The British empire was an anti-democratic, poorly governed institution that created some of the world’s worst geopolitical flashpoints. Steeped in public school snobbery, it otherwise had very little unifying ideology.
“Much of the instability in the world is a product of its legacy of individualism and haphazard policymaking,” Kwasi Kwarteng concludes in Ghosts of Empire: Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World, published a few months after his election in 2010 as the MP for Spelthorne. He claimed to be sidestepping the “sterile debate” over whether “empire was a good or bad thing”, but the book’s conclusions are quietly, firmly critical.
