THE GREAT IMPERIAL HANGOVER

HOW EMPIRES HAVE SHAPED THE WORLD

SAMIR PURI

Atlantic, 384pp, £20, ebook £12.99

Puri, a British-born adjunct professor at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, looks at the histories of empires around the world and ‘how their very different narratives linger in modern geopolitics’. ‘Of course if one sets out to look for imperial legacies, one will start seeing them everywhere,’ wrote Alex Von Tunzelmann in the

Spectator. ‘While there may be traces of imperial hangover in some of the phenomena Puri investigates – Brexit in Britain, the rise of Narendra Modi in India – it is not the main cause of them, and arguably not even a significant one. This may be the danger of trying, through the lens of a hangover, to reconstruct the events of the night before. Perspective can be muddled.’

Puri claims that ‘if empires had not existed, then it would have been necessary to invent something like them’, which struck Dominic Sandbrook, in the Sunday Times, as ‘promisingly unfashionable’ and ‘the kind of thing that can get an author into trouble... Puri’s book is unlikely to be so controversial, however, not least because his following chapters are so dull...

‘So the first chapter offers a 36-page summary of how the United States expanded across the North American continent and became a world power. The second chapter offers a similarly brisk account of the British Empire’s rise and fall, from Agincourt to Brexit... His potted histories are scarcely more than encyclopaedia entries, and his judgements are so inoffensively bland that no intelligent reader could conceivably be surprised by them.’