ONE FINE DAY

An ambitious history of the beginning of the end of vast dominions of the British Empire on Sept. 29, 1923.

British historian Parker, author of Battle of Britain, Panama Fever, and other books, digs into the archives to create a multilayered portrait, with deep contextual background, of the British Empire in 1923. At the time, it “covered nearly 14 million square miles, 150 times the size of Great Britain and a quarter of the world’s land area. Four hundred and sixty million people, a fifth of the world’s population, [were] subjects of Britain’s King-Emperor George V.” Yet even at its apex, the empire was showing cracks in the facade, whether in Palestine, Cape Town, Nairobi, Sydney, Rangoon, or Jamaica, as the author illustrates incrementally through newspaper articles, diaries, documents, novels, and other sources. Trade had established British global supremacy, highlighted by the dominance of the British navy, yet World War I had ruptured the old order. Across the empire, the entire social and economic edifice, based largely on race and privilege, was being questioned. Parker astutely examines pieces of the empire in turn, exploring relevant economic, political, social, and racial developments. Australia, for example, where D.H. Lawrence had just published his novel Kangaroo, desperately needed to attract new settlers. The author also chronicles the journey of the dissipated Prince of Wales, who was touring multiethnic India followed by Malaya, where rubber was supplanting tin production and the attitude of British “paternalistic trusteeship” was uneasily on display. In addition to social and political figures, Parker investigates the work of authors such as Somerset Maugham, George Orwell, and E.M. Forster, who presented frankly critical depictions of the failing order. The author also introduces the first political movements to challenge the British government in India, Kenya, Nigeria, and the West Indies.

An impressive work of research and synthesis tracing the end of an empire.