Books by John Darwin

The subtitle is The Global Expansion of Britain .  The book received strong reviews in the UK and these are justified.  Here is the bottom line: I started it Wednesday, have read parts of it every day, and I am still reading it .  There is interesting and fresh material on almost every page.  Think of it as a selective history of the building of the British empire.

In other words, who really knows?  The excerpt is from Darwin’s new book After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 , which should be read by anyone…who…reads books with titles like that.  It is most interesting on the Indian and Arabic collapse of the 18th century and on fitting the Russian conquest of Central Asia into the more general history of European imperialism.  I didn’t find any revelations in the book, but it was consistently interesting and readable throughout.