Rating: 
Summary: Interesting but flawed.
Review: This was the first history of the British Empire I have read and I felt that I learned quite a bit. I was certainly never bored while reading it. But as the narrative reached the 20th century, and I became more knowledgeable about the topics the author was describing, I began to find that I disagreed with many of his conclusions, or that his arguments were shallow. In particular I took issue with some of his opinions of World War I. Ferguson makes the statement that it was surprising that it took so long for the British to beat the Germans, and that with the resources of the Empire they should have done it far sooner. In fact, Paris was nearly captured in 1914 and this would have had a far different outcome that what occurred in 1940. The Allied lines almost cracked again in 1917 when the Germans were able to bring troops from the Eastern Front. Ultimately the Germans were defeated by a combination of several factors. The effects of blockade certainly had an impact. The arrival of large numbers of fresh troops from the U.S. also was very demoralizing. But Ferguson doesn't seem to believe that the U.S. contribution was very important. I think that one could make an argument that it wasn't the Empire that helped Britain win in WWI, rather than an active Eastern Front which kept Germany (which I believe had a larger army than France and England combined) from deploying an overwhelming number of troops from the Western Front until it was too late.
Ferguson also seems to take offense at FDR's attitude towards Churchill. There have been many books lately about FDR and Churchill and their relationship so there is no need to rehash it here. And while it is true that FDR put far too much faith in Stalin's promises, Ferguson seems to feel that FDR put too much faith in the Chinese. In fact, Ferguson seems to forget/ignore that the U.S. emphasized the European theatre over the Pacific theatre at Churchill's insistence, which was a politically unpopular move for FDR since the Japanese had just attacked Pearl Harbor. FDR had to romance the Chinese to keep them in the war to tie up the Japanese army based in Manchuria. This was an army of nearly one million men and could have been redeployed into the Pacific or used in an attack of the Soviet Union.
Finally, Ferguson's conclusion draws far too many flawed parallels between incidents in the 19th century that brought about British military action and expansion of Empire and recent incidents involving the U.S. and Al-Qaeda. Ferguson seems to imply that it might be beneficial for the U.S. to build an empire in those Middle Eastern regions which are the breeding ground of religious ferver. I believe that recent events in Iraq (which occured after publication) should give pause to anyone promoting that argument.
Rating: 
Summary: Empire...Informative yet Not Always Accurate!
Review: I found the book overrall to be well written and informative; however, my opinion of the author changed drastically with the cruel smear against T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia). Ferguson describes Lawrence as, "..a masochistic homosexual". Where did he get his information? According to his biographer Jeremy Wilson, no one who knew Lawrence well believed him to be homosexual. No friends or contemporaries supported the accusation; and the two people who made the accusation were only slight aquaintances who had "strong personal reasons to wish to discredit him".
I was appalled at the caption next to the photo of T.E. Lawrence which said, "Queer hero: T.E.Lawrence, 1917". Mr. Ferguson truly lowered himself in my estimation by printing such a personal smear against one of the greatest and most influential men the British Empire has ever produced. Shame on Mr.Ferguson! Lawrence is one of the very few about whom he made sexuality an issue. Why does the issue of sexuality need to be
brought up at all? What relevance does it have to the subject of the British world order?
Rating: 
Summary: A different look at empire
Review: First, prospective buyers should understand that this is NOT a history of the British Empire, but rather reflections on the empire, and its implications for the modern world, particularly the United States. It is more like a graduate school History seminar in book form, largely set out in fascinating and apt anecdotes, and generously, but never obtrusively, illustrated with a wonderful selection of maps, photos and paintings. Thus, it presumes a fair amount of knowledge of world, and especially British, history. And although I consider myself quite knowledgeable in these matters, I was surprised and delighted with facts and stories I had never come across before, or, perhaps better stated, had never viewed from Ferguson's particular angle. Don't for a minute believe the book is merely the excuse for the TV series: it stands on its own as a refreshing and perceptive treatment of an age that is gone, but on the grand wheel of history, may come again. Ferguson rolls out a parade of small stories and forces the reader, in a most gentle and enjoyable way, to think big. If that single attribute doesn't denote a worthwhile history book, I don't know what does. You won't regret the read.
