1114 Featured Reviews

lished gender-based reservations within communal vidual women’s agency. In situating her study of
electorates despite continued agitation by women for Katherine Mayo in a global context, Sinha too pioneers
universal suffrage. Paradoxically, however, such agita- new forms of scholarship. Rather than place Western
tion was a privilege of dominant elites and allowed a feminism in a binary opposition with Indian forms of
majoritarian Hinduism to masquerade as abstract in- patriarchy in a single national framework, her multi-
dividualism. Sinha notes, “Herein lay the most ironic sited analysis provides a lateral view of alternative
role of the collective political agency of women: as ideo- global feminist networks whose possibilities are en-
logical cover for a unitary nationalist imagination that abled by colonialism but whose significance resides in
was implicitly a reconstituted male, Hindu, and upper- the ways these groups turned the colonial system
caste conception” (p. 247).
against itself. The imperial social formation, her study
Both Ghosh and Sinha make substantial contribu-
reveals, exists alongside a global network of resistance.
tions to South Asian studies, modeling the practice of

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PURNIMA BOSE
feminist deconstructive historiography in stylistically
masterful prose. Methodologically innovative, Ghosh’s Indiana University,
study excavates textual fragments as evidence of indi- Bloomington

JOHN DARWIN. After Tamerlane: The Global History of Em-

Empires need myths to sustain them. One of the most “how Britain made the modern world,” and the like. It
pervasive myths behind Western imperialism from its is unsettling. There is no single “line” to get a firm grip
eighteenth-through-twentieth-century European vari- on. It offers very little positive and practical guidance
ants to its modern American form has been that it was for present times. “No prediction is safe. Like all pre-
somehow inevitable, a byproduct—welcome or other- vious generations, we face the future with little more
wise—of the irresistible spread of “modernity” from its than guesswork on which to build our plans” (p. 485).
fount in the more “progressive” West to what were usu- Those who want their history to be neat and tidy, and
ally seen as the “backward” or “static” East and South. to furnish them with more definite answers and advice,
That of course is a very Eurocentric view: blinkered, will be disappointed with this book. But is not that all
arrogant, and potentially racist. (It depends on why you to the good? It is arguable that many of the great po-
think the East has been “static.”) John Darwin takes a litical errors and disasters that have been perpetrated
very different one. Western imperialism was not inev- in recent times have been at least partly the fault of
itable. Its victims, or beneficiaries, were certainly not versions of history that have been too simple and def-
“static” at any time. Whether you want to call them inite. Darwin does not mention the “neocons” (by
“backward” depends on value judgments. Even by mod- name) and the 2003 invasion of Iraq, surprisingly in a
ern “Western” criteria many non-European societies book that was first published (in the United Kingdom)
were at least as “advanced” as most of Europe until the in 2007: perhaps it was for fear of appearing too po-
early or middle nineteenth century; European power in lemical; but one could make this point about them. The
the world was highly tenuous and vulnerable before prime role of the genuine historian is to show how com-
then; and other Eurasian empires—the Chinese, for ex- plex history really is. That may seem a modest service;
ample, and the Ottoman—were arguably more domi- but in fact it is a vital one. It is what Darwin does su-
nant. Most shifts in the balance of power between em- perbly well here, in a vast-ranging, brilliantly stimulat-
pires came about through what Darwin calls “unique ing and wonderfully written book.
conjunctures” (p. 58), or luck, rather than as the result Its chief virtue is the fresh light it sheds on so many
of any “progressive” trend. This applies to Europe’s and aspects of modern imperial history—for the general
then America’s later dominance, too. The latter has reader, at least. Obviously most of its points will be fa-
been quite short-lived so far, and could easily col- miliar to the specialists whose work it acknowledges.
lapse—but we cannot be sure, because it is impossible But who apart from Sinologists knows enough about the
to predict “unique conjunctures.” So, the whole history history of China to realize how very “advanced” and
of empires from the fifteenth century on has been “far non-“static” it generally was? Armed with an impres-
more contested, confused and chance-ridden” than the sively wide reading among these authorities, unfettered
current “legend” has it (p. x). That is Darwin’s main by any single “theory,” and demonstrating the kind of
theme. empathy toward other cultures and civilizations that
Obviously it presents problems. “Confusion” is much has been a feature of “imperial” history in the two older
more difficult to handle (for the reader) than simple English universities for some years now (unexpectedly,
overarching theories about “progress” and “inevitabil- one might think), Darwin presents all sorts of things in
ity”—“the end of history,” “the clash of civilizations,” new ways. Imperialism is of course not an exclusively

