The Last Thousand Days Of The British Empire

Author : Peter Clarke
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1596917423
Total Pages : 321 pages
Book Rating : 4.22/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire written by Peter Clarke and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-01 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British empire and the moment when America became a world superpower. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the world-wide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a worldwide scale to defeat Hitler and his allies-and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill's defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian Independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain's Empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swiftly paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures though whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.

Author : Peter Clarke
Publisher : Penguin UK
ISBN 13 : 0141906383
Total Pages : 728 pages
Book Rating : 4.86/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire written by Peter Clarke and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-07-31 with total page 728 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.' Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously proclaimed his loyalty to the world-wide institution which he had served devotedly for most of his life. The majority of the British people, who believed they were fighting the war to beat the Germans and preserve the Empire, shared his view. Yet less than five years after Churchill's trenchant speech, and despite - apparently - winning the war, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian Independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? In January 1945, just before the conference at Yalta between Churchill, Stalin and Truman, where the disposition of so much of the post-war world was made, Lord Wavell, the Viceroy of India wrote in his diary: 'I wonder if the Prime Minister, who is the biggest man of the three, will still be able to assert his dominant personality. A great triumph if he can, the oldest man of the three, with the weakest hand to play.' Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyse in detail the losing hand which Britain was dealt in the last year of the war, and then to see how that hand was played over the next two years by Churchill's successors. Its originality lies in the detailed narrative which shows how military, political and economic developments bore down upon each other. It makes superb use of the copious letters and diaries now available of the major participants and many involved observers to show how decisions were taken, and of contemporary newspaper reports and contemporary witnesses to show how those decisions were received: it recreates both the geopolitics and the atmosphere of the period. Not least, it analyses dispassionately the role of the USA: how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it stopped. The book thus also describes the short pivotal period when American influence finally took over from the British in world politics.

Author : John Darwin
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1620400391
Total Pages : 497 pages
Book Rating : 4.95/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Unfinished Empire written by John Darwin and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-12 with total page 497 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John Darwin's After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of "massive erudition" and narrative mastery. In Unfinished Empire, he marshals his gifts to deliver a monumental one-volume history of Britain's imperium-a work that is sure to stand as the most authoritative, most compelling treatment of the subject for a generation. Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary range of forms of rule, from settler colonies to island enclaves, from the princely states of India to ramshackle trading posts. His penetrating analysis offers a corrective to those who portray the empire as either naked exploitation or a grand "civilizing mission." Far from ever having a "master plan," the British Empire was controlled by a range of interests often at loggerheads with one another and was as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength. It shows, too, that the empire was never stable: to govern was a violent process, inevitably creating wars and rebellions. Unfinished Empire is a remarkable, nuanced history of the most complex polity the world has ever known, and a serious attempt to describe the diverse, contradictory ways-from the military to the cultural-in which empires really function. This is essential reading for any lover of sweeping history, or anyone wishing to understand how the modern world came into being.

Author : Piers Brendon
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0307388417
Total Pages : 850 pages
Book Rating : 4.14/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997 written by Piers Brendon and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2010-02-09 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A WASHINGTON POST BOOK WORLD NOTABLE BOOK After the American Revolution, the British Empire appeared to be doomed. Yet it grew to become the greatest, most diverse empire the world had seen. Then, within a generation, the mighty structure collapsed, a rapid demise that left an array of dependencies and a contested legacy: at best a sporting spirit, a legal code and a near-universal language; at worst, failed states and internecine strife. The Decline and Fall of the British Empire covers a vast canvas, which Brendon fills with vivid particulars, from brief lives to telling anecdotes to comic episodes to symbolic moments.

Author : Ronald Hyam
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 0521115221
Total Pages : 575 pages
Book Rating : 4.23/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Understanding the British Empire written by Ronald Hyam and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-05-20 with total page 575 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A study of key themes in the history of the British Empire by one of the senior figures in the field.

