The Great and Tolerable Empire

When a book is advertised as a “wide-ranging and vigorous assault on political correctness” one can usually expect that the reality will be a mere screed, one which (for the most part) targets real evils but (for the most part) does so on the basis of poor political philosophy, partial facts, and bombastic rhetoric. But when the volume so described has come from the pen of the distinguished historian Jeremy Black, one can be confident that it will be among the few to live up to its advertising. His recent Imperial Legacies: The British Empire Around the World does not just fulfill such expectations, it does so while taking up a cause that even many of more-or-less conservative dispositions are either too timid endorse in public or too influenced by pervasive left-wing prejudice to sympathize with in private.