One Fine Day
Britain's Empire on the Brink
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- ¥300
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This critical historical exploration shows a portrait of the British Empire at both the peak of its global reach—and the moment it began to topple.
September 29, 1923. Once the Palestine Mandate officially takes effect, the British Empire—now covering a quarter of the world’s land and boasting a population of 460 million—is the largest the world has ever seen. But it is also an empire in rapid transition.
Nationalist and Pan-African movements are gaining momentum throughout West Africa, thanks as much to Marcus Garvey as to the sustained efforts of local activists and politicians.
On far-flung Ocean Island in the Pacific, highly profitable phosphate extraction threatens to render the land uninhabitable for its native population—and colonial officials are torn between their integrity and their careers.
And in India, Jawaharlal Nehru and fellow nationalists wonder despairingly about the future of the independence movement as Gandhi languishes in prison.
Moving from London to Kuala Lumpur, Australia to the West Indies, One Fine Day is a breathtaking and unflinching tour of the British Empire at its pinnacle. Here the Empire is at its biggest; but it is on a precipice, beset with debts and doubts as liberation movements emerge to undo the colonial era, and see the sun set on the Empire.
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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.
