Rubin on 'The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire'

Losing Hope, Glory and Assets
By MARTIN RUBIN
Wall Street Journal June 20, 2008

The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
By Peter Clarke
(Bloomsbury, 559 pages, $35)

“The sun did set on the British Empire, after all, roughly 60 years ago, when Britain gave up the Indian Raj and of its Mandate over Palestine. Most histories of this seismic shift in world affairs focus on personalities—no surprise, given the outsize figures of the time: Churchill, Gandhi, Mountbatten, Truman, Weizmann, Ben-Gurion. But even the great are driven forward, in part, by forces larger than themselves.

“The supreme virtue of Peter Clarke’s detailed account of Britain’s last imperial days is his effort to describe those forces and register their effect. It is a complicated story—involving economic imperatives, political obstacles and social demands—but Mr. Clarke makes it all clear and captivating. He is maddeningly tendentious: He shows an obvious partiality to Britain, an outright hostility to Zionism, and a not-so-subtle distaste for the U.S. and its postwar rise. But it is not necessary to share Mr. Clarke’s prejudices to value ‘The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire.'”

—For Martin Rubin’s full review, click here or visit www.wsj.com.