The Old Order.

Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power, by Niall Ferguson (Basic, 352 pp., $35)

In 1897, the year of her Diamond Jubilee, England's Queen Victoria ruled over a quarter of the world, more than 400 million souls. Taking into account her impressive economic holdings and authority elsewhere, her country's influence could be felt in virtually every nation on earth. And though little now lingers of the Empire's political supremacy, its cultural and economic legacy remains ubiquitous. England laid the foundation for global capitalism, her language the standard for business and culture worldwide. Her progeny, the United States, has become the world's sole superpower, exporting its message of democracy and free-market capitalism to nations around the world.

That's the saccharine (or -- some critics would charge -- hopelessly revisionist) version of the Empire's legacy. Countless detractors of Rule Britannica will offer a far more pessimistic assessment, contending that England's hegemony was built on slavery, unjust imperial domination, and an unchecked, exploitative laissez-faire economic policy -- all of which left the world cluttered with the ethnic hostilities and economic catastrophes still being sorted out in Africa, India, Ireland, and the Middle East.

Prolific Scottish historian Niall Ferguson is without question firmly entrenched in the feel-good camp. His new book Empire (with an accompanying documentary on British TV's Channel 4) is ambitious, provocative, and entertaining -- a rare hat trick in the genre of historical writing -- in its meticulous charting of the rise and fall of the world's largest empire. While acknowledging the sins of British colonialism, this illustrated volume gives an enthusiastic nod to the Empire's high moral character and its role in bringing a sometimes regressive and antagonistic world kicking and screaming into modernity's fold.

A professor at Oxford and New York University, Ferguson has become a pop idol of sorts. He has already released a torrent of ambitious histories fashioned for mass consumption, which flood has been attracting considerable attention in England for years now. A couple of his earlier books -- The House of Rothschild (1998), about the mysterious banking dynasty, and The Cash Nexus (2001), in which he argued against the popular theory that there is a direct link between economic growth and democracy -- sold well beyond what one would have expected from their rather unsexy subject matter.

This superstar professor, not yet 40, tends to specialize in contentious historical assertions. In The Pity of War (1998), Ferguson argued that British involvement in World War I was unnecessary, far too costly in lives and money for any advantage gained, and a Pyrrhic victory that in many ways contributed to the end of the Empire. His new book is likely to be equally controversial, in that it casts the British as the exporters of "the idea of liberty": a perspective that will surely place him in conflict with a multitude of contemporary historians, most of whom become visibly shaken at the mere mention of colonialism.

But how did a relatively inconsequential island nation in Western Europe become the largest and most influential empire in the world? The short answer, Ferguson says, is mass migration. From 1600 to 1950, more than 20 million people left the British Isles, and only a small minority were ever to return. Ferguson has a great facility with statistics, but he does not condemn us to a merely algebraic understanding of this phenomenon; instead, he brings these millions of settlers, criminals, pirates, and Puritans to vivid life in a thoughtful dissection of the complexities and paradoxes of British history. Why, for instance, did American colonists, the richest of all Britain's subjects, possibly the wealthiest people in the world, revolt against the king, while in Australia, "a nation of pickpockets" -- subjects whom Britain had brusquely thrown out on their rumps -- proved to be the Empire's most dependable colony? And how did 70,000 British soldiers and policemen and a little over 60,000 civilians rule over an Indian population of some 300 million with relative ease?

These are issues of more than antiquarian interest, because they are connected to Ferguson's deeper question: "What lessons can the United States draw from the British experience of empire?" Ferguson unequivocally believes that the United States has "inherited the Empire," and that Americans are still in deep denial about this fact. Alexander Hamilton once told a British envoy to the burgeoning republic that Americans "think in English," and Ferguson takes this idea a step further: The American colonies, he suggests, were really never England's enemy to begin with -- and the War of Independence was therefore not a rebellion but a civil war. The merciless redcoats we have come to know through movies and American folklore, and the general idea of an American struggle for freedom against an evil empire, are elements of a silly "creation myth." And so, when Samuel Adams proclaimed the principle of no taxation without representation, he was not rejecting his Britishness, but emphatically asserting it, demanding the same rights his brethren enjoyed on the other side of the Atlantic.

From this perspective, Pax Britannica can conveniently be perceived as having morphed into Pax Americana. "No one can deny the extent of the American informal Empire -- the empire of multinational corporations, of Hollywood movies and even of TV evangelists. Is it so different from the early British Empire of monopoly trading companies and missionaries?" That may be a stretch; Ferguson himself suggests that America hasn't taken a serious crack at the task, undertaken earlier by Britain, of "impos[ing] its preferred values on less technologically advanced societies."

While Ferguson clearly endorses the preferred values of the British Empire, he does not exactly gloss over the horrors -- slavery, indentured labor, and the extermination of indigenous peoples -- that were part of the Empire. It's true that the British, for all their transgressions, acted a great deal better than, say, the Belgians in Africa or the Spanish in South America; but by 1750 some 800,000 Africans had been shipped to the Caribbean alone by British traders, their death rate so high and reproduction so low that more than half didn't survive the decade. Toward the end of the 18th century, however, there was a sudden shift, and the British started shipping slaves back to Africa and setting them free. "It was almost as if a switch was flicked," writes Ferguson, thanks to the birth of a new kind of politics: pressure groups. Through the work of "zealous activists, armed with pens, paper, and moral indignation," Britain turned against slavery.

This transformation toward liberalism, later coupled with Britain's leading technological role in the Industrial Revolution, transformed the world economy and the international balance of power, giving the British the ability to impose their moral authority on the world. And they did so, often and enthusiastically. By 1945, however, the Empire was no longer providing wealth to Britain, and had in fact become an unbearable burden; it soon unraveled. Traditionally, historians have given credit for this development to the various nationalist movements and freedom fighters who sought to shed their colonial masters; but Ferguson argues that this perception is misleading, and that the principal threats and the most plausible alternatives to British rule were not national independence movements, but other empires, some considerably more unpleasant than the British.

So was the British Empire, finally, a force for virtue? Did its colonialism provide English subjects with an economic and cultural advantage that would have taken them countless years to achieve otherwise? Ferguson makes a subtle, but impressive, argument that free trade, the English language, and superior education helped improve the lot of those under colonial rule. "The question is not whether British imperialism was without blemish," Ferguson writes. "It was not. The question is whether there could have been a less bloody path to modernity." Ferguson's persuasive answer is no.