National Post from Toronto, Ontario, Canada • 86

SP4 SATURDAY POST, SATURDAY, APRIL 19, 2003 BOOKS EVE EMPIRE NO MORE: TWO TV-SAWY TAKES ON BRITAIN'S BLOODY PAST AHistory of Britain: The Fate of Empire, 1776-2000 by Simon Schama McClelland Stewart 576 $65.00 By John Fraser The British SIMON SCHAMA cusemelI mean the English people and the Scottish people and the Welsh people and the Ulster Hi HK.BHf Bp BY Be-mBi wan Br Be "(ChI BbBBbBI Was afc X.3-' -'iaH I Km vj there a causal link, something deep in the constitution of imperial rule, that forged a synchronic relationship between famine and British rule in its later phases? These famines were killers six million dead in the chronic famines that beset India in 1877, 15 million in 1899. It was Edmund Burke, in his speeches during the impeachment of Warren Hastings, the 18th-century governor-general of India, who first suggested that English rule ag- gravated famine in that country. Ferguson does rebut the analogy I reunify revived by Mike Davis, in his book Late Victorian Holo- causts, between British imperial- ism and the racial policies of the Nazis. That seems right The more pertinent analogy might be to I Stalin's "terror famines," to use Robert Conquest's term for the use of mass starvation as a means to an ideological end. For Stalin, that end was collectivization; for the British, monetizing peasant economies.

Ferguson counts the spread of the British idea of private property as one of the good things done by the Empire, but he could have been more critical of its shadow side. In a work dealing with a subject as variegated as this one, the controversies of specialists have a tendency to magically turn into facts for the general reader. Ferguson is a master of concision, which makes this book an exciting read; but he sometimes oversimplifies. When, for instance, he tells us the British settlers "ultimately exterminated" the Tas-manian aborigines, he means pure-blood aborigines a categorical divide not accepted by to- HULTON GETTY A British officer receives a pedicure from an Indian servant circa 1900. Schama and Ferguson dare to look beyond the iniquities of empire.

people are having a hard time with their history at the moment. Tribalism has resurfaced. That jolly old union so happily forged 400 years ago is coming unstuck It has been four centuries since that day in March, 1603, shortly after the death of Elizabeth when the invitation went out to James VI of Scotland to come south and become James I of an altogether new and united kingdom. What will be left for Charles III is not at all clear. Nor has it been just Celtic brooding north of the Roman Wall that has had all the Queen's men and all the Queen's women wondering who, exactly, they are these days.

The demise of the British Empire, which was for so long the dominant force in the world and the focus of identity for so many under the unsetting sun, has brought about a whole generation of historical revisionism. What was once thought to be Good the opening up of trade routes, the spread of Christianity, the extension of the English language, the "civilizing" of "savage tribes," the evolution of parliamentary democracy and the constitutional monarchy, the peaceful emergence of the Commonwealth of Nations, the whole Pax Britannica thing -is now seen to be mostly Bad. Trade routes brought slavery and the economic subordination of less powerful countries; the English language undermined and ultimately supplanted indigenous languages and culture; parliamentary democracy and a benevolent monarchy mean nothing to people with their own historic means of governance and their own respected hierarchies; Christianity im Consort, made sure his desk was angled to Queen Victoria's, so no one was in doubt who her principal advisor was, is summoned up as winningly as the petty, but pretty interesting, details ofhow middle-class British women ruled the Empire through the imposition of social decrees and marital rewards in the sultry tropics (or frozen greatest force for good the world has ever known." He doesn't have to. The good spills out along with the bad and the craven. What he does is present a brilliant collage, set out at a brisk pace, of a known entity, transformed with new perspectives, and an unknown entity, revealed through rigorous research.

