One of the towering figures in modern world history is Winston Churchill, the remarkable imperial die-hard who is now largely remembered for his decisive role in leading Britain’s fight against Adolf Hitler’s Nazi juggernaut during World War II. But in a new biography by the young British historian Richard Toye,
Churchill’s Empire: The World That Made Him and the World He Made (John Macrae Book/Henry Holt & Company, 423 pages), these dark and disturbing questions are raised: Was Churchill in reality nothing but a dyed-in-the-wool white supremacist who, as a young colonial minister for the British Empire, had gladly taken part in what he called “a lot of jolly little wars against barbarous peoples”? Did Churchill oppose Nazism on moral grounds simply as “a charade, masking the fact that he was merely trying to defend the British Empire from a rival?”
In “The Two Churchills,” a review of
Churchill’s Empire in the August 12, 2010 issue of
The New York Times, columnist Johann Hari of
The Independent in London says that the great, enduring paradox of Churchill’s life is that although he led the charge against Nazism with “some of the richest prose poetry in defense of freedom and democracy ever written,” freedom and democracy were things he actually didn’t want black or Asian people themselves to enjoy. In fact, Hari says in his review of the book, “Churchill lived to see democrats across Britain’s imperial conquests use his own hope-songs of freedom against him.”
According to Hari,
Churchill’s Empire beautifully teases out the unsettling ambiguities in Churchill’s attitude towards the other peoples of the world. Although the book recounts that as a youthful colonial minister, Churchill had charged through imperial atrocities and had gladly taken part in raids that laid waste to whole valleys, Hari says that this is not the only Churchill: “The fact that we now live at a time where a free and independent India is an emerging superpower in the process of eclipsing Britain, and a grandson of the Kikuyu ‘savages’ is the most powerful man in the world [a reference to US President Barack Obama], is a repudiation of Churchill at his ugliest—and a sweet, unsought victory for Churchill at his best.”
Read Johann Hari’s “The Two Churchills” in The New York Times now! Read Piers Brendon’s review of Churchill’s Empire in the Literary Review now! Read the prologue to Churchill’s Empire in the US.Macmillan.com website now!ABOUT THE AUTHOR:Dr. Richard Toye, born in Cambridge in 1973, studied at the universities of Birmingham and Cambridge and is now an associate professor at the University of Exeter. He has written extensively on British and international history. In 2007 he was named Young Academic Author of the Year by
Times Higher Education magazine for his book
Lloyd George and Churchill: Rivals for Greatness.
