Saul David
THE SUN DID SET
The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997
By Piers Brendon (Jonathan Cape 788pp £25)

It is hard to read this brilliant book and not agree with Edward Gibbon, its inspiration, who wrote: 'The history of empires is the history of human misery.' The reason, explains Piers Brendon, is that 'the initial subjugation is invariably savage and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive. Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda'.

Brendon's title is a deliberate echo of Gibbon's masterpiece, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. Not because he wishes to set himself up as a rival to Gibbon - no historian 'in his senses' would do that - but rather because the great man's work 'became the essential guide for Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory'. They found the 'key' to understanding their own empire 'in the ruins of Rome'. Brendon underlines this point throughout the text by quoting politicians, imperial administrators, soldiers and journalists making 'striking analogies' between the two empires. Hence The Times compares the shocking news of the disastrous retreat from Kabul in 1842 to the effect the Parthian victory at Carrhae had on the Romans 'in the very acme of their power'. And even in 1958, ten years after Indian Independence, the Prime Minister Nehru was heard to ask Harold Macmillan, his British counterpart and fellow student of Gibbon: 'I wonder if the Romans ever went back to Britain.'

The author accepts that his choice of start date - the fall of Yorktown, which signalled the beginning of the end of American colonies - may seem 'paradoxical, even perverse' given that the British Empire did not reach its height until the twentieth century. Yet there is method in his madness. From the very start, he writes, the Empire carried within it 'an ideological bacillus that would prove fatal'. It was Edmund Burke's paternalistic doctrine that colonial government was a trust, and that it was to be 'so exercised for the benefit of subject people that they would eventually attain their birthright - freedom'.

Unlike some recent chroniclers of empire, Brendon has no agenda. He accepts that Britain's Empire, 'much better than any other, as even George Orwell acknowledged, was a liberal empire.' Yet it was this very commitment to liberty as its 'binding principle' (Lloyd George's words) which both made it unique and acted as its Achilles heel. By the twentieth century, facing adverse circumstances almost everywhere, the British 'grudgingly put their principles into practice' by giving their brown and black colonies independence. Thus the Empire realised its long-cherished ideal of becoming what The Times called in 1942 'a self-liquidating concern'.

The ideals may have been sound, but the methods and motives were often ugly. India, subverted over several generations, 'was coerced and inveigled into collaboration according to no central plan and often by the initiative of men on the spot'. Successive conquests were paid for by official plunder. The great turning point in India - and the Empire in general - came with the Mutiny, or rebellion of 1857. Blamed on the liberal reforms of successive Governors General, it resulted in a change of government - the Crown replacing the East India Company - and a new emphasis on 'consolidation rather than improvement, on holding the sub-continent rather than preparing it to shed the foreign yoke'. The Raj became at once 'sterner and more emollient', a mode of government that Indian nationalists called the 'knife of sugar', and Kipling described as knuckle-dusters under kid gloves. Brendon's assessment is starker still: post-mutiny British rule was 'hopelessly muddled' and 'humanity was sacrificed to economy', as illustrated by the famines between 1860 and 1908 which cost 30 million lives.

The root cause of Britain's involvement in the 'Scramble for Africa' in the late nineteenth century was, says Brendon, a fear of economic and political decline. America's economy overtook Britain's between 1870, when it was roughly equal, and 1914 when it was three times as large. Germany was making similar inroads. Yet in Africa, in particular, could be seen the conflicting elements in Britain's imperial enterprise (best portrayed by the ruthless Stanley and the gentler Livingstone): 'To rule the British Empire with a rod of iron was to destroy it as a civilising mission.'

By the end of the First World War, with white domination of coloured races no longer acceptable, the British dressed up their new type of imperial rule - mandates - in 'liberal language and presented it as a form of trusteeship'. It worked for a time, enabling the British Empire to reach its apogee between the wars. But it could not last. In just twenty years - from 1945 to 1965 - the Empire shrank from 700 million people to just 5 million. The factors included: loss of prestige in Asia accompanied by post-war military weakness; emergent nationalism; global (particularly US) opposition to imperialism; fiascos such as Suez; Britain's recurrent economic crises and its move towards Europe.

Brendon paints a broad canvas yet he never forgets the apt quote or the telling detail. His pen portraits alone are worth the cover price: Gandhi was a 'compound of Oriental mystic and occidental crank, humble sadhu and astute advocate, visionary and revolutionary'; Lord Mountbatten 'was reckless, flamboyant, egotistical, outspoken, ingratiating, vain, shallow, flagrantly handsome and pathologically ambitious'; and King Farouk, the last monarch of Egypt, was a 'gourmand, libertine, kleptomaniac, drug-trafficker and buffoon, [who] surrounded himself with a camarilla of Nubian flunkeys, Italian toadies and Levantine pimps'.

He awards credit where it is due, noting that 'Britain's record in Africa was better than that of other European states and on the whole, once in place, its yoke was easy'. But his tone is often disapproving: there are 'few uglier blots on the imperial escutcheon' than the Boer War concentration camps; Britain departed from Palestine 'amid humiliation and confusion'; the whole Suez enterprise was 'vitiated by hypocrisy'; and it was an 'open secret' that Kenya in the mid-1950s had become 'a police state that dispensed racist terror'.

Brendon's last book, The Dark Valley, a superb overview of leading nations in the 1930s, was published seven years ago. He has used the interval to good effect because his latest is, quite simply, a masterpiece of historical narrative. No review can hope to do justice to the depth of Brendon's research, the balance and originality of his conclusions, or the quality and humour of his prose. Our imperial story has been crying out for a top-flight historian who can write. Now it has one.