Richard Gott Britain’s Empire: Resistance, Repression and Revolt. New York: Verso, 2011, 568 pages.
Joshua Paetkau
In “Shooting an Elephant,” an autobiographical essay published in 1936, George Orwell speaks of time spent as a police officer in a Burmese town. At close quarters with the dirty work of imperialism the young Orwell had grown deeply disillusioned with the British Empire. At the same time he was possessed of a “rage against the evil-spirited beasts who tried to make my job impossible.” Torn between hatred of Empire and resentment of the local population Orwell is a solitary and conflicted figure who, in the end, acts not out of a sense of duty but a fear of looking ridiculous. As Orwell reflects on the existential quandaries of his younger days he is able to retroactively reconcile the incoherence of this earlier experience to a lack of education and an isolation that left him unable to gain perspective. “I did not even know,” he writes, “that the British Empire is dying, still less did I know that it is a great deal better than the younger empires that are going to supplant it.”[1] Continue reading