A comprehensive, scholarly and fascinating study of the end of the British Empire.
No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves, and a quarter of the earth's surface was coloured red on the map. Where Britain's writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.
Yet no empire (except for the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation, this mighty structure sank almost without trace leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of empire -- the Commonwealth. Equally, it can be claimed that Britain bequeathed its former colonies economic foundations, a cultural legacy, a sporting spirit, a legal code and a language more ubiquitous than Latin ever was.
Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire evokes remote places as well as distant times.

"From the Hardcover edition."

Piers Brendon's magisterial overview of the 1930s is the story of the dark dishonest decade, child of one world war and parent of the next, that determined the course of the twentieth century. Dealing individually with each of the period's great powers - the USA, Germany, Italy, France, Britain, Japan, Spain and Russia -Brendon takes us through the ten years dominated by the Great Depression and political turmoil. When Broadway, Piccadilly Circus, the Kurfurstendamm and the Ginza - neon metaphors of hope after four years of carnage - grew dim as the giants of unemployment, hardship, strife and fear took their hold. From the concentration camps of Dachau and Kolyma, the Ukraine famine and the American Dust Bowl, to the Moscow metro, the Empire State Building and the Paris Exposition, THE DARK VALLEY brings the 1930's back to life through meticuous scholarship.

Brendon examines the great leaders - Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao Tse-tung, Haile Selassie and countless others - not with hindsight but in the context of their age; but also, through a vivid chronicling of contemporary experience, he gives us a sense of what it was to be living then.

A comprehensive, scholarly and fascinating study of the end of the British Empire.
No empire has been larger or more diverse than the British Empire. At its apogee in the 1930s, 42 million Britons governed 500 million foreign subjects. Britannia ruled the waves, and a quarter of the earth's surface was coloured red on the map. Where Britain's writ did not run directly, its influence, sustained by matchless industrial and commercial sinews, was often paramount.
Yet no empire (except for the Russian) disappeared more swiftly. Within a generation, this mighty structure sank almost without trace leaving behind a scatter of sea-girt dependencies and a ghost of empire -- the Commonwealth. Equally, it can be claimed that Britain bequeathed its former colonies economic foundations, a cultural legacy, a sporting spirit, a legal code and a language more ubiquitous than Latin ever was.
Full of vivid particulars, brief lives, telling anecdotes, comic episodes, symbolic moments and illustrative vignettes, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire evokes remote places as well as distant times.

"From the Hardcover edition."