The Upsides of Empire

These are thorny issues, and there has been a prevailing wind in recent decades in Britain as across the rest of the anglophone world to pretend that these are issues of great simplicity. Specifically there seems to have been a movement underway to imply firstly that the history of empire is solely the story of European empires, that the history of slavery is solely a history of European and North American slavery, and finally that all of these added together make the Western democracies not just as bad as anybody else in the world but actively worse. Read Full Article »