'Ghosts of Empire' - Kwasi Kwarteng - Review

Kwasi Kwarteng, a Tory MP of Ghanaian descent educated at Eton, has come up with a book about empire which is beyond most Tory politicians. Generations of colonial rulers and officials from privileged backgrounds, often were responsible for much of the disorder and chaos that afflicted the British Empire. Worse, he sees them as responsible for many of the problems former colonies suffer today.

The fact that colonial servants were usually public schoolboys selected largely by “character” did not mean that men of quality failed to find their way into their ranks. But so did many cranks, oddballs and romantics. While it is true that colonial policy was largely formulated in London, vast distances and slow communications meant that policy could rest in such people’s hands, sometimes with appalling results. Power was often delegated either to Britons who served as imperial representatives or to local forces intent on doing the empire’s bidding. But Kwasi Kwarteng, in this fine book, argues that the empire granted far too much authority to the wrong people.

Too often, Kwarteng argues that the British reinforced the higherachial nature of their dominions by preferring to rule through natural native rulers. This is something to bear in mind as we lament the corruption and social backwardness of countries like Afghanistan or Pakistan.

A survey of key episodes in the history of empire illustrates his thesis. He allows that there was often a genuine idealism about what the British saw as their civilising mission. Iraq was clearly better off under their administration than that of the Ottoman Turks. But he also believes that it was the establishment by the British of the Hashemite Kingdom under King Faisal in 1921, with no historical legitimacy, that led to the bloody 1958 uprising and eventually to Saddam Hussein, and the subsequent calamities that have plagued the region since.

One sees the same arrogance in London’s treatment of Africa. Britons in Nigeria had an innate distrust of educated “natives” and decided to grant resources and autonomy to more traditional tribal chieftains, who were intent on pursuing local, not national, interests. Britain’s decision to join the Islamic north of the country with non-Muslim settlements in the south fed tribal conflicts and insurgencies that have lasted to this day.

In Sudan, meanwhile, British authorities ruled the north and south separately, ultimately to calamitous effect. Southern Sudan has recently become a separate country after decades of bloodshed, and the last 10 years have seen unconscionable war and genocide in the Darfur region, which was mindlessly tacked on to Sudan during World War I.

This is a list without many success stories, and Kwarteng, who is a Conservative member of Parliament with Ghanaian parents, ends up making a damning case. He declares that the British Empire is fundamentally flawed model of government, and blames much of the world’s instability on imperial individualism and haphazard decision decision making. 

Due to the gripping narrative and the sheer volume of content this impressive volume gets 4.5/5