JOHN DARWIN has spent his whole career thinking about Pax Britannica. Three years after his magisterial study, “The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830-1970”, the Oxford historian has returned yet again to the subject. This time, though, his focus is different and the period he covers is longer. His new book is not a straightforward narrative of the British empire’s rise and fall. Rather, it is a brilliantly perceptive analysis of the forces and ideas that drove the creation of an extraordinary enterprise. At its zenith the British empire was almost impossibly grand in conception and yet was frequently so “improvised and provisional in character” as to appear almost ramshackle.
