Imperial dispossessions

Imperial dispossessions

Surrender of French soldiers, Dien Bien Phu, Indochina, April 22, 1954

Book Details

Martin Thomas

FIGHT OR FLIGHT

Britain, France and their roads from empire
539pp. Oxford University Press. £25 (US $39.99).
978 0 19 969827 1

Some strange omissions in a sobering history of decolonization

RICHARD VINEN

"I have lived seventy-eight years without hearing of bloody places like Cambodia." Thus spoke Winston Churchill in 1953. The remark shows how disconcerting the messiness of decolonization could be to those who had grown up in an age of imperial certainty. Churchill liked to recall how he had drunk the health of the Queen Empress in the mess of his cavalry regiment in India and, if anything, the empires of Britain and France seemed more secure after 1918 than they had before 1914. Germany and Russia, which had once had ambitions in Africa and Asia, were broken. New weapons, notably the bomber, made it easier to put down rebellions – as the Berbers in North Africa and the Kurds in Iraq were to find out. Most importantly, Britain and France posed no threat to each other. Except for some squabbles in the Levant, their imperial interests did not conflict. The most enthusiastic British imperialists – Churchill or Rudyard Kipling – were also keen Francophiles.

The Second World War changed things. In the short term, it showed that imperial Britain and France had a dangerous enemy – Japan – and, in the long term, it showed that they had a dangerous rival – the United States. There was, however, no obvious reason to suppose that empire was finished. In many ways, the war confirmed what many British and French strategists had said in 1939 – imperial powers, able to draw resources from across the world, would beat a purely European power, such as Nazi Germany. Charles de Gaulle's struggle against Vichy had, in large measure, been conducted in sub-Saharan Africa and Algeria: troops from these places fought in French uniform and thus earned France its place among the victorious powers.

After 1945, the rulers of Britain and France believed that their empires would last for hundreds of years but, as it turned out, almost all their imperial possessions were gone by the early 1960s. Martin Thomas tells this story in a book that is based on an impressive range of reading. He works hard to present a balanced and comprehensive account, but any work on British and French decolonization is likely to be asymmetric in two ways. First, it is bound to lay a heavy emphasis on the decisions of the imperial powers rather than the experience of the colonized. It was, after all, the colonial powers that conferred unity on the empire and, for a host of practical reasons, historians know more about politicians in London and Paris than they do about, say, guerrilla leaders in the jungle. Thomas gives detailed descriptions of European politicians – he comments on the resemblance between Guy Mollet and the late Arthur Askey – but his descriptions of colonial subjects are more terse: of Chin Peng, we learn only that he was a more "orthodox Stalinist" than his predecessor as leader of the Malayan Communists.

The second asymmetry springs from the fact that the Algerian War casts such a shadow over recent French history. Algeria was legally a part of France and contained a million European settlers. Its position was, in many ways, more comparable to that of Ireland in 1914 than to that of the overseas colonies from which Britain withdrew after 1945. The number of troops sent to Algeria dwarfed that sent to any other colonial conflict. Violence in Algeria had a special quality – not just because it took place on such a large scale, but also because it pitted Europeans against each other and European victims attracted more attention than Algerian ones. Maurice Audin was the best-known individual to disappear after having been interrogated by the paratroopers, and Henri Alleg's La Question (1958) was, in Britain as well as France, the most famous account of what it was like to be on the receiving end of torture. The British, by contrast, rarely directed violence at people of European origin – unless one counts Cypriots as Europeans, which the army rarely did.

Thomas is careful not to say that the British were "better" decolonizers than the French. He draws attention to similarities and, in particular, to the extent of British violence – something that has been partially obscured by the propensity of British officials to "lose" documents. Overall, however, he does suggest that there were important differences. French domestic politics were more intertwined with empire. Thomas attributes much of this to the colonialism of the Christian democratic Mouvement Républicain Populaire. More generally, the instability of the Fourth Republic was both a cause and an effect of colonial disputes. It was, of course, particularly important that inhabitants of the French empire, unlike those of the British, sent representatives to parliament and that they often supported the small centre parties whose pivotal position gave them disproportionate influence – François Mitterrand's early career was built partly on alliance with the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain. Britain, by contrast, had a simple two-party system and during two crucial periods (from 1945 to 1950 and from 1959 to 1964) governments had secure majorities. In France, disputes over empire brought down governments and a republic and threatened, in 1961, to take the country into civil war. In Britain, disputes over the empire generated a few noisy protests by the League of Empire Loyalists and some sarcastic exchanges in Cabinet between Iain Macleod and Lord Salisbury.

Suez was the exception to this general pattern. On this occasion, it was the British political class that seemed divided and uncertain. The French – who saw Egypt as a sponsor of rebellion in Algeria – had a clearer sense of what they were doing. The expedition was opposed by the British Labour Party while the French were led into Suez by the socialist Mollet. Suez was a turning point for both countries, but they turned in different directions. Shortly before Suez, Mollet had made the extraordinary suggestion that France might join the Commonwealth. After it, the French were contemptuous of British hesitancy. The British concluded from the fiasco that they should never again begin an operation without American support; some of the French concluded that they should equip themselves to finish operations without American support.

For all Thomas's erudition, I did not feel that this was an entirely successful book. "Fight or flight" seems an oddly trite organizing principle. Does this dichotomy tell us much about, say, the circumstances in which the Malayan Federation was granted independence, a couple of years before British soldiers finished their largely successful campaign to wipe out Communist guerrillas? Based on his own archival work, Thomas gives tantalizing glimpses of how, for example, the British military attaché in Paris regarded French tactics in Algeria, but it would have been good to have more of these concrete details. Did it matter that Paul Aussaresses – the most flamboyantly unrepentant of the French officers who presided over torture and murder in Algeria – had fought with British special forces? Is there anything to be said about Basil Liddell Hart – the British military writer who continued to correspond with Colonel Antoine Argoud, even when the latter was on the run after the failed putsch in Algeria? Is there, for that matter, anything to be said about Liddell Hart's son – a languid Old Etonian who whiled away a couple of years fighting as a private with the Foreign Legion in Indochina?

Some episodes cry out for cross-Channel treatment. Consider Madagascar, a topic on which Thomas has published in the past. It was liberated from the rule of Vichy authorities by British and South African forces in 1942. The French are said to have resisted for so long because they believed that six months of active service would enhance their pension. What was the relation between this operation and the Malagasy rebellion of the later 1940s? Was it true, as some seem to have believed, that the population perceived the British as having been more liberal than the French?

