Take territorial sovereignty for example. How can we explain the demarcation of Southeast Asian countries today without taking into account the roles of colonial powers? Singapore-Malaysia, Indonesia-Malaysia, Siam-Lao/Cambodia, Vietnamese-Khmer Krom.
Sure, Furguson is not wrong by saying "[o]f course, no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished..." (p.358), "...the fact remains that no organization in history has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries" (p.XXIV).
But it is disturbing to read:
without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models - the Russian and the Chinese - imposed incalculable misery on their subject peoples. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world's largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly British model. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on the planet (p.358)
Southeast Asian countries are no exception.
Instead of being the revisionist version of history, Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power became another promoter of empire.
By stressing how the world has become a better place by the British Empire, Ferguson fails to ask the most fundamental question: where are the voices of the native people?
The intention of the British Empire was the spread of British-led capitalism to other areas of the globe, for the betterment of Britain, NOT the world. In order to sustain such system, liberalism was needed to be established.
It was rather like sticking a piece of meat into someone's mouth.
It seems to Ferguson that, at any time in history, there must be someone acting as an Empire to regulate world order. It is the duty, and the US is doing that job at the moment (with a genuine goodwill).
No, Ferguson. We don't want it.
The British Empire has not yet demised. This book is the proof.
(Niall Ferguson, Empire: The rise and demise of the British world order and the lessons for global power, 2002)
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