Rating:
Summary: Iconoclastic, revisionist review of the British empire
Review: In a beautifully illustrated volume the author presents in broad brush strokes the history of the world's greatest and most expansive empire and the people who created it. Many useful historic and interpretive maps and charts are included. However, the work should not be mistaken as a history, but rather a critical analysis of the British empire: the author goes well beyond reporting and interpreting the facts in the traditional manner of historians, and glibly reinterprets them in the light of contemporary liberal opinion. He inserts many anachronistic terms and current concepts and values in order to introduce his revisionist ideas of how people should have thought and acted at the time. For example, he refers to British as "racist" (p45); the faith of pilgrims and puritans settling early America as "religious fundamentalism" (p67); John Newton is derogatorily described as "born again" (pp79, 116). He exasperates his readers by frequently mentioning names and places with no introduction or explanation as to who, what, or where they are, and liberally sprinkles the text with Latin or worse, native, terms, the meaning of which is left up the reader to guess.
Under the guise of attempting to answer the question of why Americans should care about the history of the British empire (in other words, to justify the author's US book sales) the author introduces his work with a brief diatribe on how bad the United States is. I was totally unprepared for (and quite turned off by) this unnecessary and incongruent insult to the American consciousness in a book on British imperial history. But it served to introduce the trend the author followed throughout his volume, continuously substituting the invective opinion of the critic for the unbiased reporting of the historian.
The irony of quoting Marxists in support of the author's criticism of British (and so-called American) imperialism did not go unnoticed. (In just 70 years the Soviet Marxist regime was responsible for the cruel subjugation and murder of far more people than in the entire English colonial period of over 400 years; the Marxist Chinese continue the practice today.) After outlining the pros and cons of British empire, citing examples of it being both a "good thing" and a "bad thing", the author ends his introduction with the hope that enough material will be presented for the reader to make up his own mind as the merits of the empire. But no such grace is extended to the brief recounting of American international activity, unilaterally labeling it a "bad thing". In fact, no real opportunity is afforded the reader to come to his own conclusions about the British or American "empires", as the author constantly does that for him.
No innovations are offered in the treatment of the American revolution, continuing the typical British sour grapes viewpoint that the colonists overreacted to minor inconveniences imposed by the Crown, and that taxation or the lack of its representation had nothing to do with the revolt (p90). Ferguson describes the Boston Tea "Party" as an event organized not by irate overcharged consumers but by Boston's wealthy smugglers who stood to lose money if the tea were allowed in to the port.
In his ongoing harangue of anything Christian, the author speciously and unconvincingly labels the Sepoy Rebellion in mid 19th century India as a direct result of evangelicals' interference in Hindu religion and culture. Yet he acknowledges that the supposed instigation of the rebellion (army rifle cartridges impregnated by animal fat by Christians) never happened, and thousands of Hindu natives fought alongside of British soldiers against their rebellious "cousins". In reality the infrequent and inappropriate cries of "holy war" were drowned by claims of the real material inequalities suffered by the Sepoys.
The text is a bombastic attack on British imperialism and anything the author associates with it, such as Christian evangelicalism. Though he inadvertently laces his text with traces of nationalism, his primary effort is the tired revisionist approach of the armchair historian who iconoclastically reinterprets events from the view of contemporary liberal hindsight.