Thomas's scrupulousness in summarizing the latest research sometimes obscures earlier scholarship that might have cast an interesting light on Franco–British comparison. He discusses the work of Raphaëlle Branche but not that of Branche's mentor, Pierre Vidal-Naquet – whose book on torture in Algeria was, incidentally, published in Britain almost ten years before it was published in France. The military historian, and pro-Algérie Française activist, Raoul Girardet, associated loss of empire with a "military crisis" that went with increasing marginalization of traditional martial virtues in a world of missiles and nuclear weapons. Might this analysis also tell us something about the bitter hostility between Duncan Sandys, author of the 1957 review, which sought to base British defence on nuclear weapons, and Gerald Templer, Chief of the Imperial General Staff? The French journalist Raymond Cartier argued in 1956 that colonies were simply not profitable. This raises interesting questions about Thomas's suggestion that the French were less prone than the British to see the empire in economic terms. How much did this change in the late 1950s, and how far did the change account for the eventual withdrawal from Algeria?

"Cartiérisme" leads to a broader point. Losing the empire was more painful for the French but – perhaps precisely because the loss was so dramatic and irrevocable – it was France which adjusted better to a post-imperial world, and it was the French who – to use Dean Acheson's words – "found a role". While the British were distracted by the Commonwealth, de Gaulle led the French into reconciliation with Germany and defiance of American hegemony.

Of course, there was no English de Gaulle and, given the solidity of the British party system and the collegiate nature of the British governing classes, there never could have been. I did, however, feel that there was one Englishman who deserves more extensive treatment in a study of decolonization. Thomas consigns Enoch Powell to a single note – dealing with the "Rivers of Blood" speech. It seems odd to say nothing of Powell the young officer in Delhi who dreamt of being viceroy, or Powell the Conservative Party functionary who once lectured an astonished Churchill about how many divisions he would need to reconquer India, or Powell the MP who condemned the brutality of the Hola camp in Kenya. Most of all, though, it is odd not to mention Powell because he admired de Gaulle and shared some of de Gaulle's qualities. Although both men were self-consciously nostalgic, they believed that their countries needed a sharp break with the recent past, which was why Powell came to insist that England must abandon all pretensions to being a world power.

Powell and de Gaulle, however, were not just hard-headed realists. Both understood the importance of myth and appreciated that decolonization needed its myths as much as empire had done. In spite of the humiliations of Vichy, Dien Bien Phu and Algeria, the French managed to preserve, or invent, national myths that sustained them until recently. By the early 1960s, by contrast, the British had come to see their empire as neither good nor bad but simply ridiculous – it is no accident that the founders of Private Eye were largely men who, thanks to National Service, had seen the last days of empire in Jamaica and Malaya. In February 1942, as Britain licked its wounds after the fall of Singapore, Harold Nicolson wrote that "the future historian of the decline and fall of the British Empire will give [one man]… a front row seat in the gallery of our disintegration". That man was David Low – the cartoonist and creator of Colonel Blimp.

Marx’s daughter

Marx's daughter

Eleanor Marx at eighteen

Book Details

Rachel Holmes

ELEANOR MARX

A Life
528pp. Bloomsbury. £25.
978 0 7475 8384 4

A new biography restores the foremother of socialist feminism to history

ELAINE SHOWALTER

The great divas among the early feminist intellectuals, Mary Wollstonecraft, Margaret Fuller and Eleanor Marx, lived valiantly and died young. Indeed, their operatic deaths seem like the punishments bestowed by a malign universe for defying female destiny – Wollstonecraft expiring slowly of puerperal fever and septicaemia at thirty-six, Fuller drowning in a shipwreck at forty as she returned to the United States with her Italian lover and their child. But Eleanor Marx's death seems the most ironic and inconsistent with her life, because it was not an accident, but a choice. At the age of forty-three, dressed ritually in white, she killed herself after discovering the perfidy of her partner Edward Aveling. As the child of Karl Marx, she had lived and breathed socialism, collectivism and sexual equality since childhood; she was the designated daughter of the revolution. So why did she end like Madame Bovary or Madame Butterfly?

That's the question all of her biographers must face. Chushichi Tsuzuki subtitles his Life of Eleanor Marx (1967) "A socialist tragedy", with Aveling as the villain. In her monumental two-volume study (1971, 1976), Yvonne Kapp blamed Eleanor's despair over the slow progress of the British labour movement; she "had thought to see the dawn of a new world. For her, the light receded and she would not stay". Rachel Holmes, however, does not see the suicide as a negation of the legacy. From the first pages of her exhilarating biography, she champions Eleanor Marx as a great hero of British history, "the foremother of socialist feminism", and a woman who "changed the world". Holmes exuberantly embraces the jumble of independence and obligation, self-assertion and self-starvation, as an essential condition of a life "as varied and full of contradictions as the materialist dialectic in which she was, quite literally, conceived".

Her glowing account of Eleanor Marx's childhood makes that conception sound very appealing. There were already six people in the messy, smoky two-room Soho flat where she was born on January 16, 1855: Karl, called Mohr (Moor), for his curly black hair and swarthy skin; Jenny, or Möhme; two older sisters, Laura and Jennychen; a baby brother, Edgar, who soon died; and Helen Demuth, or Lenchen, the "second mother", who was the housekeeper and nurse. Adding to this parental surplus was Marx's prosperous friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, the "second father" who supported them all financially and helped educate the daughters. Eleanor was given her own pet name, "Tussy".

The Marxes were impoverished, and their rooms were dirty as well as shabby. But home was so cosy, noisy and busy, her two mothers so wise and loving, the stories of her two fathers so magical, her two sisters so bright and artistic, that Tussy never noticed the trips to the pawnshop or the broken furniture. She internalized the image of a perfect marriage, a large and happy family, a communal household. Most of all, there were piles of books, pamphlets, articles and journals. As their fortunes rose or fell, the Marxes might be "short of many things, but books and paper and pencils and ink and nibs and needles, brushes, glue, sewing thread and stubs of charcoal were in plentiful supply". Home-schooled by her father until the age of eleven, Tussy was introduced to atheism, socialism, science and literature (especially Shakespeare) by one of "the greatest minds in Europe", and encouraged to read and study whatever captured her imagination, from the novels of Dickens and Scott to the American Civil War.

Holmes makes it sound like a Marxist version of Little Women, with Tussy as Jo. Yet there were mysteries and warnings in the Marx household as well. In 1851, Lenchen had given birth to a son, Freddy, who was sent away as an infant to be fostered, and never came back to the family. His father was unnamed, but they all assumed it was Engels. Mohr was often away, sometimes for months, and money was always in short supply, or squandered when there were windfalls or inheritances. When Engels's mistress Mary Burns, a Manchester millhand, died, he quickly replaced her with her sister Lizzy.

