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Churchill's Empire: The World That Made Him And The World He Made (2010)

by Richard Toye(Favorite Author)

3.43 of 5 Votes: 5

ISBN

0805087958 (ISBN13: 9780805087956)

languge

English

genre

History & Biography

publisher

Henry Holt and Co.

review 1: Toye's history focuses on Winston Churchill's acts, writing, speeches, and attitudes toward the British Empire and the widely varied people it encompassed. The author assumes the reader is reasonably familiar with the history and issues that presented themselves to the British from the late 19th century through the 1950's. Without that background, it would be easy for a reader to get lost.Teasing out Churchill's core beliefs is a tricky task. There are contradictions, differences between public statements and private beliefs, inconsistencies, emotional statements countering well-thought analysis, high principles that don't match pragmatic and prejudiced attitudes toward colonial people. For example, he warns against self government for India, saying Hindus and Muslims ... morewill start killing each other without British control, then suggesting playing them off against each other to stay in control in India.After reading this book, it's difficult to see the British Empire as monolithic. Instead, it appears as a patchwork quilt of competing interests imperfectly and marginally controlled from London, where the British government tried to apply consistent policies to wildly varied conditions or, alternately, tried to explain the inconsistent policies to those who would have benefited from them, for example, voting and self-determination.To Churchill, the Empire was both a real-world collection of actual places and an idealized, romanticized concept where civilized, English-speaking white men brought the benefits of civilization to savages with bizarre personal and religious beliefs, and would bring them to full equality within the Empire at some undetermined point in the future. Of course, it was fair for the white man to reap a reward for all of his work helping the savages, the criteria for civilization was that they acted, dressed, lived like, and spoke English like the English. The white men would determine whether they were ready for self-government.Both of these Empires came apart after World War II, when a weakened and financially strapped England was faced with areas and populations that were unwilling to allow their fate to be decided by a people of a different race and culture thousands of miles away.Twenty-twenty hindsight makes Churchill's vision seem unrealistic. Yet, the Common Market seems to be surviving. It may be an unresolvable human problem, the advantages of combining into a large political and economic unit eventually breaking down as small, cohesive groups come to believe their needs aren't being met and breaking away.3 stars, because it's of narrow interest and requires considerable background knowledge. Recommended.
review 2: Raises the question of Churchill's record of being pro-humanitarian, while apparently being quite racist when it came to Black Africans. Churchill is attributed with quotes such as: "the Ayran stock is bound to triumph" and "I am strongly in favor of using poisoned gas against uncivilized tribes" among others. President Obama's grandfather was one of Churchill's targets, having been sent to "Britain's gulag". less

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