Rating:
Summary: The noblest empire, with warnings and advice for America
Review: In his book, Empire, Professor Niall Ferguson argues that the British Empire was the grand provider of five institutions for the world: "the triumph of capitalism as the optimal system of economic organization", "the Anglicization of North America and Australasia", "the internationalization of the English language", "the enduring influence of the Protestant version of Christianity", and "the survival of parliamentary institutions, which far worse empires were poised to extinguish in the 1940s". While acknowledging that empires are far from perfect, Ferguson allows the reader to decide "whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity." In the brief conclusion, he identifies America being in the same role Britain was for four centuries and the lessons it can learn from its forebear.In each of Empire's six chapters, Ferguson gives a distinct theme both in terms of globalization and the human dynamics, chronologically weaving the two together, e.g. commodity markets/pirates, labour markets/planters, culture/missionaires, government/mandarins, capital markets/bankers, and warfare/bankruptcies. Ferguson points out that the British were imitating the Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese empires at the time, countering the myth that England was the first industrial nation. China and India were homes to the imports the British craved, but there was nothing the British had that those two countries wanted, so the British had to make cash purchases with gold and silver bullion. The significance of this trading arrangement led to globalization, "the integration of the world as a single market" Ferguson does not omit the darker moments, such as the Myall Creek Massacre in Australia (1838) and the massacre of Amristar (1919). Yet he places culpability on misguided groups and individuals who were aberrations in the role of British administrators, weighing in with the presence of a distant "restraining authority" in London to halt the excesses of their colonists, a dynamic not present during the American campaign against the Native Americans. The good intentions the British had can be labelled as the three C's: commerce, civilization, and Christianity. Ferguson then lists a fourth "C" that unfortunately emerged in conjunction with the other three: conquest. The reasons for the Empire's fall, is World War I, post-war territorial overstretch from the Ottoman Empire and Germany, and a tenfold increase in the national debt. Reduced defense spending thus allowed Hitler and Mussolini to run riot in the 1930's. He also briefly goes into the Japanese atrocities at Nanking. India could have used WWII to break free, "but ... had to look at the way the Japanese conducted themselves... to see how much worse the alternative before them was". Then there were nationalist uprisings, such as the Easter Rising in Ireland (1916) and the one in Amritsar; what they both revealed was the schizophrenic nature of the British response: "harsh on the ground but then emollient at the top." Ferguson accounts for the darker moments and failures of the British Empire, but in a broad context, concludes as follows: "In the end, the British sacrificed her Empire to stop the Germans, Japanese, and Italians from keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice along expunge all the Empire's other sins?" He heavily tilts the emphasis on economic, with military and administrative dynamics coming in a close tied second. The last part of the title, "the Lessons for Global Power," tells Americans to take the initiative and realize that their country is traversing down the same road as Britain. Ferguson uses a few techniques to make this book eye-grabbing. One is the use of contemporary phrases on past events. The laying out of telegraph wires on the ocean floor--an "imperial information superhighway." How the telegraph and steamship shrank the world is reminiscent of how the Internet has done so from the late 1990's. His use of contemporary expressions extend to recent events. He likens the Mahdi in Sudan as an 1880's version of Osama bin Laden, the massacre of General Gordon and his forces as a miniature 11 September, and the 1898 Battle of Omdurman to the Gulf War and the war against the Taliban. He also uses maps and statistical figures, which contributes to the Empire's economic dynamics. And he peppers the book with paintings, political cartoons, many of them unflattering towards the British Empire, and black-and-white photographs. I found this book very fascinating despite its subtle nationalist bent, explaining blank spots in my knowledge of the British imperial experience, and seeing it from a predominantly economic perspective helped.
Rating: 
Summary: Dreadful apologia for empire
Review: In this book of the TV series, Ferguson attempts to survey the British Empire's history and impact on the world. In the earlier chapters, he makes a reasonable job of telling the story truthfully, but when he reaches the 20th century, his imbecile political opinions wreck the narrative. He depicts the Empire's bloody origins in piracy and theft. He shows how the British people bore the Empire's costs, how the Indian people paid for the Indian Army, while the Empire's gains accrued only to a tiny minority of bondholders, and how the export of India's riches led to the vast famines of the 18th and 19th centuries. He accurately describes the imperial slogan `Commerce and Christianity' as theft and fundamentalism. He praises the Empire's `capital export to the less developed world', as if investment was about giving not taking. The investment should have been in British industry. He blames trade unions for the Great Depression - "Rising real wages led to unemployment" - unpardonable economic illiteracy from a Professor of Economics. He blames World War Two on a `descent into protectionism' rather than on the continuing rivalry between empires. He writes that the USA was the key to victory - so not the ally that destroyed 90% of Nazi forces? He writes that Britain "sacrificed her Empire to stop the German, Japanese and Italians keeping theirs. Did not that sacrifice alone expunge all the Empire's other sins?" (A strangely Catholic doctrine!) But Churchill thought he had saved the Empire, only to find that the USA nipped in and stole it! And the answer to Ferguson's question is still no. He sneers that anti-imperialism is linked to anti-semitism, sneers about `conspiracy theories' about oil, sneers about `freedom fighters' (his inverted commas), sneers about the Soviet and Chinese achievements. As usual with reactionaries, he poses as bravely saying unpopular truths, while actually just retreading the hoariest, most discredited, clichés. He ends by calling ludicrously for the USA to set up a formal empire, a universal `political globalisation'! Book, TV series and author are as showy and shallow as was the Empire itself.