Meanwhile Möhme, Lenchen, and Lizzy were stuck home with the needles and thread. As Möhme wrote to Lizzy, "in all these battles, we women have to bear the hardest, i.e. pettiest parts. In the battle with the world the man gets stronger . . . we sit at home and darn socks". Holmes vividly contrasts socialist women's domestic drudgery with men's freedom to create: "For every hundred meals they cooked, Marx and Engels expressed an idea; for every basket of petticoats, bibs, and curtains they sewed together, Marx and Engels wrote an article. For every pregnancy . . . Marx and Engels wrote a book".

Tussy did not want to play a petty or petticoat part on the stage of history. Determined to escape the domestic trap, she learned philosophy, chess and gymnastics instead of cooking and sewing, and became Marx's best student, the surrogate son. Throughout her childhood, Mohr was writing Das Kapital, and she grew up preparing to carry on his work. As Holmes sums up their connection, "Karl Marx was the theory, Eleanor Marx was the practice".

Yet as Tussy wrote to her sister Laura in 1892, "Is it not wonderful . . . how rarely we seem to practise all the fine things we preach to others?" Holmes uses the line as an epigraph to her book, and the reader can view the gulf between theory and practice as both comic and tragic. Marx turned out to be Freddy's father, having got Lenchen pregnant when Jenny was pregnant too, denied his son and cast him out, and lied about it for the rest of his life. He hoped to spare his daughters early marriages to penniless revolutionaries like himself, but who else were they likely to meet? Laura and Jennychen were quickly burdened with babies and poverty. In the 1870s, Tussy, too, fell in love with Hippolyte Lissagary ("Lissa"), a glamorous survivor of the Paris Commune, exiled in London and twice her age. The relationship much improved her French, but Mohr did not approve, and at eighteen, she left home and moved to Brighton to support herself as a teacher by day, do research for Lissa's history of the Commune by night, and spend all her time with him when he came down at weekends.

The liaison with Lissa, by then her fiancé, was the trigger for her first bout of psychosomatic illness, an array of nervous symptoms including anorexia and fainting. By 1874 she had given in to her parents' pressure to come home; but as soon as she was well, she began again to smother her anxieties about her vocation and independence with frenetic activity. Her diary was packed with meetings of the English Text Society, Chaucer Society, New Shakespeare Society, Sunday Shakespeare Society, Browning Society, and Shelley Society. She was also helping her sisters care for their ailing babies, and as her father's secretary and research assistant, performed hours of "unpaid labour of love". In that line, she also took on the English translation of Lissa's book. At last, in March 1880, she ended her engagement, and Lissa returned to Paris. She was free.

Nevertheless, she had a more serious breakdown in 1881 triggered by the passionate desire to begin a new life in conflict with daughterly duty and self-doubt. She was treated by Dr Horatio Bryan Donkin, a progressive, even radical thinker, who understood the newly recognized epidemic of nervous disorders in relation to the social conditions of the young unmarried woman. "All kinds of . . . barriers to the free play of her power are set up by ordinary social and ethical customs", he wrote in his essay on hysteria for the Dictionary of Psychological Medicine; "'Thou shalt not' meets a girl at every turn". Donkin hypothesized that sexual repression, the strain of caring for ageing parents, and overwork were the causes of the daughter's disease; Freud's "Anna O" (Bertha Pappenheim) and Hardy's Sue Bridehead would catch it in the 1890s. As Holmes explains, Tussy was at an impasse. She wanted to

"Go ahead!" But in order to do this, she had to take unthinkable action and abandon her family. This was not in her nature. She wouldn't be free unless they abandoned her. And that was not in their nature.

Nonetheless, in the next few years most of her family – first Jennychen, then Möhme, and, in March 1883, her father – did leave her, by dying. She had persuaded Mohr to pay for dramatic training, but after his death she gave up her dreams of the stage, and looked for other ways to earn money. Holmes argues that the plays Tussy sought would not be written until the new theatre of Ibsen and Shaw, and that the complex female roles she longed for did not yet exist. Yet giving up acting was another loss, and deprived her of a creative outlet and a society of her own. Fortunately, Karl Hirsch, a journalist who admired her, gave her a carton of ready-made cigarettes and a pince-nez, the basic accoutrements of the liberated New Woman. Thus equipped, uncorseted, she began to meet the writers, dissidents, activists and artists of Victorian Bloomsbury in the British Museum Reading Room. Beatrice Potter saw her there a few months after Karl Marx's death, "comely, dressed in a slovenly picturesque way with curly black hair, flying about in all directions. Fine eyes full of life and sympathy, otherwise ugly features and expression and complexion showing signs of unhealthy excited life kept up with stimulants and tempered by narcotics". She loved champagne, and may have begun experimenting with opium.

Tussy found the intellectual community of the Reading Room another exciting stimulant. There she met Annie Besant, Bernard Shaw, and the South African New Woman novelist Olive Schreiner, who became an intimate friend and confidante. In 1882, they were comparing notes on female sexuality. There, too, she met her nemesis, Edward Aveling, a thin-lipped Darwinian secularist, journalist and aspiring dramatist who invited her to write about her father for the magazine he was co-editing. In a short time, she had agreed to join him as an editor of the magazine, and they had become a couple, although he was separated from a wife who refused to give him a divorce. Her friends accepted Aveling, but they didn't like him. They gossiped that he was selfish, unscrupulous and repulsive, with "the face and eyes of a lizard". No matter. Mohr's death had left a huge vacancy in her life, a space for a man to love and serve, and she could not leave it unfilled for long.

In the summer of 1884, she and the saurian Aveling agreed to live openly together, and announced their new status to all their comrades. As she wrote proudly to one young activist, "we have both felt that we were justified in setting aside all the false and really immoral bourgeois conventionalities, and I am happy to say we have received the only thing we really care about – the approbation of our friends and fellow-socialists". They enjoyed being the very model of the modern Marxist couple, and showing how free love and socialist principles could work in the home. Eventually, Eleanor decided that socialists could have servants, but in the beginning she struggled to cope with meals, laundry and housework herself, and Edward was "the very devil for untidiness". She was anxious about money, and toiling as a ghostwriter, typist, journalist, and teacher to support them, while he was gaily unconcerned, "going about like a happy child", she lamented to Schreiner, who had viewed him from the first with "horror" and "dread".

