Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power Read Free

suspect my mother was never happier. And although we finally came home – back to the grey skies and the winter slush of Glasgow – our house was always filled with Kenyan memorabilia. There was the antelope skin on the sofa, the Masai warrior’s portrait on the wall, the crudely carved but exquisitely decorated footstool that my sister and I liked to perch on. Each of us had a zebra-skin drum, a gaudy basket from Mombasa, a wildebeest-hair flywhisk, a Kikuyu doll. We did not know it, but we grew up in a little post-colonial museum. I still have the carved wooden hippopotamus, warthog, elephant and lion which were once my most treasured possessions.
    Still, we had come home – and we never went back. One who did not return to Scotland was my great-aunt Agnes Ferguson (‘Aggie’ to all who knew her). Born in 1888, the daughter of my great-grandfather James Ferguson, a garden labourer, and his first wife Mary, Aggie personified the transforming power of the imperial dream. In 1911, enticed by alluring pictures of the Canadian prairies, she and her new husband Ernest Brown decided to follow his brother’s example: to leave their home, their family and friends in Fife and head west. The lure was the offer of 160 acres of virgin real estate in Saskatchewan, free of charge. The only stipulation was that they had to build a dwelling there and cultivate the land. According to family legend, Aggie and Ernest were supposed to sail on the Titanic ; by chance, only their luggage was on board when the ship went down. That was luck of a sort, but it meant that they had to start their new life from scratch. And if Aggie and Ernest thought they were getting away from the nasty Scottish winter, they were swiftly disillusioned. Glenrock was a windswept wilderness where temperatures could plunge far lower than in drizzly Fife. It was, as Ernest wrote to his sister-in-law Nellie, ‘sure terriabl [ sic ] cold’. The first shelter they were able to build for themselves was so primitive they called it a chicken shack. The nearest town – Moose Jaw – was ninety-five miles away. To begin with, their nearest neighbours were natives; friendly ones, luckily.
    Yet the black-and-white photographs they sent back to their relatives every Christmas of themselves and ‘our prairie home’ tell a story of success and fulfillment: of hard-won happiness. As the mother of three healthy children, Aggie lost the pinched look she had worn as an emigrant bride. Ernest grew tanned and broad-shouldered working the prairie soil; shaved off his mustache; became handsome where once he had been hangdog. The chicken shack was supplanted by a clapboard farmhouse. Gradually, their sense of isolation diminished as more Scots settled in the area. It was reassuring to be able to celebrate Hogmanay with fellow countrymen so far from home, since ‘they don’t hold New Year out here very much just the Scotch folk’. Today their ten grandchildren live all over Canada, a country whose annual income per capita is not merely 10 per cent higher than Britain’s but second only to that of the United States. All thanks to the British Empire.
    So to say that I grew up in the Empire’s shadow would be to conjure up too tenebrous an image. To the Scots, the Empire stood for bright sunlight. Little may have been left of it on the map by the 1970s, but my family was so completely imbued with the imperial ethos that its importance went unquestioned. Indeed, the legacy of the Empire was so ubiquitous and omnipresent that we regarded it as part of the normal human condition. Holidays in Canada did nothing to alter this impression. Nor did that systematic defamation of Catholic Ireland which in those days was such an integral part of life on the south side of the Clyde. I grew up still thinking complacently of Glasgow as the ‘Second City’ (of the Empire); reading quite uncritically the novels of H. Rider Haggard and John Buchan; relishing all the quintessentially imperial