The Decline and Fall of the British Empire is a title suggesting that its author, Piers Brendon, sees himself a worthy successor to Edward Gibbon. And indeed Gibbon is often invoked in these pages as though he were a guiding spirit. A man of the Enlightenment, Gibbon attributed right and wrong in accord with the preconceptions of his day. But he had the imagination, the empathy, to appreciate that people in the past had other beliefs and standards and so did things differently. For the historian, description is one element in coming to terms with the past, and passing judgment is another, and the ability to keep them distinct is what makes Gibbon great.

Piers Brendon is instead an anti-historian, that is to say one who describes the past not in order to capture how it really was but only for the sake of passing moral judgments about it. For him, the past is to be judged solely in the light of the present, as though the outlook in today’s moral and intellectual arena is not just the product of the times but rather some sort of final word. The anachronism is deliberate, for the whole purpose of this book is to give substance to the single, very simple, and eminently fashionable preconception that the British Empire was always and everywhere a criminal enterprise. Those who ran it were scoundrels,