Still, in 1886, her most productive year, she completed the first English translation of Madame Bovary, collaborated on the first translation of Das Kapital, and starred in the first playreading of A Doll's House; Aveling was Torvald. They collaborated on a long essay, "The Woman Question", which Holmes calls "the founding text of socialist feminism". Its principles of sexual equality and socialist unity were eloquent, but Holmes leaves out the passages that make this manifesto so painful to read in the light of the clash of theory and practice in the Marx–Aveling ménage. Declaring that under socialism "monogamy will gain the day", they predicted "lasting, blending of two lives". Honesty, fidelity and truth would triumph in these utopian relationships; after the revolution, they promised, there would be none of "the hideous disguise, the constant lying, that makes the domestic life of almost all our English homes an organised hypocrisy". But free love was very costly for Eleanor Marx. In fact, Aveling was a chronic liar and womanizer, a scoundrel with scandalous habits of borrowing, expense account padding, even embezzling.

Eleanor covered up for him and defended him and pretended that he was a New Man. But his unpopularity isolated them, and his infidelities wounded her. Havelock Ellis said she attempted suicide in 1888 by taking a large dose of opium, and that he and Olive revived her. For another decade, she pressed on at her usual manic pace, writing, editing, lecturing, orating, teaching, organizing, travelling, studying Norwegian, learning Yiddish to speak to Jewish women in the East End, supporting gas workers, dock workers, match-girls, and onion-skinners (for Crosse and Blackwell) in a life she described as "one long strike", and generally representing Marxism to the world. To the huge audiences gathering to hear her speeches, she was a socialist saint.

Things were different at home. At the end of March 1898, she found out that Aveling's first wife had been dead for years, and he had recently married a twenty-two-year-old actress. Eleanor staged a dramatic suicide, imitating those of Emma Bovary, Hedda Gabler, or the heroine of the popular novel, The Woman Who Did. On the morning of March 31, she wrote to her lawyer to change her will, sent the maid to the chemist for chloroform and prussic acid, donned her favourite white summer dress, took the poison, and died. She left a scent of lavender and bitter almonds, two suicide notes, and the money from Engels's legacy. Her friends thought Aveling had confiscated the letter, skipped out of the house, and lied at the inquest. He got the money and spent most of it on his wife in the four months before he died.

Holmes readily admits that Eleanor Marx had "many shortcomings, frustrations, and spectacular failures", and her suicide was surely spectacular. Why did she do it? She had lived with Aveling for fourteen years, and his secret marriage was a stunning humiliation. Even worse, she had presented their home life as politically exemplary. But she was not a victim, although her practice did not match her theories. In the end, Eleanor Marx's great soul may have been the most inspiring part of her story. With the infectious conviction of her narrative, Rachel Holmes has restored her to history.

Foreign India

Foreign India

The ruins of the Palace of Pataliputra

Book Details

Sam Miller

A STRANGE KIND OF PARADISE

India through foreign eyes
421pp. Cape. £18.99.
978 0 224 09341 5

A history, memoir and organizational muddle

ANDREW ROBINSON

Sam Miller describes A Strange Kind of Paradise, his story of foreign reactions to India from the ancient Greeks to the present day, as an "intermittent history and memoir". He is certainly qualified to write both of those things, having studied history at Cambridge and politics at the School of Oriental and African Studies in London, worked on South Asian affairs for the BBC as a journalist on and off since the 1980s, lived and travelled widely in India for more than a decade and a half, married a Parsi from Bombay and learned to speak Hindi. Moreover, he is already the author of a historically informed travel book on Delhi, his current home, Adventures in a Megacity (2009). He even discovers to his surprise while going through family papers in London that an ancestor was the Indophile Sophia Dobson Collet, a Victorian feminist captivated by the life and work of the reformer Rammohun Roy, founder of the Brahmo Samaj.

However, the challenge of his subject is formidable, given its two and a half millennia-long timespan, and the exceptional diversity of India's religions and cultures, invaders and visitors, from Alexander the Great, Babur and Robert Clive to the Chinese Buddhist pilgrim Hiuen Tsang, the orientalist Sir William Jones and the Beatles. Despite the paucity of sources for the earlier period, the first half of the book, until the British colonial period, works better than the second.

In the first half, Miller takes the reader on an entertaining trip to Patna, the site of Pataliputra, the great capital city of the Mauryan Emperor Asoka in the third century BC, which he calls "arguably the country's least impressive major archaeological site": a mosquito-ridden swamp through which he paddles, feeling the stumps of Mauryan columns with his toes. This he contrasts with the awestruck impressions of Megasthenes, the Greek ambassador of the Seleucid empire to the Mauryan empire, whose reports established India's worldwide reputation for astonishing wealth. From the Mughal period, he quotes some famously scathing criticism of India in the memoirs of the first Mughal emperor, Babur, and notes that these words were once recited to him by a former Indian foreign secretary at a Delhi party "with obvious pain". But he also notes how Babur's vivid memoirs contain passages appreciative of Indian landscapes, traditions and learning, which foreshadow the love of India shown by Babur's grandson, Akbar. And from the Portuguese period, he corrects the common impression that Vasco da Gama, on arrival near Calicut in 1498, proclaimed to a crowd of Indians on the beach: "We seek Christians and spices". In fact, the words were spoken by a Portuguese convict sent ashore by a nervous da Gama to two Muslim traders from Tunis, who knew some Italian and Spanish. Arab merchants of course traded with India long before European colonialists; the earliest Indian mosque was supposedly established on the Kerala coast at Cranganore in 629.

In the second half, it is unclear whether A Strange Kind of Paradise is really about foreigners who visited India, or is intended to include foreigners who never travelled to the subcontinent. Miller discusses the nineteenth-century discovery of Sanskrit literature by German writers and thinkers including Goethe, and the twentieth-century admiration of Rabindranath Tagore by W. B. Yeats and Ezra Pound – none of whom visited India. Yet the more sustained response of Graham Greene (who also never travelled in India) to the classic novelist R. K. Narayan is not analysed. Narayan "has offered me a second home. Without him I could never have known what it is like to be Indian", wrote Greene in 1978. Cinema, too, receives attention, covering the foreign reactions to Indian-directed films such as Awaara and Sholay and foreign-directed films set in India such as The River, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire. But Satyajit Ray's world-famous Apu Trilogy, which defined India for European and American cinema audiences in the 1950s and 60s, is completely ignored, as are Ray's insightful writings on Western cinematic reactions to India.

Other striking omissions come to mind. For instance, the impact on the West of India's epics, especially the Mahabharata, and its folk tales has been considerable; the Panchatantra formed the basis of La Fontaine's Fables, published in 1678. In mathematics, India originated our Arabic numerals (as well as games like chess and Snakes and Ladders). The sybaritic and artistic culture of nawabi Lucknow earned it the nickname of the "Paris of the East". Complete coverage is neither possible nor desirable in such an avowedly personal book. But surely a number of the lengthy footnotes – some informative and fascinating; others self-indulgent, with ephemeral quotations from websites – could have been pruned to make space for more essential main text. Captions for the decidedly idiosyncratic illustrations, by no means all of which are explained in the text, would also have been helpful. A Strange Kind of Paradise is a charming, often intriguing, experience, but something of an organizational muddle – much like India itself.

