Kwasi Kwarteng

I might as well admit it, I am a huge history geek. A trivia nerd. And This book was a true spur-of-the-moment purchase, inspired by the fact that it looked interesting - and that I loved Postcolonial Studies when I was at university a few years back.

With some delay (a delay incurred especially by my subconscious obsessing over the cover -the colourful print began peeling off at the corners quite fast) I got into it. Brought it on holiday trips, read it on the bus. Anyways, the book itself is very good, if perhaps a bit overwhelming. From Iraq to Hong Kong, you are taken on a tour de force of Britain's colonial-imperial spheres of interests, and the post-colonial histories of said areas. Kwarteng does a brilliant job of showing just how elitist, out-of-touch and out-of-date the British colonial authorities often were - but he also manages to humanize some of the grand icons of Imperial British history.

Take for example Lord Kitchener of Khartoum - the great Victorian war hero who is probably best known today for the iconic WW1 recruitment poster "Your country needs YOU". Kwarteng reveals that because of a birth defect, Kitchener was a terrible shot. So much so that he named three of his gundogs "Bang", "Miss" and "Damn". How can you not love that little trivia tidbit?… (más)

Underwhelming. I believe the author had a single thought: colonialism = bad, British colonialism = especially bad. (Wait, is that two thoughts?). Anyway, having established this world view, the author tries, with mixed results, to characterize a random selection of British imperial experiences as having left a terrible legacy that endures to this day. It's too subjective. Some of the connections Kwarteng attempts to make fail miserably and struck me as 'reaching' to support his hypothesis, none more so than in the case of Nigeria or the Sudan.… (más)