"Time's Monster: History, Conscience and Britain's Empire" by Priya Satia

It gets harder and harder to maintain my policy of reading non-fiction written by people I know I will profoundly disagree with. But I think it is important not to sit happily in the one echo chamber, so plan to continue reading broadly. But boy did this one anger me. Rarely have I read a book which is simultaneously so erudite, well-researched, original and thought-provoking, while at the same time being so utterly unreasonable and at times downright offensive. I am not going to beat about the bush in this review. My anger is very raw indeed and I am going to give this 'Professor of British History at Stanford University' the full two barrels. The woman is, I have concluded, simply an anti-British bigot. So well-read, but also pig ignorant and, I think, someone who knowingly distorts historical scholarship for her own political ends.

It starts thoughtfully enough and is well-written. Very well-written, although she is irritatingly obsessed with the word 'agency' which is used throughout, continually in all contexts. The first half is mainly about how British historians of the imperial period wrote about their country's Empire. She discusses the narratives they developed, the arguments that were propagated to justify the adventure and the immense influence these had on the general reading public. I have no problem with any of that. But gradually it becomes clear that Professor Satia is happy to do what (in my view) no historian of seriousness should ever do, which is to use contemporary conceptions of ethics, morality and politics to condemn those who lived in the past where completely different values were prevalent.

All are judged (and largely condemned) through her narrow little twenty-first century eyes, steeped in contemporary identity politics and thinking about human rights, environmentalism and internationalism. Her values are those of the radical liberal left and all her held to those standards. Even if they lived two hundred and fifty years ago.

The upshot is that we start with the assumption - one that absolutely holds true today - that imperialism is a bad thing which should be resisted. It is often underpinned by racism, typically has an oppressive character and is, in short, considered to be an illegitimate form of governance. She then focuses on one Empire - her hated British Empire - and judges it, its supporters and apologists of centuries past using through this very contemporary lens.

Historians of the past must, in Satia's view, have had a guilty conscience about the Empire and their writing about it must therefore be an essentially deceitful exercise in covering up the truth and creating false narrative that justified its existence. Poppycock. They did not share her values, probably could not even of conceived of their existence, lived in a wholly different world from that we inhabit now and had no guilty conscience whatsoever. They did not share our generally held twenty-first century view that imperialism should be considered to be an unacceptable and illegitimate way for nations to act. They wrote it as they saw it through their eyes and mind sets in their own eras.

The entire history of the world is a story of empires and slavery. Holding that these are 'illegitimate' is a view that only emerged more recently.

As the book proceeds, however, this minor irritation grows as her anti-British hatred (and I am really not exaggerating in describing it as that) comes through more and more. Everyone who is British is condemned for their actions and beliefs with the honourable exception of some Marxist historians like E.P Thompson who began to develop anti-imperialist thinking in the mid twentieth century. Her hatred builds until towards the end she goes the whole hog and argues, unequivocally, for (im)moral equivalence between the Nazi regime in Germany and the British Empire. The 'theft' of the Elgin Marbles is no different from the looting of artworks owned by Jewish people killed in the holocaust, and British children should all be taught at school about the shame of their country's past crimes.

In Alan Bennett's brilliant play 'The History Boys' which is mentioned (of course) unfavourably in the book, one of the characters famously and flippantly defines history as being 'just one f***ing thing after another'. In Satia's view, the British Empire should be wholly and solely conceived of as being just one f*** atrocity after another. Even if one applies contemporary conceptions of 'atrocity' to mean things which clash with today's sensibilities and values, this is grossly over-simplistic, and of course knowingly so.

The book also infuriated me for its constant assault on liberalism as a set of political values. Not just their use as an underpinning set of ideas for government, but their very essence. Of course she is right to criticise any law of liberal historical thought which views progress as being inevitable, but that does not mean that historical progress does not in fact sometimes occur as societies learn from past mistakes and harness technologies to improve lives. Again, her perspective is infuriatingly narrow and limited.

Finally she decides that she is somehow qualified to weigh in in debates about more contemporary British politics, which like her historical analysis, she distorts, oversimplifies and uses as a vehicle to express more anti-British hatred. Here is one passage, included in her discussion of partition between India and Pakistan that had me spitting with rage:

"With an uncanny sense of poetic justice, the vulture of partition now circles Britain itself. The Brexit movement, calling to partition Britain from Europe, is the culmination of a long struggle to accommodate the presence of immigrants of colour in post-war Britain, many of whom were refugees from India's partition. The racial sentiments deployed in the empire found amplification in nasty and violent debates as home as they arrived. Brexit is also about imperial nostalgia - resurrecting Britain's island glory and ties with the wider world. As Britain faces a messy partition from Europe, ghosts of partitions past sit at the table.... As in the breakup of South Asia, today's Brexit mess is a product of the reckless and ignorant nonchalance of Britain's ruling elite, setting rushed calendars for departure, oblivious to the mayhem to which it will give rise."

No acknowledgement that Brexit was voted for by (mostly) people were anything but elite and probably in most cases have only a hazy conception of what the British Empire ever was. No acknowledgement that self-government is a perfectly legitimate aim of any nation state, including contemporary, multi-cultural, liberal Britain. The India / Pakistan partition led to millions of violent deaths. Brexit really didn't. She goes on to say similarly ridiculous things about the Falklands War too, wholly ignoring and discounting the fact that a territory had been invaded and annexed by a Fascist junta in a failed bid to stay in power - oh so 'legitimate'!

The book, at least in its later stages represents no more than an historical distortion by an obviously bright, but hate-filled professorial mind.