H. W. Crocker - The Politically Incorrect Guide TM to the British Empire

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As someone who grew up in India, I often hear people ask, What have the British done for us? Until I read this book, I didnt have the full answer. And here is Crockers answer: Apart from roads, railways, ports, schools, a parliamentary system of government, rights, separation of powers, checks and balances, the rule of law, and the English language... nothing!

Dinesh DSouza, President of the Kings College and bestselling author of The Roots of Obamas Rage

The Politically Incorrect Guide to the British Empire offers a cautionary tale for Americans who dont believe the sun could ever set on our great land. Even the nations collapse when a people no longer believes in itself or its mission. Harry Crockers book is a jolly good read for Anglophiles and history buffs in general.

Brett M. Decker, Editorial Page Editor of The Washington Times and former Governor of the Hong Kong Foreign Correspondents Club

H. W. Crockers Politically Incorrect Guideto the British Empire is a vivid, wide-ranging and persuasive defence of an empire that spread freedom, democracy and the rule of law to all the corners of the earth. As Crocker shows, the British people supported the Empire because they believed in the superiority of their civilisation. This belief was neither false nor hypocritical, and Crocker adroitly assembles the proof that the Empire was both a liberating force in a dangerous world, and a testimony to those old virtuesgrit, leadership and the stiff upper lipwhich were taught to British children of my generation, and which are being air-brushed from history by the cult of political correctness. This brave and persuasive book deserves to be read in all courses of school history: it tells an inspiring story in an inspiring way.

Professor Roger Scruton, philosopher, founding editor of The Salisbury Review, and author of more than two dozen books, including Art and Imagination and A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism

The British Empire was a great and wonderful social, economic and even spiritual experiment, and all the parlour pinks and eager, ill-informed intellectuals cannot convince me to the contrary.

The British Empire still exists, thank goodness, with its outposts in the Falkland Islands, Bermuda, Gibraltar, the British Antarctic Territory, Pitcairn Island, and a peppering of other British Overseas Territories (including Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, and St. Helena) and Crown Dependencies (closer to home, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands). Together they ensure that the sun still does not set on the British Empire. At its height, though, Britains empire was the largest ever, covering a quarter of the globeor half of it, if you count Britains control of the seasand governing a quarter of the worlds population.

The empire was incontestably a good thing. The fact that it is controversial to say so is why this book had to be written. In the groves of academe, colonialism and imperialism are dirty words, the fons et origo of Western expansion with all its alleged sins of racism, capitalism, and ignorant, judgmental, hypocritical Christian moralism. But if the Left hates imperialism, so do many so-called paleoconservatives or paleolibertarians who blame the British Empire for dragging the United States into two unnecessaryin their mindsWorld Wars.

Still, most Americans are sympathetic to Britain. They think of her as our oldest and most reliable ally, even if they might be ambivalent at best about the British Empire, or harbor a knee-jerk disapproval of it: Isnt the empire what we fought against in 1776? In fact, no. Arent Americans anti-imperialists by birth? John Adams didnt think so when he foresaw in 1755, with prescience and pleasure, the transfer of the great seat of empire to America. about the British Empirethough, as well see, much of this animosity is based on Shamrock-shaded myths.

To hate the British Empire is to hate ourselves, for the United States would not exist if not for the British Empire. It was that Empire that created the North American colonies, giving them their charters, their people, their language, their culture, their governments, and their ideas of liberty. The inherited rights of Englishmen going back at least to the Magna Carta of 1215, were planted on American soil by English people in an overt act of profit-making imperialism. Moreover, the American War of Independence was not a war against the idea of empire. It was a war guided by men like Washington, Franklin, Adams, Hamilton, and Jefferson, who wanted an American Empire of their ownand who were in fact partly motivated by the British Empire not being imperialist enough.

After the War of Independence, Britains trade with the United States surpassed what its trade had been with the Thirteen Colonies. Even with the interruption of the War of 1812, Britain was not only a trading partner, it was a tremendous source of new Americans. From the end of that war (1815) through the presidency of Zachary Taylor (1850), roughly 80 percent of British emigrants came to the United States; we can presume they saw America as a second Britain, but one with more opportunity. Despite occasional diplomatic kerfuffles, there was an ineluctable bond between Britain and the United States, a bond that encompassed everything from the influence British literature had over American writers to the quietly conducted power politics of the Royal Navy helping enforce the Monroe Doctrine. In 1899, when Rudyard Kipling published his famous poem about picking up the white mans burden, his purpose was not to urge his fellow Britons to greater sacrifices but to congratulate the United States for accepting an imperial mission in the Philippines, joining Britain not as a global rival but as a partner in extending the blessings of Christian civilization.

At the time, Theodore Roosevelt thought Kiplings poem was bad verse but good politics. Today, at least in English literature courses, if it is taught at all it is merely another exhibit in a long litany of Western condescension to, and exploitation of, native peoples. But Kipling frames the white mans burden rather differently. It means binding your best men to serve another people, to take up what he says will be a thankless task, yet one that a mature and Christian people must doto banish famine and sickness, to provide peace and order, to build roads and ports, to seek the profit of another rather than oneself.

Kipling knew the British Empire as well as any manand he saw it clear-eyed, with all the blood and sacrifice and repression, of self and others, it entailed. He was a patriot for his own country, but India was his country too, the country where he was born and where his imagination was ignited. The British Empire of the twenty-first-century academic lecture hall, however, is something utterly different. The idea that the British Empire was a white mans burden is treated with scorn, contempt, and ridicule. The Empire was not a responsibility borne by self-sacrificing Britonson the contrary, the Empire was a vehicle of rapacious, self-serving capitalists responsible for racism, slavery, and oppression on a global scale. But which was it really?