In early 2018, a group of students from London’s School of African and Oriental Studies picketed an unassuming café near Finsbury Park for honoring Winston Churchill with some décor and a breakfast special named after him. The students chanted “Churchill was a racist” and demanded that all traces of him be erased from the establishment. The café’s proprietor defied the mob and later declared, “If you cannot celebrate Churchill, you cannot celebrate anyone.”
Jeremy Black seeks to defend the British Empire as a whole from this kind of historical erasure in his newest effort, Imperial Legacies. Black, Established Professor of History at the University of Exeter, has written over ninety books on topics including naval warfare, the art of fortification, Shakespeare, and James Bond. His latest is timely, personal, and richly detailed, applying his scholarly faculties to popular historiography in a manner that many professors avoid.
Black does not undertake a comprehensive apologetic for the British Empire. Instead, he offers a more limited defense against the revisionist and condemnatory interpretations that have become standard in both academic and popular discussion. In its early chapters, Imperial Legacies promises to show how disapproval of America today replicates the postcolonial condemnation of Britain. The book does not quite fulfill this line of argument, which vanishes as Black’s focus on the British Empire becomes much more acute. Instead of refining the comparison to America, however, Black accomplishes something much more ambitious: he systematically debunks the ideologies of “decolonization” and postcolonial resentment and shows the harm of dismissing British history as a story of monolithic oppression.
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