The global city

The global city

ALISON BASHFORD

Tristram Hunt

TEN CITIES THAT MADE AN EMPIRE

514pp. Allen Lane. £25.
978 1 84614 325 0

In the late 1990s, there was a curious attempt to identify cities that warranted global status, and then rank their economic and cultural significance on a scale from alpha to gamma. Two only – New York and London – came in at a steroidal "Alpha++". Tokyo, Paris, Beijing, Dubai, Sydney achieved a respectable Alpha+, while Leipzig, Portland, Algiers were awarded an unfortunate Gamma minus. Tristram Hunt has written a history of the assertively alpha cities of the British Empire: Boston, Bridgetown, Dublin, Cape Town, Calcutta, Hong Kong, Bombay, Melbourne, New Delhi, Liverpool. All these towns have been hitched to the fortunes of a British-led commercial system over the past 300 years. Hunt's is not a twenty-first-century alpha list, however – a fact that betrays what this book is really about: the rise and decline of the British Empire; and at least as much the latter as the former, as the cameo appearances of Gibbon's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire indicate.

Such a book could easily become sentimental about the British Empire, and something about the title and the jacket design plays to that. But Ten Cities that Made an Empire is decisively not what Hunt calls antiquarian, not a "sepia version of the colonial past". While he never quite confesses to having written a history of the British Empire, I suspect he wanted to write just that all along. The cities are at least as much a device as Hunt's real objects of inquiry. The result is British imperial history with a new angle, but no new thesis. Instead, the book serves as a compelling introduction to imperial history, especially for those unfamiliar with the shift from the so-called First Empire to the Second; from the Atlantic world that shattered with the American War of Independence, to the East – India, East Asia and the Pacific. Hunt leads us through the world-shaping events of the classic imperial story: the thirteen colonies and their rebellion; the slave trade and the sugar trade that made so many fortunes on the back of so much agony and agonizing; the East India Company, that commercial monster that single-mindedly dealt with Mughal rulers and then played all the wrong cards; the wars with the French, the Americans, the Dutch, the Chinese; and all along the goods and commercial mission that linked and drove the whole.

And the buildings. It is a treat when Hunt turns to architecture and design. We accompany him on walking tours, taking in marble, stone and brick signifiers of empire, trade and colonialism, above and below ground. Sometimes we see the cities as their designers intended them, however naively, and as colonizing and colonized subjects lived and died in them. Hunt brings us up to the present, gesturing to the architectural remnants that tell the stories of anti-colonialism and decolonization.

His chapter on Georgian Dublin is especially strong in this respect, the raising and then the demolition of a quarter of the city that symbolized British rule. In the penultimate chapter, he explores extravagant New Delhi, the Indian capital designed by Edwin Lutyens and Herbert Baker and completed by 1930, just when the Raj was coming undone. This time and place reveal a different architectural response to decolonization altogether; not demolition but an equally powerful takeover and move-in. Lutyens's palatial Viceroy's House simply became the President's house after 1947. One of the forty-five colour plates shows Gandhi and Mountbatten taking tea at the Viceroy's House on the eve of independence, a building that was soon to turn into Rashtrapati Bhavan. Gandhi certainly looks more relaxed than Mountbatten more at home, we might say.

Ten Cities is structured by place, but also by time. With a sure hand, Hunt moves us through centuries of both politics and design. Some of his cities are located in history in obvious ways. Boston represents the First Empire and the eighteenth-century crisis that turned the thirteen colonies into the United States. Likewise, Cape Town affords Hunt the perfect opportunity to explore the early nineteenth-century swing to the East, via the South (Cape Town taken from the Dutch in 1795 and Cape Colony formed in 1814). Melbourne is the opulent Victorian city built on gold.

Other cities – far older – belong less obviously to particular historical periods, and Hunt has had to make careful decisions about their chronological usefulness to the whole. With considerable skill he pins successive chapters to a representative period and place, while at the same time drawing on each town's longer history. Calcutta, for example, is the city through which Hunt tells the eighteenth-century imperial story of the Mughals, the East India Company's ascendancy, and the suite of governors-general who finally hobbled the Company while asserting British power in different form. And all this with an eye to its neoclassical building programme. Then Hunt sweeps us to Hong Kong in a move that shows the shift in economic orthodoxy from the Company's eighteenth-century monopoly on trade, to the East Asian city built on nineteenth-century free trade: the city that never looked back. Next we move forward in time to Bombay, selected to illustrate mid-Victorian imperial interventions expressed in sanitary engineering as much as military, administrative, or fiscal rule. There, the Indian military itself was to be sanitized by the likes of Sir Bartle Frere and the architecturally minded Florence Nightingale. In this way, the central chapters of this book unfold as the classic story of empire, from commerce to industry, from sail to steam, and from the seas to continental railways. Bombay's Victoria Terminus lavishly encased the trains that signalled the future.

It was all about goods and trade. Almost all of Hunt's cities were ports, thrust into historical prominence as places where commodities were warehoused and profits made from transport and exchange. The globalization of earlier centuries is evident here. Oceanic connections between these ports made and destroyed lives and fortunes, and built an empire that came to be defended by British military and naval force. But British traffic was as likely to be damaging as it was to be industrious. The slave trade linked Liverpool and Bridgetown, Barbados. The lucrative opium trade connected port cities across the world's oceans, from Calcutta to Hong Kong. Cotton brought Bombay and Liverpool together, but also brought ruin to local economies.

Although this is a book about ports, it is not written in a maritime tradition. It is a book about cities, but not written in an urban history manner either. Indeed, while Ten Cities that Made an Empire is nominally about urban sites, in the end it is rather more about the historical characters who lived there. The cities become the places where governors lived, for instance, the buildings at least as much containers for engaging personal stories as for developing architectural history.

