Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World

I might as well admit it, I am a huge history geek. A trivia nerd. And This book was a true spur-of-the-moment purchase, inspired by the fact that it looked interesting - and that I loved Postcolonial Studies when I was at university a few years back.

With some delay (a delay incurred especially by my subconscious obsessing over the cover -the colourful print began peeling off at the corners quite fast) I got into it. Brought it on holiday trips, read it on the bus. Anyways, the book itself is very good, if perhaps a bit overwhelming. From Iraq to Hong Kong, you are taken on a tour de force of Britain's colonial-imperial spheres of interests, and the post-colonial histories of said areas. Kwarteng does a brilliant job of showing just how show more elitist, out-of-touch and out-of-date the British colonial authorities often were - but he also manages to humanize some of the grand icons of Imperial British history.

Take for example Lord Kitchener of Khartoum - the great Victorian war hero who is probably best known today for the iconic WW1 recruitment poster "Your country needs YOU". Kwarteng reveals that because of a birth defect, Kitchener was a terrible shot. So much so that he named three of his gundogs "Bang", "Miss" and "Damn". How can you not love that little trivia tidbit? show less

I'm honestly still not sure what the author was attempting here. The individual chapters covering British colonial governments in Iraq, Kashmir, Burma, Sudan, Nigeria, and Hong Kong are fine, but there doesn't seem to be much coherent connection that he's trying to make, and the selections seem somewhat random given all the other colonial experiments that he could have chosen.

Underwhelming. I believe the author had a single thought: colonialism = bad, British colonialism = especially bad. (Wait, is that two thoughts?). Anyway, having established this world view, the author tries, with mixed results, to characterize a random selection of British imperial experiences as having left a terrible legacy that endures to this day. It's too subjective. Some of the connections Kwarteng attempts to make fail miserably and struck me as 'reaching' to support his hypothesis, none more so than in the case of Nigeria or the Sudan.

Kwarteng looks at several cases of British imperial policy. How did Britain involve itself in Iraq, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Hong Kong, and Burma, and what has this meant for these countries and the world as a whole? These are worthwhile questions for the scholar and the policymaker and it is interesting that the person who asks them is a Tory MP whose parents were immigrants to Britain from the former colony of the Gold Coast. This is a work that needs to be read by people who think that it is a simple matter to march into another country and impose your will on it. Not to mention by those who think that all problems can be solved by force.