It's a tour de force: physically, a little heavy for comfortable bedtime reading, but otherwise deft, and often penetrating. Saturday Post ja.fraserutoronto.ca I John Fraser's regular books column resumes on May 3. GANDHI PLAYS AN ASTONISHINGLY DIMINISHED ROLE Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power by Niall Ferguson HarperCollins 352 $49.95 posed brutal suppression on many benign religions, etc. To even sug- By Roger Gathman wastes of you-know-where). Being a historian who never forgets the forest for the trees, Schama has an innate ability to see fascinating parallels, and, in this regard, the way he handles the empire stories of India and Ireland -often in tandem is brilliant: one colony in the backyard, the other in the forecourt, each setting off the conflicting demands and cost of maintaining such a vast overseas operation.

This history was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation, and the books come lavishly illustrated, leaving some professional historians sniffy about alleged superficiality. In Schama's case, that would be a false criticism. He is eccentric, as anyone who has read his history of the Netherlands The Embarrassment of Riches) or his controversial -and brilliant account of the French Revolution Citizens) can testify. Those who appreciate his ability to quickly jump from the grandly panoramic to the intensely minimal will not be disappointed with this book. I loved discovering the tale of Mary Grant Seacole, the mulatto child of a Scotsman and his Jamaican wife.

Hugely unacknowledged for most of her lifetime, she nursed soldiers in the Crimean War, despite being denied the opportunity of enlisting with Florence Nightingale. The tively Victorian industry. Since i the publication, in 1998, of the first volume of his history of the House of Rothschild, Ferguson i has turned out pages. Outside academia, he is most fa-: mous for The Pity of War, ahisto- ry of the First World War that dis- puted Keynes's famous thesis about the economic consequences I of the Treaty of Versailles, and I supported Bertrand Russell's view of the non-necessity of the con-! flict. He wrote his latest tome, which covers the rise and fall of I the British Empire (a popular i subject these days), to accompany a television series.

It reveals Fer-I guson as an accomplished popu-i lar historian. His statistical impulse is, for the main part, squelched, in favour of a vigorous and enthralling narrative. Ferguson is unafraid of the controversial thesis, and he argues here that the Empire was, in the end, not as bad a thing as its detractors made it out to be. He does not spend a lot of time mounting an ideological defence of imperialism. One can happily follow this account which comprehends slavery, massacre, bigotry, concentration camps, famine and racism, as well as a list of good things that the British Empire wrought, from the rule of law to the anti-slavery movement without feeling nudged in any partisan direction.

Composing this book with an eye on the TV series has clearly humanized Ferguson's writing. Ferguson anchors the narrative to a number of Ozymandian moments meditations on the broken-nosed statue of Queen Victoria in the Lucknow Zoo, the hills of Mafeking, the site of the climactic battle of the Boer War, places that once marked the vistas of the Empire and now reflect fallen imperial splendour. It is easy to imagine, while reading this book, how certain bits were tailored to the exigencies of cam- I era angles, but the effect is not at all bogus. The story he tells is still fairly as- tonishing. A cold European island nation became, in the 18th centu-I ry, the centre of a world empire.

More, it preserved and expanded I this dominance for the next 200 i years, spreading more than 20 i million of its citizens out to places I as far away (especially given the transportation of the time) as I New Zealand. It built a navy that i dominated the world's seas for al-i most the whole of that period. It became the centre of world fi-: nance. It conquered India, a land with four times its population, i and, in the late 19th century, i calmly pocketed most of the real estate that made up Africa. This is a great and complicated i narrative that, for Ferguson, falls i into roughly four phases.

The first i phase, beginning with British pi-j rates in the Caribbean and mov-I ing on to slavers in Africa and mercenaries in India, ended around the time of the French Revolution. The second phase I was classically liberal, and charac- terized by rigid laissez-faire doc- I trine tinged with an anti-slavery evangelism. Ferguson takes serf- I i ously the moral awakening that swept through England in the ear- ly 19th century. This phase ended in the 1870s, when the justifica- tion for imperialism became more and more racialist. The racialist phase underwrote the scramble for Africa and the hardening of race lines between Indians and white rulers in India, which made way, after the First I World War, for the gradual disso- lution of the imperial spirit in a mixture of continuing racial jin- goism, liberal guilt and economic self-interest.