Hunt clearly likes writing about governors and their circles. He likes the rich British traders too, whose dubious upward mobility and sometimes rapid decline offer anti-imperial morality tales. His other historical actors are locals made good: Rachel Pringle, for example, the Bridgetown freed slave turned brothel and hotel owner; or the Parsi merchant prince Jamsetjee Jejeebhoy. Curiously, there are next to no indigenous historical actors in Hunt's chapters on Boston and Melbourne. In the latter chapter Hunt laments the city's ignorance of its imperial past, by which he means its connection to Britain. But Hunt doesn't quite perceive that heightened local awareness of indigenous–settler history is the British imperial past. Melbourne's politico-urban history includes spectacular instances of nineteenth-century Aboriginal land claim and civic protest that could easily have enriched the critical and postcolonial credentials of this book. The etiquette of acknowledging indigenous country on which imperial cities are built is now conventional in postcolonial Australia. Indeed, this is what the twenty-first-century vice-regal descendants of all those Regency, Victorian and Edwardian governors-general do now, and as a matter of course.

Thinking through the politics of land might have served Hunt's own argument well, since he claims to overturn a tired and dichotomized good/bad history of the British Empire. This is a thin contribution, however, because such a simplistic rendition of the Empire is mostly long gone. Still, combining academic and popular history is always hard, and while Hunt clearly wants to make a scholarly intervention, the value of this elegant book for the general reader does not, in the end, rest on its historiographical positioning. It has so much else to recommend it.

All Hunt's cities were "alpha plus" in their day, but only Hong Kong has retained, even exceeded, its historical status. It is with good reason that Tristram Hunt begins his book with a reflection on the relationship between Britain and Hong Kong, since the tiny island with the stratospheric financial reach distils the economic story told here: the imperial history of globalization. The political story is altogether different, however, bookended by two anti-colonial riots: one in late eighteenth-century Boston, the other in late twentieth-century Toxteth.

The novel reflects

The novel reflects

LINDSAY DUGUID

Michael Schmidt

THE NOVEL

A biography
1,172pp. Harvard University Press. £29.95 ($39.95).
978 0 674 72473 0

The title and the length of Michael Schmidt's book promise something more than an annotated chronology. This is not a rise of, nor an aspects of, nor even a theory of, the novel, but a nuanced account of the development of an innovative form. As in most biographies, the subject expands and grows from the innocence of childhood – a literature of adventure, based in travel-writing, fables and legend – to a rebellious adolescence of the erotic, letter-writing and romance, then a solid middle age of three-decker commercial success and social realism. Socially committed fiction then succumbs to the late-life confusions of postmodernism. The death of the novel is hardly mentioned, though Gore Vidal's worries about the death of the novel-reader are noted. The book's thirty-six-page timeline, which begins with Bartholomeus Anglicus (1203?–1277), ends with Bret Easton Ellis (born 1964); its 1,103-page text starts with Mandeville's Travels (which first appeared in the middle of the fourteenth century) and finishes with six pages of praise for the work of Martin Amis.

In his introduction Schmidt sets out his view of the novel with an emphasis on popularity and readability, in particular the idea of engagement. The strong relationship between reader and book is illustrated by his memories of the addictive pleasures of G. A. Henty and the Hardy Boys, H. Rider Haggard and Arthur Ransome: "we pestered our parents for another: we wanted to stay in those adventures with their smells, colors and voices . . . we didn't want a book to end even as we rushed to the climax". Schmidt then traces a 700-year history of the form through a series of thematic groupings, some conventional, such as "Sex and Sensibility", "The Eerie", "Gothic Romance"; others more inventive, such as "Win, Place and Show", "The Blues", "Pariahs". These groupings produce creative alignments: Aphra Behn shares a chapter with Zora Neale Hurston and W. H. Hudson is considered alongside Bruce Chatwin. Robert Graves is placed next to Doris Lessing, P. G. Wodehouse to Kazuo Ishiguro, Roddy Doyle to James Joyce and Hugh Walpole to Frederic Raphael. Selected authors are summarized with a brief life and an examination of their influences and prejudices. Selected books are analysed with the help of publication history, advances and sales figures, prizes and reception, which includes banning and burning and turning into major motion pictures.

Professional critics and reviewers are scarcely mentioned; the commentary comes from the novelist-critics Virginia Woolf, Ford Madox Ford, E. M. Forster, Henry James, Saul Bellow and Gore Vidal, with additional input from fellow novelists who reveal their loyalties and exercise their wit. Some of these comments are judicious and informative. Others are more emotional. Graham Greene calls Sterne "unbearable"; Thackeray says of Smollett "I fancy he did not invent much"; John Cowper Powys and E. M. Forster savage George Meredith; William Gass calls Pamela "the edifying history of a prick tease"; Gabriel Josipovici compares Julian Barnes and Ian McEwan to "prep-school boys showing off"; and Stephen King dismisses Thomas Hardy: "Nobody's life is this bad. Give me a break, you know". Schmidt also makes his own feelings plain: Frankenstein is "less a novel than a text"; Redgauntlet is "more famous than it is good"; Sylvia Townsend Warner is guilty of "a rather too charming inventiveness"; Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day is "a book to study not to read". In a gleeful passage he imagines Samuel Richardson "rising day after day to add further twists to the undoing of his heroine, his little tongue running along his upper lip with a leer, not of malice but of satisfaction". A rewarding theme, writers on how to write, is followed from Henry James and Graham Greene to Ronald Knox and Elmore Leonard, with several nice examples of rules for writing, including Jasper Milvain's guide for prospective authors in George Gissing's New Grub Street ("Novel-writing taught in ten lessons!"). He also tells a good anecdote: Marie Corelli rowed in her gondola on the Avon at Stratford; Ernest Hemingway describing Wyndham Lewis as having "the eyes of a rapist"; Hugh Walpole spotting Rudyard Kipling at the Athenaeum, "beaming like a baby"; Hardy having Thomas Carlyle pointed out to him at Chapman and Hall in 1869; and Ottoline Morrell's "unbuttoned romance" with a stonemason called Tiger as a source for Lady Chatterley's Lover.