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2008

“Western” phenomenon, even before Japan’s big im- sphere,’” and “manliness” (pp. 339–340). That is an un-
perial surge in the 1930s; nor was Europe in any way usual list of the main perceived characteristics of West-
dominant, until quite late on. Asia was at the front of ern “superiority”—the last two are not generally put as
the stage before around 1800, and had an active, not bluntly as that—but it seems about right. This was the
simply a passive “victim” role, for most of the time after slightly more benign form of ideology suggested by the
that. China gains enormously from this approach, imperial “successes” of these years. The other was a
emerging as perhaps the most successful—certainly the more virulent form (for Europe) of racism. By that time
most enduring—empire of the whole period. The Ot- Europeans had forgotten how close the peoples of the
toman Empire is made to look far more impressive for whole of Eurasia had been before the “great diver-
almost its entire history than its nineteenth-century dis- gence.”
missal by Europeans as their “sick man” was intended Even at this zenith of Euro-Russo-American impe-
to imply. Islam features as prominently, complexly, and rialism, however, it was sometimes touch and go for the

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even sympathetically as it clearly should. The idea that imperial powers against indigenous resistance and re-
Europe was set on an imperial path before the mid- bellion, which succeeded as often as they failed. Many
eighteenth century is revealed as “an optical illusion,” colonial states, especially in Africa, were “shallow,”
the clear product of hindsight (p. 104). Even as late as and—partly as a result—irresponsible and brutal. As a
1750 its commercial penetration of most of Asia was leading historian of decolonization, Darwin is predict-
very limited indeed. Several particular European im- ably good on colonial resistance movements and the
perialisms are diminished here: the Spanish Empire, for forms they took (and take): firstly, using European
example, was from the beginning “less than the sum of knowledge against their masters; secondly, religious re-
its parts” (p. 97), as was the British imperium in North vival, usually feared and reviled by the West as “fanat-
America. Britain’s conquest of India in the mid-eigh- icism”; and thirdly, Gandhi’s. There are clear sugges-
teenth century was very uneven, to say the least, and far tions here, if not clear-cut “lessons” for today. Then
from a simple case of the British going in to sort out an along came another series of conjunctures. The first
oriental “chaos.” In reality, before the later eighteenth were the great European civil wars of the first half of
century there was little to choose between most parts of the twentieth century, which put an end to this coop-
Europe and Asia in terms of (say) political instability, erative imperialism, and also brought to the stage a cou-
“backwardness,” and religious intolerance; or, on the ple of more brutal ones (Nazi and Japanese); otherwise,
other side of the ledger, material progress, commerce, Darwin thinks, the old European empires might have
“high” culture, and beneficent government. soldiered on. That gave rise to a bi-imperial system,
The “great divergence,” in material terms, between which itself was brought to an end, again unpredictably,
parts of Europe and Asia only began then, not before, by the collapse of the Soviet empire, leaving the United
and only became obvious around the 1830s. (Whether States to soldier on alone. Obviously that latter event
they can be said to have diverged morally then, of bolstered the “progress” idea: the “end of history,” and
course, is highly questionable. Muslims in Egypt were all that. But it may just have been a lucky break, all the
impressed by the strength and efficiency of the force same.
that Napoleon Bonaparte sent to occupy their country Darwin is clear that this still constitutes “imperial-
in 1798, but were deeply shocked by its brutalities. That ism.” “It is pointless to debate whether America should
has been a continuing perception.) Russia’s and Amer- be seen as an imperial power,” he writes at one point;
ica’s roles in the European expansionary movement of “the case has already been made” (p. 482). Probably few
