THE SHADOWS OF EMPIRE

How the empires of yore continue to influence events long after their fall.

Puri, a former British Foreign Service officer whose “roots are in Britain’s former East African and Indian colonies,” writes that British mores concerning foreigners have “progressed substantially in the intervening decades since my family arrived after decolonization.” The mere fact that ex-imperial subjects are flooding the island is a product of a British Empire that once encircled the world but that began to splinter as World War II ended. Being English, notes the author, is now something available to ex-colonials generally, despite Brexit—itself a repudiation of a polity that closely overlies the Roman and Holy Roman empires—so long as they respond properly to “the cultural cues.” Just so, he writes, Russia’s annexation of portions of Ukraine was an expression of a historical imperative to restore former czarist—and Soviet—boundaries and a form of resistance to “second-tier status” on the world stage, “despite its relative economic weakness.” Puri’s argument sometimes seems self-evident, but it has an appealing freshness, as when he observes that under Donald Trump, the U.S. withdrew from the empire-building of the previous century only to demand control of ground formerly occupied by Mexico in the form of ID checks, mass deportation, and wall-building. Interestingly, Puri notes, just as no American secondary school textbook would speak of our far-flung military presence as evidence of an American empire, almost nowhere except in a brief geography syllabus do British schoolchildren learn that their country once controlled nearly half of the globe, “perhaps because there is no consensus as to whether to present the facts in a positive or negative light.” We now live in a world without formal empires, Puri concludes, “and this is a historical novelty.” This comes, of course, as China, Turkey, and other nations attempt to build new empires of their own, so that novelty may be short-lived.

A provocative work that will appeal to students of world history and geopolitics.