Schmidt's preferences are strong and warm. He admires a range of authors from Thomas Love Peacock and Walter Scott to Anthony Burgess and Peter Carey, and many minor authors are indexed. In general, however, he sticks to a familiar English-language canon and does not always sustain the argument for engagement in his careful accounts of what a book is about and why you should like it. As the years pass, the chart becomes fuller and fuller; the statistics increase – She has sold 90 million copies since it was published in 1887; Agatha Christie wrote sixty novels in sixty-three years; 55 per cent of all paperback books sold in the US in 2004 were romance novels – and critical terms such as self-reflexive, shape-shifting and apocalyptic single out the academically approved – Paul Auster, Jonathan Franzen, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Lethem – from the popular – Stephen King, Helen Fielding, Erle Stanley Gardner. At times, Schmidt seems to avoid the issue. Some bestselling authors, such as Dashiell Hammett and Elmore Leonard, are simply said to "transcend their genre". The romantic fiction of Barbara Cartland, Catherine Cookson and Georgette Heyer is easily dismissed. The Western is praised as having led to Cormac McCarthy, Larry McMurtry and Patrick de Witt. Science fiction and Chandleresque detective fiction are both taken seriously. In practice, the juxtaposing and the undercutting support a distinction between enjoyable novels and serious fiction, endorsing Orwell's idea of a "good bad book", acknowledging the difference and noting the critical resistance to genre fiction. Much space is devoted to Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Marilynne Robinson, less to Annie Proulx, Anne Tyler, Jane Smiley and Ali Smith, and none to Beryl Bainbridge or Penelope Fitzgerald. Kingsley Amis and Henry Green are praised, Evelyn Waugh and Anthony Powell damned; Nabokov outweighs George Orwell; William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac beat Elizabeth Taylor. The American strand, from Theodore Dreiser to Saul Bellow, from Mark Twain to J. D. Salinger, from William Faulkner to Zane Grey, appears more heroic to Schmidt, and several writers are quoted disparaging the genteel and class-bound English novel with its sadly escapist tendencies.

Among the many happy byways of the book is a quotation from Tony Harrison's house-clearance poem "Thomas Campey and the Copernican System", a tale of forgotten books: "Marie Corelli, Ouida and Hall Caine / And texts from Patience Strong in tortoise frames. / And every pound of this dead weight is pain / To Thomas Campey (Books)". The novel can be viewed as a jumble of out-of-date texts, but The Novel: A biography incidentally provides the material for one to make a personal re-reading list: The Female Quixote, Crotchet Castle, Their Wedding Journey, The Custom of the Country, The Maltese Falcon, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Lonesome Dove, Amongst Women. This well-produced and apparently scholarly book has a good index but no footnotes to provide the sources of its many quotations. Its style of citing authors' names is inconsistent and there are minor confusions about Virginia Woolf's half-sisters and the first name of the author of Just William.

Freelance

Freelance

Baldwin in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, 1979

On breaking into James Baldwin's house

DOUGLAS FIELD

Two days before I turned forty, I finally submitted my critical study of James Baldwin to a publisher in New York. I awoke the next morning with a hazy recollection of toasting my favourite writer with a glass or two of Johnnie Walker Black Label, his favourite tipple. Over breakfast my partner revealed that she had organized a birthday trip to St Paul de Vence, the medieval hilltop village in the mountains above Nice where Baldwin lived for almost the last twenty years of his life, and that we were leaving straight away.

By evening, I was installed at the Colombe D'Or, a charming hotel outside the village walls where artists, including Picasso and Braque, had sojourned, sometimes paying off their hotel bill in exchange for their work. In our room, an original Joan Miró hung on the sixteenth-century wall. Today, guests are more likely to bump into George Clooney or Bill Wyman, who has a house nearby – than avant-garde artists – but the Colombe D'Or retains a relaxed bohemian gentility.

On our first night there, I asked the staff if they remembered "Jimmy", as he was known. To my delight, several of his old friends and acquaintances gladly shared their memories of the writer's frequent visits to the hotel bar. One of the waiters I spoke to had lodged with Baldwin for several months in the early 1980s. He spoke of his kindness and generosity, and recalled how he was frequently invited to join Baldwin and his guests for dinner in the garden of his house which sits on the opposite side of a valley outside the village. "We need people like him", said a woman whose mother-in-law had been close to Baldwin. For one of the hotel owners, who first met Baldwin when she was fifteen, it was his charisma that shone through. "He was so charming. He could seduce anything." Others recalled his infectious smile "that always made you want to laugh".

After breakfast on the terrace, I set off to find Baldwin's old house, which eventually I came across nestled in more than two acres of sprawling land downhill from the ramparts. I had been told that it was derelict and vacant; that after Baldwin's death in 1987 there had been legal disputes about who in fact owned the eighteenth-century Provençal building (Baldwin thought he did). The rusty padlock on the austere gates and the broken buzzer confirmed that the house was unoccupied. I glanced furtively around to check that no one was watching and prepared to scale the wall. As I was about to do so, the thought occurred to me that Baldwin had been imprisoned in Paris for stealing a bed sheet in his twenties. Was I going to be arrested for breaking and entering on my fortieth birthday?

I made the jump, hopping almost nimbly over the stone wall and into the overgrown garden. As my feet hit the scorched grass in Baldwin's rambling grounds, I felt exhilaration but also sadness. To my left was the gate house where his assistant, Bernard Hassell, had lived for many years in a two-room apartment with views of the Mediterranean. The door was open and I peered inside, stepping over broken glass and old wiring. I opened a cupboard in the first room and found a row of solitary hooks that once held keys to the three buildings in the grounds. Beneath the gate house was an overgrown terrace, but there was no sign of the "welcome table" where Baldwin had dined with friends including Miles Davis and Josephine Baker. The main house, where Baldwin died, was locked. Peering through the open window, I could see that one room had been recently painted. There were new plywood doors on several of the buildings; "WC" was written in chalk on one crumbling exterior wall with an arrow to another locked door, evidence, it seemed, of a slow renovation project. At the back of the main house I found broken shutters and open windows leading to several downstairs rooms, including an old stable with a stone water trough. As I set foot inside one of the rooms, I recognized the distinctive fireplace from a magazine article I'd seen shortly before Baldwin died. This, I realized with excitement, had been Baldwin's study, or "torture chamber" as he called it. "You don't live where you're happy", he once wrote to an editor, Sol Stein, "you do your best to live where you can work." It was hard to reconcile this bare and derelict room with the pictures I'd seen of Baldwin sitting at a rustic table, surrounded by photographs and personal, homely objects: a painting by his old friend Beauford Delaney; an exhausted looking typewriter; a drink, probably Johnnie Walker Black Label; cigarette packets; and a sheaf of papers – a manuscript – but which? There was little to see in his study except for flaking plaster and a piece of ancient baguette, which had probably been left by some other interloper.

I kept looking for tangible evidence of Baldwin's life in the house, hoping naively to find an old pen or lighter that had been dropped years ago. This, I knew, was unlikely. After Baldwin's death, his brother David moved in, and he and Bernard Hassell stayed here until their respective deaths. A writer friend told me that he'd visited the house a few months after Baldwin died, to find David wearing his brother's Martin Luther King watch and jewellery, and doing his best to sound just like him. Curiously, Baldwin's books and other possessions still remained in the house up to fifteen years after he had died, yet nobody I met knew what happened to them. All I found was a pitchfork in the garden, which I doubt that Baldwin had used. It seemed strangely apt, nonetheless, since he was fond of quoting the closing line in Voltaire's Candide – "il faut cultiver notre jardin". Today, Baldwin's garden, which had been an arcadia of grape arbours, peaches and almonds, was little more than brambles and thorns. Just as I was about to leave, I spotted an orange tree, which, smothered by grass, against the odds still bore fruit. In this grassy wasteland the orange tree seemed both perfectly at ease but also poignantly out of place. I plucked an orange and tore into the sagging peel and bit through the tough white skin. I thought at once of Tony Harrison's poem, "A kumquat for John Keats", hoping, like Harrison's narrator – who is also "a man of doubt at life's mid-way" – that I would taste "how a full life ought to feel". The tired fruit was dried up, leaving a strange, though not bitter taste in my mouth.

