territorial extent"—in this portrait of a world on the cusp of sweeping change. Surveying critical colonial outposts ranging across half the globe, from the small, phosphate-rich Ocean Island, located "a short distance from the international dateline" in the Pacific, to Jamaica in the Caribbean Sea, Parker vividly demonstrates the empire's vast reach and the "impossibly conflicting interests between government the governed." He juxtaposes colonial narratives told from positions of cultural authority within the empire, such as those of novelists E.M. Forester and George Orwell, with the work of anticolonial leaders, including India's Jawaharlal Nehru and Herbert Macaulay, the "Gandhi of Nigeria." The inherent brutality of colonialism is evident in each region that Parker spotlights, providing a stark reminder that the goal of imperialism is to exploit faraway populations for the enrichment of the homeland. Accessible and sturdy, this expansive account provides solid ground for understanding the decline of the British Empire. It's an eye-opening and a unique vantage point from which to study 20th-century history.