that time were as significant as Western Europe’s. In- Americans would dispute this now, especially in aca-
deed, Darwin treats these three regions as a single unit demia, although it used to be thought important to deny
in this period: a “Greater Europe” with a “sense of it: “we don’t do empire” (Donald Rumsfeld). Obviously
shared ‘Europeanness.’” (“‘Americanness,’” he adds, it depends on your definition. Darwin has two. First,
puckishly, “was merely a provincial variant” [p. 224].) imperialism is “the attempt to impose one state’s pre-
That is an interesting perspective. If anything, America dominance over other societies by assimilating them to
drew even closer to Europe in the later nineteenth cen- its political, cultural and economic systems” (p. 416).
tury, in its imperialism too; with its only important dis- Second, empires were “systems of influence or rule in
tinguishing features being “its democratic populism which ethnic, cultural or ecological boundaries were
and . . . its open avowal of race segregation” (p. 319). overlapped or ignored” (p. 491). These two versions
(This was a widespread European view of the United seem complementary, and also to embrace the modern
States, although motes and beams may come to mind United States, quite comfortably. It is by these defini-
here.) This loose polity was able to dominate much of tions that Darwin also suggests—a suggestion that
the rest of the world so long as its members avoided might be disputed, although it would take too long to
fighting one another seriously. It was at this stage that dispute it here—that “the history of the world . . . is an
Euro-Americans started to believe that they had dis- imperial history,” with “imperial power” being human-
covered the secret of “perpetual progress”; the “four ity’s “default position.” But, he goes on, “if empires
cardinal rules” of which, according to Darwin, were were common, they were also diverse” (pp. 491– 492).
freedom of ideas, private property, social order, includ- Only a few of them conformed to what were probably
ing the “right treatment of women in their ‘separate Rumsfeld’s narrow criteria. They took very different

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2008

forms at different times, maintained by different econ- may “decline and fall” too. Darwin does risk one very
omies, political systems and methods, ideologies, and cautious prediction in this connection. This is that “in
cultures. These too depended on those “unique con- the next fifty years” the “rough equilibrium” that used
junctures.” to exist two or three hundred years ago “between the
This all implies that imperialism is here to stay. Dar- Euro-Atlantic West and most of the rest of Eurasia”
win writes of the imperialism of the later twentieth cen- may be restored. The American empire could be effec-
tury—the period after formal “decolonization”—as be- tively challenged. But it might not be. We are at “an
ing “colossal” and “unprecedented,” and also, extraordinary moment” now, but it has lasted only fif-
incidentally, possibly more damaging collaterally—“the teen years. That is no time at all, compared to the 600
destabilizing effects of covert intervention, the financial years covered in this book. At any time, another of
succour lent to authoritarian rulers, and the militari- those “conjunctures” could intervene to wreck the
zation of politics encouraged by the vast traffic in weap- trend. Or things might go on as they are. That point

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ons”—than the more formal late nineteenth-century about the impermanence of empire was only a historical
variety was (pp. 470, 477). (This is even before Iraq.) truism, note, not a general law. “We will have to see”
But of course there are also indications the other way. (pp. 504 –505). There is the proper conclusion of a his-
All empires in history, Darwin points out, have suffered torian. Do not be misled by those who promise you
from “great stresses and strains,” and “spasms of cri- more.
sis,” which in the past have always ultimately under- BERNARD PORTER,
mined them; so that it is a “historical truism that no Emeritus
empire was permanent” (p. 493). So the present one University of Newcastle

AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW OCTOBER 2008