Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present.

Empire: The British Imperial Experience from 1765 to the Present, by Denis Judd (Basic, 518 pp., $35)

Mr. Falcoff is resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. His most recent book, Panama's Canal: What Happens When the U.S. Gives a Small Country What It Wants, will be published later this year.

SOME years ago Boodles gin ran an advertisement in various American periodicals which began, "Come now, admit it. You miss the British Empire." I feel reasonably sure that the same pitch was never used in British periodicals, where such nostalgia, even in harmless commercial ploys, would be regarded as in poor taste. But the same line might well have proved successful in a lot of places besides the United States -- Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, to be sure, but also various countries in South Asia and Africa, and even Portugal, Argentina, and Chile. The reason is quite simple. This country which dominated a large part of the earth's surface for nearly two hundred years cannot have failed to leave an indelible mark on the Western (and non-Western) cultural imagination. Fifty years after Britain's departure from India, another look at Britain's imperial record would therefore seem in order.

Denis Judd certainly possesses many of the requisite credentials. An Oxford graduate, he is the author of more than a dozen works, including biographies of King Edward VII and Palmerston, as well as histories of the Boer War and the British Raj. This book is in many ways the culminating work of his career, bringing together immense erudition, genuine narrative gifts, and a capacity to pick out important details from a vast range of materials. Because Britain ruled over so many places for so long, a book of this sort becomes, perforce, a history of much of the world in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. That alone makes it a worthwhile read.

Perhaps the most interesting point Judd makes about this subject concerns the centrality of the imperial experience to Britain as a society and culture. The Empire was, he reminds us, central in the forging of a "British" identity, providing a common project not only for Englishmen and Scots, Welshmen and Irishmen, but also for French Canadians and Afrikaners. Indeed, as he points out, the Empire was the one place where the notion of a common citizenship transcended ethnic and historic differences. It also provided "outdoor relief" for substantial numbers of middle- and upper-class Britons --soldiers, civil servants, traders, and missionaries. It helped to maintain Britain as a major military power, since the Indian Army could be deployed around the globe, and it also allowed British authorities to sidestep the potentially destabilizing effect of peacetime conscription at home. It was a device to blunt the edge of class warfare and egalitarian philosophies. Above all, it united the British people "in a common cause, as a means of inspiring a sense of international mission . . . as a way of looking to the future with more confidence than the realities intrinsically merited." Anyone who knows Britain today is profoundly aware of the spiritual void that the end of empire has left there.

Judd begins his story with the American Revolution. The loss of the 13 colonies had important consequences for the expansion of the Empire elsewhere -- mainly in Australia, but also in India -- and it encouraged experiments in more flexible forms of rule in Canada. By the middle of the nineteenth century British hegemony had extended to much of Africa and Asia, requiring varied responses to widely differing cultures and situations.

Judd's narrative method is highly original. He selects a number of events in widely scattered geographical venues, arranges them in roughly chronological order, and then spins out his data to the widest margins. These include not merely battles or decisions of state, but cultural events like the 1924 British Empire Exposition in the London suburb of Wembley. This enormous tapestry is held together by several unifying threads. The first is that the British Empire was hardly British at all -- but rather a collection of dissimilar, mostly non-Western peoples, requiring a highly sophisticated approach to authority.

The second is that the British could not have dominated so large an area on their own; they made good use of local elites, who were often more than anxious to participate in the imperial project, and of settler communities who, however, once installed, could not easily be abandoned.

The third is that the vaunted Pax Britannica was something of a misnomer; during the entire reign of Queen Victoria there was never a year in which Britain was not engaged in violent conflict. Nor was everything placid even in the twentieth century. Everyone has heard of the Crimean and Boer Wars; here Judd tells us about the Jamaican rebellion of 1865 and the Amritsar massacre of 1919.

The fourth is that no one motive can explain the British imperial adventure -- neither strategic imperatives, desire for profits or international status, or the need to find a dumping ground for undesirables. Rather, the imperial impulse was fed by all of these in different -- and differing -- measures. Indeed, for much of its history the Empire was a less profitable place for British in-vestments than the United States or Argentina. And in spite of efforts to turn the Empire into a closed trading area in the interwar period, countries like Canada continued to be drawn into the American sphere of economic in- fluence.

The fifth and perhaps most interesting, to Americans at least, is the degree to which India remained utterly central to imperial self-definition. "The Raj," Judd writes, "was a source of inestimable pride to . . . many Britons . . . It was, in their eyes, an almost philanthropic venture, though based on sound money." As the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, put it in 1901, the loss of India would mean that Britain "would drop straight away to a third-rate power." As late as the 1920s and 1930s, Judd acidly observes, many Tory members of Parliament were "more concerned about Indian issues . . . than they were about unemployment."

The sixth and last is the degree to which the Empire was always based to some extent on illusion -- it was never as powerful, as profitable, or as secure as it seemed. Indeed, this book is peppered throughout with anecdotes that attest to periodic crises of confidence suffered by the British imperial class; one attempt to forestall decline in the Edwardian period was the founding of the Boy Scout movement, based partly on fear that the British race would be brought down by -- this is not a misprint -- masturbation.

Indeed, if Judd is to be believed, taken as a whole the Empire-builders were a pretty kinky bunch. Cecil Rhodes hated women; General Charles Gordon liked to scrub down dirty urchins in bathtubs; Lord Kitchener had a series of passionate friendships with his military aides; Colonel Robert Baden-Powell loved to gaze upon youthful naked men . . . And then -- contrary to what Mme Edith Cresson seems to think -- there were plenty of heterosexual officers and civil servants who made the most of the opportunities their positions afforded, mainly by maintaining relationships of concubinage with native women, at least until enough British women arrived to impose the proprieties of Edwardian and Victorian society. Judd reminds us, however, that the image of Victorian England as a sexually reticent society is a myth, and what was going on in the colonies was not all that different from what went on under-stairs at home.

TO write history is to select -- particularly when the subject matter is so vast and complex. The very process of selection we call interpretation, and Judd, like every other historian, has the right to his choices. His readers will immediately note an extreme ambivalence on his part. He is simply too good a scholar to damn the enterprise of Empire full bore, but he is also the very model of a New Labour Brit, so periodically we get large dollops of political correctness.

Judd's two pet hates are the United States and Israel, but he also has much to say about racism and economic exploitation, as if either were a British invention. He quotes with scorn the prediction of some Britons that independence would be "a catastrophe," for India, "bringing corruption, maladministration, and chaos in its train," although he admits that partition led to the deaths of 600,000 people. (He passes over the quality of Indian administration since 1947 in respectful silence.) He admits that one-party rule in Africa since independence has been a disaster for that continent's peoples, but insists that the indigenous political systems that the British replaced were perfectly all right. When the spectacle of "corruption, maladministration, and chaos" becomes a bit too heavy to bear in the former colonies -- from Jamaica to Ghana, from Pakistan to Sri Lanka -- he trains his camera on Britain today, suffering, as he says, from "coarse materialism . . . post-industrial decline, and squalor." In the end, however, he has some nice things to say about Britain's intentions in governing a quarter of the earth's surface, which were honorable by its lights, the only ones -- Judd admits -- by which it could have labored. In this sense the most telling anecdote relates to Brigadier General Michael O'Dwyer, who drowned the Amritsar uprising in blood. "I don't want to get better," he told his daughter-in-law as he lay dying of a stroke many years after the event. "I only want to die, and to know from my Maker whether I did right or wrong."