Well, I finished Niall Ferguson's Empire last night, and in some odd way I was disappointed. The book has been advertised and reviewed as a great revisionist take on the British Empire, staring down raving post-colonialists who claim the Empire was a genocidal stain on Britain's name. But the book was hardly that -- in fact, calling Empire revisionist and contrarian says more about simplistic knee-jerk reviewers and scholars than about the author and his book. Rather than being an imperialist whitewash (no pun intended) or a spiteful fist-in-the-air defense of empire, Ferguson shows British imperialism as more complex.

Much of the book is critical of what the Empire did -- robbing the Spanish, aggressively trading in slaves, using private and public spheres to "develop" colonies, massacring natives (usually black) with modern technology, etc. In fact, I kept reading chapter by chapter wondering when the apologia was coming, or indeed if one was possible. But for all the blunt condemnation, Ferguson's essential "positive" take on empire comes at the very end: sure, the Empire did some nasty things and made life miserable for many people, but the other empires that would have happily superceded the British (French, Russian, Belgian, German, Japanese) would have made life immeasurably worse -- witness the French in Indochina, Russia in Poland, Belgium in the Congo, Germans in their African possessions, and Japan just about everywhere. Which leads to another oddity I had never thought of. According to Ferguson, the choices faced by the colonies was not Britain or national independence, it was Britain or another imperial power. That was the real tension.

In addition, British rule meant the presence and influence of civil law, private property, representative government, some degree of intellectual tolerance, anti-slavery, individualism, free trade, capital investment, and religious pluralism. None of this was perfect, Lord knows the British did not grant any or all of these to its colonies; but it was there, and was especially evident when these colonies became independent in the 1950s and 1960s. Former British colonies were much more likely than others to resemble the mother country, and that was a good thing compared to the murderous Third World communist regimes. No other empire left this residue.

Perhaps I expected too much from the book, looking naively for an imperial apologia; indeed, as an American historian woefully ill-informed about so much in Ferguson's book, I should have been more guarded in my expectations. But the apology is there, albeit an odd one, that the world had two choices: British-installed misery or really miserable misery installed by another power. And the implications for America are made clear; Ferguson calls on the USA to "step up" and embrace its world power as Britain did. Coincidently, I noticed that Max Boot is calling for an American Colonial Office modeled along British imperial lines in today's Weekly Standard. Imperialism is ugly, but American imperialism is preferable to anyone else's; American institutions and mores will someday help other nations (Iraq, Liberia, Iran perhaps?) stand on their own and disavow tyranny. In that, empire is not devilish but welcome.