This is eminently a book for 'us', and non-specialist readers need not be put off by
the faet that nearly 15% of the text is given over to over 900 notes and some 30 pages of
bibliography. It is an original, thoughtful and fascinating attempt to answer the
not-so-original question of why it was the English (no Celtic fringe here: "the ideas
were English in origin") came to think of themselves as an imperial race whose
responsibility and genius it was to conquer and so to 'civilize'. In a sentence, what were
the leit-motifs of Britain's self-perceived role?
For Kathryn Tidrick (she is a psychologist by training), the answer lies in "the play
of character within the context of empire once empire was an established fact", that is
to say not so much 'why imperial expansion? but rather 'how colonial rule?' Her
time-scale is from the 1840s to the 1940s. Her method is to take individuals and to
build the development of ideas around them: the Lawrence brothers and the Punjab creed; Cecil Rhodes and F. C. Selous as adventurers, Clifford as an administrator;
Delamere in Kenya, and that "special breed of men" who administered the Masai;
Lugard and Temple, Furse and the public schools on the meaning of indirect rule, and
Hailey, Cohen and Creech-Jones on the end of empire. Throughout she makes
attractive allusions to the writers of imperial fiction: John Buchan and Rider Haggard
(no Edgar Wallace), Karen Blixen and Elspeth Huxley, Rudyard Kipling, and Sir
Hugh Clifford's remarkable if often autobiographical output as a novelist. It is a long
time since I read such a hugely enjoyable, informed and reflective book about the
British at the cutting edge of empire.
While I remain grateful to the OSPA member who first put us on to this book as
being very much 'our' kind of reading, if the experience of your Association in
obtaining a copy is anything to go by, a word of caveat emptor warning to potential
purchasers will be in order. It took four letters and five telephone calls over six months
to elicit even an acknowledgement of the request for a review copy. When this arrived,
201 days later, it was so disgracefully damaged, smellingly coffee-stained and
unacceptably thumb-marked that only the belief that the contents were important
enough to bring to our readers' attention without a further half-year elapsing
prevented its immediate return to 'Mr. Tauris' for him to assess the standards of his
marketing department. That said, good luck to lucky readers!
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