Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain

John Darwin’s After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of “massive erudition” (the Guardian) 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 and compelling treatment of the subject for a generation. It was hailed as one of the 10 best books of 2013 by Jonathan Yardley of The Washington Post.

Darwin’s 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.

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—military and cultural—in which empires really function.