I am looking forward to reading Ghosts of Empire by Kwasi Kwarteng, a history of the British Empire written by a Conservative MP of Ghanaian heritage who won a Kings Scholarship to Eton & worked as a banker.
According to the publisher’s blurb it makes the point that ‘the empire was not formed by coherent policy’, & much depended, for good or ill, upon the character of individual governors & colonial servants.
This is certainly different from the evil empire view that has been so prevalent in recent years & has produced so much post-colonial guilt, or the ‘on the whole a benign bringer of civilisation’ of a Niall Ferguson.
But I wonder if it is really so very different from the absorbing Pax Britannica of Jan Morris, or even the collection of individual eccentrics in Running the Show by Stephanie Williams which portrays colonial governors as on the whole more liberal in their views than the local white settlers, traders, business people or missionaries who could frustrate their very best intentions.