Ferguson's treat- ment of the last phase is perfunc- I tory. Gandhi plays an astonish- ingly diminished role here, since Ferguson's thesis is that it was the struggle with other empires Japanese and German that re- ally did the Empire in. One serious flaw in the book is Ferguson's sometimes cursory treatment of the human cost of empire, at least in the 19th and 20th centuries. For example, was It is said that when Thomas Babbington Macaulay, England's greatest THE GOOD SPILLS OUT ALONG WITH THE BAD AND THE CRAVEN rian, was four day's government-recognized Tas-manian aborigine associations. Those who go to history for "lessons" are bound to be disappointed by Ferguson's book.

The relation between bad things and good things is as often one of entailment as of opposition. The British slavers (a bad thing) accumulated the wealth that let their descendents become anti-slavery (a good thing), which was used as an excuse to seize African territory (a bad thing), which led to a level of investment (a good thing) that has collapsed in the post-colonial world (a bad thing). And so on, in the tangled pattern of events. This is not moral relativism; rather, it's an irony that resists moral smugness. There is a lot of that irony in Ferguson's blood, thank goodness, which makes one trust that his modified Whig view (the thesis that historical "progress" is roughly synonymous with the trajectory of social arrangements that compose British history) does not impinge too much on the subject matter.

The lessons in the subtitle are, really, not imparted with any vigour. Still, one wonders, on closing this book, if Ferguson has Spent enough time wondering what the history of the Empire would look like from an Irish, Indian or Kenyan point of view. After all, the "lessons" of global power are bound to vary, according to whether you are the applier of that power, or the person over whom it is being applied. Saturday Post years old, he was scalded gest that there were positive aspects of empire is politically mcor-rect today. That's the main reason why the latest volume of Simon Schama's History of Britain, which deals specifically with "the fate of empire," is such a pleasant surprise.

Our times require Schama to indulge in a certain amount of irony and debunking when dealing with empire issues, and he overlooks few of the major atrocities or minor hypocrisies that were perhaps shrouded during Britannia's salad days. On the other hand, he paints a far fuller and fairer picture of what the Empire was and felt like than we have seen in years. Part of the pleasure of any book by Simon Schama is his penchant for the telling detail. The belligerent way Prince Albert, the Prince by a cup of coffee. The woman who wiped him up asked him how he feh, and he is reported to have said, "Thank you, madame, the agony is abated." That's a prodigy.

Niall Ferguson, the 39-year-old wunderkind of modern-day English historians, cannot quite match that level of precocity. But if he could, his approach might have been to tabulate the incidence of injuries to children in England over the past four decades, helpfully divided by district and ethnic origin. Ferguson was trained, at Oxford, in the obscure field of economics history, but he has a gift for thinking synoptically and, when he chooses, writing elegantly. He also possesses a posi- book is littered with tales of people like her, and they lend humanity to the stories of great battles, crusading reformers and leaders with outsized egos. What Schama calls "bloody-minded liberty" is also writ large in his history.

He doesn't dismiss Lord Curzon's vainglorious claim that the British Empire was "the This particular German dilemma may never be resolved Crabwalk by Gunter Grass, translated from the German by Krishna Winston Harcourt, Inc. 234 $41 and, later, with a more liberal newspaper, changing his stripes without adopting any real convictions. Caught between his mother's curious love of totalitarianism and his son's anti-Semitism, he finds himself unable to influence either. Unfortunately, Grass's punchy style comes across as bland in THE FATE OF THE NAZI LINER WAS NOT MADE PUBLIC IN GERMANY 10,000 refugees and soldiers aboard, part of an effort that would help two million ethnic Germans escape the advancing Red Army. (Thousands of those refugees would eventually make their way to Canada.) Three Soviet torpedoes abruptly ended the voyage, killing some 9,000 people -six times the number that perished on the Titanic.

