Unfinished Empire by John Darwin
John Darwin's After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of massive erudition and narrative mastery. In Unfinished Empire, he marshals his gifts to deliver a monumental one-volume history of Britain's imperium-a work that is sure to stand as the most authoritative, most compelling treatment of the subject for a generation.
Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary range of forms of rule, from settler colonies to island enclaves, from the princely states of India to ramshackle trading posts. His penetrating analysis offers a corrective to those who portray the empire as either naked exploitation or a grand civilizing mission. Far from ever having a master plan, the British Empire was controlled by a range of interests often at loggerheads with one another and was as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength. It shows, too, that the empire was never stable: to govern was a violent process, inevitably creating wars and rebellions. Unfinished Empire is a remarkable, nuanced history of the most complex polity the world has ever known, and a serious attempt to describe the diverse, contradictory ways-from the military to the cultural-in which empires really function. This is essential reading for any lover of sweeping history, or anyone wishing to understand how the modern world came into being.
Darwin, John: - John Darwin teaches Imperial and Global History at Oxford where he is a Fellow of Nuffield College. His previous publications include After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire since 1400 (winner of the Wolfson History Prize for 2007), The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate (1991) and Britain and Decolonization: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World (1988).
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781620400371 |
| ISBN 10 | 1620400375 |
| Title | Unfinished Empire |
| Author | John Darwin |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Hardback |
| Publisher | Bloomsbury Publishing PLC |
| Year published | 2013-02-12 |
| Number of pages | 478 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |