A worthy, thought-provoking follow-up.
The author of Empireland, which plumbed the legacy of empire in Great Britain, offers a companion book that traces its effect across the world.
Writing to his fellow Britons, British Sikh journalist Sanghera strives to move beyond what he calls “balance-sheet thinking,” in which “the achievements of the British empire [are put] into inane ‘good’ and ‘bad’ categories,” and to find nuance and complexity in it. His quest takes him abroad to Delhi (both Old and New), Barbados, Mauritius, and Lagos, with a fascinating sojourn in Kew Gardens, as well as to a “colossal number of history books and articles” that inform his examination. (The bibliography alone occupies nearly 60 pages.) As most readers will expect, the author’s survey of Britain’s imperial legacy includes the scars inflicted by slavery, indenture, and white supremacy, but they may be more surprised at some of his other findings. The time spent at Kew, for instance, yields the insight that the cultivation of non-native flora in colonial plantations had economic reverberations that continue into the present day. This and countless other facts Sanghera highlights are fascinating in their own right. However, to fully understand his argument, readers who are not steeped in imperial assumptions will need to be mindful of his British audience and the fact that abolition, for instance, in the minds of many “balance-sheeters,” somehow compensates for its earlier enslavement of some 3 million Africans. The author’s style is often disarmingly colloquial—“We cannot proffer solutions to the world’s greatest geopolitical problems without acknowledging that we created a bunch of them,” he remarks—a mannerism that amplifies his sincerity. If the scope of his interrogation is vaster and therefore harder to contain than that of his earlier work, his honest attempt to reckon with it is just as compelling.
A worthy, thought-provoking follow-up.Pub Date: May 7, 2024
ISBN: 9781541704978
Page Count: 464
Publisher: PublicAffairs
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2024
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2024
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.
Words that made a nation.
Isaacson is known for expansive biographies of great thinkers (and Elon Musk), but here he pens a succinct, stimulating commentary on the Founding Fathers’ ode to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.” His close reading of the Declaration of Independence’s second sentence, published to mark the 250th anniversary of the document’s adoption, doesn’t downplay its “moral contradiction.” Thomas Jefferson enslaved hundreds of people yet called slavery “a cruel war against human nature” in his first draft of the Declaration. All but 15 of the document’s 56 signers owned enslaved people. While the sentence in question asserted “all men are created equal” and possess “unalienable rights,” the Founders “consciously and intentionally” excluded women, Native Americans, and enslaved people. And yet the sentence is powerful, Isaacson writes, because it names a young nation’s “aspirations.” He mounts a solid defense of what ought to be shared goals, among them economic fairness, “moral compassion,” and a willingness to compromise. “Democracy depends on this,” he writes. Isaacson is excellent when explaining how Enlightenment intellectuals abroad influenced the founders. Benjamin Franklin, one of the Declaration’s “five-person drafting committee,” stayed in David Hume’s home for a month in the early 1770s, “discussing ideas of natural rights” with the Scottish philosopher. Also strong is Isaacson’s discussion of the “edits and tweaks” made to Jefferson’s draft. As recommended by Franklin and others, the changes were substantial, leaving Jefferson “distraught.” Franklin, who emerges as the book’s hero, helped establish municipal services, founded a library, and encouraged religious diversity—the kind of civic-mindedness that we could use more of today, Isaacson reminds us.
A short, smart analysis of perhaps the most famous passage in American history reveals its potency and unfulfilled promise.Pub Date: Nov. 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781982181314
Page Count: 80
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: Aug. 29, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
For Howard Zinn, long-time civil rights and anti-war activist, history and ideology have a lot in common. Since he thinks that everything is in someone's interest, the historian—Zinn posits—has to figure out whose interests he or she is defining/defending/reconstructing (hence one of his previous books, The Politics of History). Zinn has no doubts about where he stands in this "people's history": "it is a history disrespectful of governments and respectful of people's movements of resistance." So what we get here, instead of the usual survey of wars, presidents, and institutions, is a survey of the usual rebellions, strikes, and protest movements. Zinn starts out by depicting the arrival of Columbus in North America from the standpoint of the Indians (which amounts to their standpoint as constructed from the observations of the Europeans); and, after easily establishing the cultural disharmony that ensued, he goes on to the importation of slaves into the colonies. Add the laborers and indentured servants that followed, plus women and later immigrants, and you have Zinn's amorphous constituency. To hear Zinn tell it, all anyone did in America at any time was to oppress or be oppressed; and so he obscures as much as his hated mainstream historical foes do—only in Zinn's case there is that absurd presumption that virtually everything that came to pass was the work of ruling-class planning: this amounts to one great indictment for conspiracy. Despite surface similarities, this is not a social history, since we get no sense of the fabric of life. Instead of negating the one-sided histories he detests, Zinn has merely reversed the image; the distortion remains.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1979
ISBN: 0061965588
Page Count: 772
Publisher: Harper & Row
Review Posted Online: May 26, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1979
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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