The tragedy went unreported in Germany, for fear it might demoralize the home front, and it never became part of German national consciousness after the war: Germans were more focused on either forgetting or acknowledging national guilt for crimes against humanity. Summoning the narratological tricks that have served him so well, Grass weaves the fictional life of the novel's uncertain, nervous narrator, Paul Pokriefke, with the true tale of history's worst maritime disaster. Paul's mother, Tulla, a figure from Grass's earlier novel Cat and Mouse, survives the attack and gives birth to Paul that very night, a date that marks two catastrophes: the sinking of the refugee ship, and Hitler's accession to power, 12 years before. Eager to live his own life, Paul, who becomes a journalist, steadfastly refuses his mother's wish that he tell the story of the Wilhelm Gustloff. Paul's teenage son, Konrad, however, embraces his grandmother's tale and, under her influence, drifts into the far-right fringe of German society.

Konrad sets up a Web site honouring Wilhelm Gustloff, who was a Nazi organizer in Switzerland and would have been long forgotten had he not been assassinated by a Jewish student in 1936. Telling these stories by "scuttling backward to move forward," like the movement of a crab, Paul is forced to face his own uncertainty and moral ambivalence. He grows up in East Germany after the war, full of love for his Young Pioneers uniform and outings. But he later emigrates to the West, where he works as a journalist, first, with the right-wing Springer press, the cover of the German edition, is replaced by a sinking ship bearing no resemblance to the single-funnel Wilhelm Gustloff. When this novel was first published in Germany last year, German critics posed the same question with which the novel opens: "Why now?" Why tell this story almost 60 years after the event? Publishing tales of German hardship during the 1940s was largely unthinkable after the war; in East Germany, it was prohibited.

W.G. Sebald's 1999 collection of essays, which dealt with the absence in German literature of accounts of the Allied saturation bombing (now available in English under the unfortunate title On the Natural History of Destruction), is a recent challenge to this taboo. And new German television documentaries about Allied carpet bombing and the flight of refugees have drawn large audiences. Some critics have questioned Grass's decision to participate in this trend. But the narrator himself, in a postmodern moment, argues that it is I only Grass, who is famous for writ- ing about the experiences of the Danzig Germans during the war, and who hovers, unnamed, in the i background of the novel, who i could properly recount this saga.

By the end of the novel, in an ef-i fort to counter neo-fascist at-! tempts to invent a one-sided mythology of German suffering, Paul begins to write the story he has so long resisted. Anyone, like Tulla, hoping for a I legend that confers victim status on Germany will be disappointed, Crabwalk expresses Grass's fear that Germany's true tragedy is its i inability to rid itself of a violent ha-I tred born of a curious mix of cul-I turd insecurity, self-pity and self-I importance. If Paul's concluding words are any indication, neither he nor Grass is optimistic that this peculiar German dilemma will be resolved: "It doesn't end. It never ends" I James M. Skidmore teaches Ger-i man Studies at the University of Waterloo.

Saturday Post By James M. Skidmore Imagine that you're a Nobel Prize-winning author whose novels are always best-sellers in your native country. Your literary reputation, moreover, is based on an unflinching resolve to face your nation's uncomfortable past, to expose the hate, criminal intent and vulgar nationalism that led to the deaths of millions. Why would you then tell a story in which your fellow citizens were victims, rather than perpetrators? And how? If you're Gunter Grass, you would write Crabwalk, a short novel about the Nazi cruise ship the Wilhelm Gustloff. On Jan.

30, 1945, this ship was sailing westward from Gotenhafen (today Gdynia, Poland) with more than Krishna Winston's sometimes awkward translation. The twists and turns of Grass's sentences are, admittedly, hard to translate (particularly those written in a heavy eastern Prussian dialect), but more effort should have been made to avoid flattening Grass's ironic tone. Even the cover image does Grass a disservice: His own drawing of a crab, which graced.