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Empire How Britain Made the Modern World
by Niall Ferguson
from Penguin Books Ltd
Customer Reviews:
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Avg. Customer Rating: 3.5 / 5.0 
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Less silly than most, but not perfect. 
I read one review that bewailed the advantage taken by British soldiers, of less well armed adversaries. How silly is that, if I were fighting I should request, nay, demand, any advantage over the enemy.(Compare the War in Iraq) We are a silly generation...Empire was good and bad,, mostly, the positive benefits have come from the British form...so swallow that if you can get it past your pc spot-a-meter. This book does redress the 'orientalism' garbage of recent years but it has its flaws too. Still, worth... more info
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I only finished it because I started it 
Niall Ferguson is a decent writer but a lousy historian. There are some interesting and colorful bits... British agents disguised as Buddhist monks, "measuring the distances between places with the aid of worry beads... and concealing the maps they surreptitiously drew in their prayer wheels." However, Ferguson has a dogmatic attachment to the notion that anything that happened in British colonies was, if not good and ultimately beneficial, then at the very least better than the alternative in the form of... more info
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Pretty Picture Book 
Ferguson's book titled "Empire" sets out to discuss the rise and fall of the British Empire in less than 400 pages, a large percentage of which are pictures. As you can guess from that sentence, he doesn't do a very good job in my opinion convincing me of anything. I will admit that the illustrations that were picked are excellent, and he generally hits all the major points along the empire trajectory, producing some interesting quotes from the various eras. Unfortunately, this is too much of a coffee table... more info
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Superb 
[25th Nov - curious to know why "not helpful" buttons are being hit, unless you're proving my point of 'prediposition'. Thankyou.]
Okay, Children, listen up.
I have it on good authority that a) God is not an intergallactic social worker and b) the world was not created by Enid Blyton (fluffy childrens' author).
No doubt the all the `altruistic' acts we and our governments perform this very day will be sneered at and carped about in a hundred years from now by your own very foolish and... more info
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