A Labour MP defends the Empire – and only quotes Lenin twice

In a grand history of the British empire — because that is what this book really is —  you might expect more hand-wringing from a historian and Labour MP who has previously written a life of Engels. But despite quoting Marx half a dozen times (and Lenin, twice!) there is something about the idea of empire that excites Tristram Hunt.

And this is a book about ideas, for all that it is rich in architectural description, economic fact and colourful anecdote. It describes how — and indeed when and where — the imperial ideology shaped and reshaped itself. As such, it is a nuanced riposte to those historians of empire, notably Niall Ferguson and his opponents, who prefer to treat the empire as a monolith, all the better for standing grandiosely astride it, or indeed setting dynamite under. Hunt is more like a questing Hercules, clutching at Nereus as the sea-god morphs beneath him.

He doesn’t end in the Hesperides, however, but in a disconsolate Liverpool. On the way, he traces the rise and fall of the empire through spot-samplings of the founding and flourishing of ten imperial cities. Each way-marks a narrative arc that runs from west to east and from ascent to decline; each is chosen to represent imperial ideology at a crucial, often transitional moment in its evolution.

Hunt opens in the Boston of the 1773 tea-party, offered as the quintessential First Empire city, founded on ‘the dual ambition of profit and Protestantism’. In a striking image of ‘a set-piece battle between God and Mammon’ played out on the skyline, Hunt contrasts the 16 spires of the city’s churches (running from the original Brownist church of the Mayflower pilgrims through Scots-Irish Calvinism to Quaker and Anabaptist) with the ‘forest of masts’ attending the 166 wharves on the waterfront.