AS THE subtitle of this book suggests, Niall Ferguson makes big claims for the British Empire. Not only did these small rainy offshore islands turn the world capitalist, he argues, but they also made huge tracts of it speak English, play team sports and adopt our land-tenure system and common law. Moreover, what he calls “Anglobalizsation” was a Good Thing, and was achieved with far less blood being shed than would have been done by our Spanish, French, Dutch, Russian or — God forbid— German competitors.

The reason that Professor Ferguson is the most brilliant British historian of his generation, and it pains me acutely to write those words, is that he not only entirely substantiates these vast and controversial claims but he does so with a seemingly effortless, debonair wit. Master of the eye- catching phrase and arresting simile, he writes with splendid panache. His competitors and ideological opponents may fume, but (unlikely as it might sound) the Professor of Political and Financial history of Oxford University is also the Errol Flynn of British historians.

Ferguson examines the roles of “pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts” in the creation of history’s largest empire. As a Scot he gives his own countrymen their due — David Livingstone is described as “Victorian Superman” — for the way that the Empire was fashioned out of almost nothing over three hyperactive centuries. Almost every page has a sally, pun or thought-provoking question, such as: “Would New Amsterdam be the New York we know today if the Dutch had not surrendered it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonialism?”

Since this book accompanies a six-part Channel 4 series, one might have expected impressive illustrations, especially from the countries he filmed in, such as Jamaica, Australia, India, Sierra Leone, South Africa and Zanzibar, but there is a sumptuous one on every other page of this book.

Though the Mayflower was itself unarmed, it signalled the beginning of the process of “globalisation with gunboats” that Ferguson argues continues to this day. Only a third of the passengers on that ship were Puritans, the rest were attracted by the plentiful fish stocks on the east coast of America. “Not God but cod”, as Ferguson characteristically puts it, motivated the early American settlers. By a combination of “imitation and intimidation” the Empire grew and grew. Protestantism helped, the author argues, but capitalism drove the process.

Ferguson identifies 1940 as the year when the British had to choose between protecting their Empire and staying involved on the European continent. After the briefest of hesitations — less than a week of deliberations — it put Europe first. Ferguson accepts the necessity of the wartime alliance with the United States, despite describing it as “a suffocating embrace” which eventually, as “the price of victory”, cost Britain its empire.

The Tory nationalist in Ferguson — or the donnish controversialist — states that America was “in many ways more overtly hostile to the British Empire than anything Hitler ever said”, and he then goes on to quote the economist Moritz Benn’s postwar view that: “The United States have been the cradle of modern anti-imperialism, and at the same time the founding of a mighty Empire.” It was certainly the Americans who, in slowly calling in Britain’s $26 billion debt engendered under Lend-Lease, which represented 10 per cent of its entire wartime output and twice what it could borrow from its colonies, hastened the end of Empire. Ferguson emphasises the paradox between how ideologically opposed the Roosevelt administration was to British imperialism, while it excluded from consideration its own neo- colonies in Hawaii, Guam, the Philippines, Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands.

Just how serious the Americans are about their own modern brand of imperialism we shall soon see in Iraq, but Ferguson has no doubts that what used to be pursued with Maxims and Dreadnoughts is now just as actively being imposed by F-15s. “Empire is as much a reality today,” he writes, “as it was throughout the 300 years when Britain ruled, and made, the modern world.” The gloriously politically incorrect thing is that he obviously approves of the fact. Hallelujah!

ANDREW ROBERTS

Andrew Roberts’s Hitler and Churchill: Secrets of Leadership is published next month, to coincide with a four-part BBC2 history series.

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