Rating:
Summary: Living in a British world
Review: It is not Niall Ferguson's intent to rewrite or beautify the history of the British Empire--although he started as a young enthusiast for the British Empire, after he studied history more meticulously, he came to realize that the costs of the empire had "substantially outweighed" the benefits. Instead, Mr. Ferguson takes on a more modest thesis: that Britain made the modern world.
As ambitious as this sounds, Mr. Ferguson is careful in his formulation: for much, though not all, of its history, the British Empire "acted as an agency for imposing free markets, the rule of law, investor protection and relatively incorrupt governments on roughly a quarter of the globe." It did so by exporting certain features of its society (English language, common law, respect for liberty, banking, representative assemblies, and others) that underwrote and fuelled the most significant period of globalization (or Anglobalization) that the world had experienced to date.
From this bold thesis comes a tightly argued and narrated history of the British Empire. In the process of the argument, Mr. Ferguson tackles certain conventional hypothesis (for example, he disagrees that the British Empire was set up in an absence of mind) and covers the basic components of the Empire by examining the roles of pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts.
The end product is an elegant history that escapes the narrow debate between costs and benefits in evaluating the impact of the British Empire; in fact, Mr. Ferguson's contribution would lie much to the fact that he has changed the axes for judgment rather than supporting one or another position. And his underlying position, than in the absence of British rule, our world would be much different (and probably worse) will strike many as rather provocative if not presumptuous. But if there were ever a case to be made for that proposition, then it is nowhere better formulated than in the "Empire."
Rating:
Summary: Ultimate Victory of the Disintegrated British Empire
Review: Niall Ferguson has written a well-balanced portrait of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Ferguson does not downplay at all the sins of the British administration in its colonies: e.g., eager pursuit of slavery in the 18th century, brutal crushing of failed rebellions against British rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and mismanagement of famines in the 19th century. However, the British Empire played a key role in the spread of the ideas that have conquered the world: free markets, democracy, Anglo-Saxon culture ... and Pax Britannica (now Pax Americana). As Michael Mandelbaum reminds us in his masterpiece about the ideas that conquered the world, free markets tend to promote democracy and enrich most of their economic agents over time. And democracies are inclined to conduct peaceful foreign policies. Before WWI, Britain was the most fervent advocate of free trade. Furthermore, British imperial power relied on the massive export of capital and people. The U.S., heir and adopter of many best practices of the British Empire, however, became a convert to free trade only after WWI. Furthermore, unlike the British Empire, the U.S., currently at the apex of its power and influence, is a massive importer of capital and people. Ferguson rightly points out that the British Empire had a self-liquidating character. The British Empire learned from the American Independence that granting self-government to the most advanced colonies (read White Dominions) was key to its survival. Nonetheless, the British Empire was clearly ambivalent about self-government beyond its White Dominions. The British Empire understood that this ambivalence was not even sustainable: e.g., India was granted Dominion status in the 1930s. The crippling price that the British Empire paid in defeating the partisans of Illiberalism in both world wars accelerated its inevitable decline due to a lack of resources to meet the growing challenges and opportunities of globalization. Ferguson also reminds his audience that the failed de-colonization in many Third World countries clearly shows that the achievements of the British Empire cannot be taken for granted. Although guns, germs and steel have played an important role in the fates of these human societies as Jared Diamond rightly points out in his best seller, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments are today the ultimate culprits for their failure. Without free markets, a country is condemned to remain at the doorstep of the world and sink in both oblivion and irrelevance unless it is a dangerous failed state. Without the exercise or at least the threat of (soft) power, there cannot be globalization that ultimately benefits most human beings. The network of bases and informal spheres of influence are some of the tools that the U.S. has at its disposal to further the advancement of the current liberal hegemony that cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes, the temporary occupation of the most dangerous failed states is key to facilitate the ultimate advent of democracy that Winston Churchill nicely describes as the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Rating:
Summary: Ultimate Victory of the Disintegrated British Empire
Review: Niall Ferguson has written a well-balanced portrait of the rise and fall of the British Empire. Ferguson does not downplay at all the sins of the British administration in its colonies: e.g., eager pursuit of slavery in the 18th century, brutal crushing of failed rebellions against British rule in the 19th and 20th centuries and mismanagement of famines in the 19th century. However, the British Empire played a key role in the spread of the ideas that have conquered the world: free markets, democracy, Anglo-Saxon culture ... and Pax Britannica (now Pax Americana). As Michael Mandelbaum reminds us in his masterpiece about the ideas that conquered the world, free markets tend to promote democracy and enrich most of their economic agents over time. And democracies are inclined to conduct peaceful foreign policies. Before WWI, Britain was the most fervent advocate of free trade. Furthermore, British imperial power relied on the massive export of capital and people. The U.S., heir and adopter of many best practices of the British Empire, however, became a convert to free trade only after WWI. Furthermore, unlike the British Empire, the U.S., currently at the apex of its power and influence, is a massive importer of capital and people. Ferguson rightly points out that the British Empire had a self-liquidating character. The British Empire learned from the American Independence that granting self-government to the most advanced colonies (read White Dominions) was key to its survival. Nonetheless, the British Empire was clearly ambivalent about self-government beyond its White Dominions. The British Empire understood that this ambivalence was not even sustainable: e.g., India was granted Dominion status in the 1930s. The crippling price that the British Empire paid in defeating the partisans of Illiberalism in both world wars accelerated its inevitable decline due to a lack of resources to meet the growing challenges and opportunities of globalization. Ferguson also reminds his audience that the failed de-colonization in many Third World countries clearly shows that the achievements of the British Empire cannot be taken for granted. Although guns, germs and steel have played an important role in the fates of these human societies as Jared Diamond rightly points out in his best seller, civil wars and lawless, corrupt governments are today the ultimate culprits for their failure. Without free markets, a country is condemned to remain at the doorstep of the world and sink in both oblivion and irrelevance unless it is a dangerous failed state. Without the exercise or at least the threat of (soft) power, there cannot be globalization that ultimately benefits most human beings. The network of bases and informal spheres of influence are some of the tools that the U.S. has at its disposal to further the advancement of the current liberal hegemony that cannot be taken for granted. Sometimes, the temporary occupation of the most dangerous failed states is key to facilitate the ultimate advent of democracy that Winston Churchill nicely describes as the worst form of government except for all the other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Rating:
Summary: Entertaining yet Limited
Review: Niall Ferguson's book is a well-written and lively account of the British Empire from its earliest beginnings to its bitter end. The book is an easy pleasure to read and is highly recommended. There is much humour, sarcasm, and wit. Many interesting tales are told and much fact is unburdened in an unassuming way.
The book is, however, superficial, perhaps as a result of being lay in orientation and so wide in scope, and there is a curious anachronistic form of moral assessment throughout that is questionable. Ferguson makes many points that are extremely tenuous. His focus on the Rothschild banking house seems out of place and greatly exaggerated (no doubt due to the author's own academic interest with this extended family). His views of the American revolution are rather unfair and overly cynical (perhaps influenced by that old-school British resentment over the matter). His presentation of seminal events like the take-over of Egypt and the Boer War are unidimensional and very shallow, ignoring their multicausal, accidental, and irrational determinants (read, inter alia, Efraim Karsh on the former and Iain R. Smith on the latter for more in-depth discussion of these matters).
Ferguson's political aim in the book -- to alert readers to the reality of a supposed present-day American empire and to make them more amenable to its existence as a potential boon to the world in the same way as the British empire had once been -- is laudable in being politically out of step with so much of left-wing academia. The question remains as to whether this political aim is misguided (British misunderstanding of the United States and its ethos) or well-founded (British worldliness and good advice). A good issue to debate.
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