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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 topic for a generation. Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary selection of varieties 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 getting a "master plan," the British Empire was manipulated by a variety of interests often at loggerheads with each other 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 an extraordinary, 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. That is essential reading for just about any lover of sweeping history, or anyone desperate to understand how the modern world happened.