Author : Shashi Tharoor
Publisher : Penguin Group
ISBN 13 : 9780141987149
Total Pages : 0 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Inglorious Empire written by Shashi Tharoor and published by Penguin Group. This book was released on 2018-02 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inglorious Empire' tells the real story of the British in India from the arrival of the East India Company to the end of the Raj, revealing how Britain's rise was built upon its plunder of India. In the eighteenth century, India's share of the world economy was as large as Europe's. By 1947, after two centuries of British rule, it had decreased six-fold. Beyond conquest and deception, the Empire blew rebels from cannon, massacred unarmed protesters, entrenched institutionalised racism, and caused millions to die from starvation. British imperialism justified itself as enlightened despotism for the benefit of the governed, but Shashi Tharoor takes on and demolishes this position, demonstrating how every supposed imperial "gift" - from the railways to the rule of law -was designed in Britain's interests alone. He goes on to show how Britain's Industrial Revolution was founded on India's deindustrialisation, and the destruction of its textile industry.

Author : B. Grob-Fitzgibbon
Publisher : Springer
ISBN 13 : 0230300383
Total Pages : 478 pages
Book Rating : 4.85/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imperial Endgame written by B. Grob-Fitzgibbon and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-11-09 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this fresh and controversial account of Britain's end of empire, Grob-Fitzgibbon reveals that the British government developed a successful strategy of decolonization following the Second World War based on devolving power to indigenous peoples within the Commonwealth.

Author : Jeremy Black
Publisher : Yale University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780300103861
Total Pages : 448 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The British Seaborne Empire written by Jeremy Black and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2004-01-01 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Britain's seaborne tradition is used to throw light on the British themselves, the people with whom they came into contact and the British perception of empire. The oceans and their shores, rather than the mysterious interiors of continents, certainly dominated the English perception of the transoceanic world in the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, climaxing in the fascination with the Pacific in the age of Captain Cook, and continuing into the nineteenth century, with Franklin in the Arctic and Ross in the Antarctic. The oceans offered much more than fascination. In England, from the late sixteenth century, maritime conflict and imperial strength were seen as important to national morale and reputation and without it there would have been no empire, or at least not in the form it actually took."--BOOK JACKET.

Author : P. J. Marshall
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780521002547
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire written by P. J. Marshall and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2001-08-02 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Up to World War II and beyond, the British ruled over a vast empire. Modern western attitudes towards the imperial past tend either towards nostalgia for British power or revulsion at what seem to be the abuses of that power. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire adopts neither of these approaches. It aims to create historical understanding about the British empire on the assumption that such understanding is important for any informed appreciation of the modern world. Through striking illustration and a text written by leading experts, this book examines the experience of colonialism in North America, India, Africa, Australia, and the Caribbean, as well as the impact of the empire on Britain itself. Emphasis is placed on social and cultural history, including slavery, trade, religion, art, and the movement of ideas. How did the British rule their empire? Who benefited economically from the empire? And who lost?

Author : Hazel V. Carby
Publisher : Verso Books
ISBN 13 : 1788735110
Total Pages : 480 pages
Book Rating : 4.17/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Imperial Intimacies written by Hazel V. Carby and published by Verso Books. This book was released on 2019-09-24 with total page 480 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Where are you from?' was the question hounding Hazel Carby as a girl in post-World War II London. One of the so-called brown babies of the Windrush generation, born to a Jamaican father and Welsh mother, Carby's place in her home, her neighbourhood, and her country of birth was always in doubt. Emerging from this setting, Carby untangles the threads connecting members of her family to each other in a web woven by the British Empire across the Atlantic. We meet Carby's working-class grandmother Beatrice, a seamstress challenged by poverty and disease. In England, she was thrilled by the cosmopolitan fantasies of empire, by cities built with slave-trade profits, and by street peddlers selling fashionable Jamaican delicacies. In Jamaica, we follow the lives of both the 'white Carbys' and the 'black Carbys', as Mary Ivey, a free woman of colour, whose children are fathered by Lilly Carby, a British soldier who arrived in Jamaica in 1789 to be absorbed into the plantation aristocracy. And we discover the hidden stories of Bridget and Nancy, two women owned by Lilly who survived the Middle Passage from Africa to the Caribbean. Moving between the Jamaican plantations, the hills of Devon, the port cities of Bristol, Cardiff, and Kingston, and the working-class estates of South London, Carby's family story is at once an intimate personal history and a sweeping summation of the violent entanglement of two islands. In charting British empire's interweaving of capital and bodies, public language and private feeling, Carby will find herself reckoning with what she can tell, what she can remember, and what she can bear to know.