As I returned to the Colombe D'Or to toast Baldwin, whose ninetieth birthday would have fallen on August 2, I thanked one of the waiters who had given me directions. He told me that the house had been recently bought by a local man who, as it happened, had been drinking coffee in the courtyard across from us this morning. There had been plans to demolish the house and build more than one luxury hotel, but local hoteliers had objected. Baldwin, I'd heard, wanted to leave the house as a retreat after his death, hoping that artists would find inspiration, as he had done, in the relaxed mountain air. On our last night in the hotel, the barman pointed out that I was sitting in what had been Baldwin's favourite seat. "Nobody bothered him here", he told me with a wink, "but everybody knew his name."

The first war criminal?

The first war criminal?

Wilhelm II (1891) by Max Koner

Book Details

John C. G. Röhl

WILHELM II

Into the abyss of war and exile, 1900–1941
Translated by Sheila de Bellaigue and Roy Bridge
1,562pp. Cambridge University Press. £45.
978 0 521 84431 4

Wilhelm II: a toxic brew of religious fanaticism, anti-Semitism and mental instability

JONATHAN SPERBER

Contemporary opinion was not kind to the German Emperor Wilhelm II. In the course of his reign, he was increasingly perceived in foreign countries as a major threat to world peace, while Germany's political class grew steadily more contemptuous of him. His abdication at the end of the First World War was little regretted; the Treaty of Versailles officially named him a war criminal, the first person to enjoy such a dubious distinction.

Wilhelm's reputation continued to decline after his death. The advent of a clearly worse ruler in Germany did not improve him in retrospect; historians were more interested in noting similarities between the Kaiser and the Führer or in examining the features of Wilhelm's realm that were precursors to the Third Reich. Apologists for the German Empire focused their attention on Bismarck. Unlike so many historical figures, Wilhelm has rarely been rehabilitated by revisionists . Even more favourable interpretations have regarded him as irrelevant, making extravagant and outrageous statements, while the work of government was carried out by his nominal subordinates, who carefully ignored him. One of the very few positive assessments came from the economist Joseph Schumpeter in his book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy (1942), a strange compendium of economic theory, political philosophy and personal prejudices. Admitting that the swashbuckling and erratic foreign policy of Germany before 1914 had made "the world's opinion . . . thoroughly disgusted as well as disquieted", the esteemed economist added that he had "not intended to attribute this policy, either wholly or primarily, to Wilhelm II". The Emperor "was no insignificant ruler". Indeed, Schumpeter claimed, if one "disregarded talk" and followed "the emperor's acts from year to year", one would arrive at the conclusion that "he was often right in his views about the great questions of his time".

This is not exactly a ringing defence, and its internal contradictions are evident. Wilhelm played an important governing role but was not responsible for a dangerous foreign policy; he was right on crucial questions of the time, as long as you disregard everything he said about them. If Schumpeter's apologia falls short, its observations do provide a way to think about the English-language edition of the third and final volume of John Röhl's biography of Wilhelm II, dealing with the second half of the Emperor's life, 1900–41.

Like its two predecessor volumes, this is a massive work: almost 1300 pages of text and 200 of endnotes. Röhl has exploited every source imaginable, combing through archives from Berlin to Bückeberg to Budapest, from Meiningen to Munich, from Windsor to Washington. One reason the book is so extensive is that the author has freely displayed the results of his research: lengthy quotes abound, directly related to the topic or off on a tangent, but still fascinating. My favourite is on pp644–5, a memo to Wilhelm II from his chancellor, Bernhard von Bülow, about the seemingly unstoppable progress of democratic and parliamentary government in Europe in the wake of the Russian Revolution of 1905.

Unlike many historians, Röhl does not drown in his sources. His very clearly focused book emphasizes foreign policy, and Wilhelm's role in devising, directing and implementing it. The origins of and responsibility for the outbreak of the First World War stand at the heart of the volume, making its publication in the year of the war's centenary a fortunate coincidence. Issues of domestic politics, discussions of Wilhelm's private life and of his mental and physical health, which played such a major role in the first two volumes of the biography, by no means disappear but are subordinated to the account of international relations.

As Röhl notes in his introduction, he worked on the biography for longer than Wilhelm reigned over Germany. This close attention to one individual for over thirty-five years proves that familiarity really does breed contempt. The historian's verdict on the Emperor is devastating and confirms much of contemporary and later opinion. In Schumpeter's terms, Röhl would agree that Wilhelm was very much a significant ruler. Contemporaries called it "personal rule", not just absolutist contempt for parliamentary institutions, but a domination of his ministers and subordinates, an insistence on setting policy himself. Most accounts see Wilhelm as aspiring to be such a ruler but either being incapable of it, or gradually renouncing this aspiration after c.1900. Röhl will have none of this: Wilhelm was in charge, and the highpoint of his personal rule was in 1906-7. Increasing public and private criticism from Germany's political class did nothing to change his mind. It was only after the scandals surrounding the homosexuality of his friend and courtier Philipp zu Eulenburg broke in 1907 and the dreadful public reception of his interview published in an English newspaper the following year, the so-called Daily Telegraph affair, that the emperor was forced to step back a bit. Even so, Röhl insists, his withdrawal occurred mostly in the realm of domestic policy; in military questions and foreign affairs, his dominance continued.

Röhl thus clearly disagrees with Schumpeter about Wilhelm's responsibility for Germany's disastrous pre-1914 foreign policy. While endorsing Schumpeter's implicit admission that the Emperor talked too much, too publicly and too erratically, he certainly does not see Wilhelm as someone who was right about the questions of the day. Quite the opposite, he regards the Emperor's opinions as a toxic brew of religious fanaticism, anti-Semitism and mental instability, containing all-too-evident links to a pernicious future. The upshot is a powerful and impressive thesis, sustained over a vast expanse of text, which holds the reader's attention throughout; although there are also indications in the material provided that might suggest some different shadings of interpretation.

One particularly interesting example of a point not emphasized by Röhl is that the Emperor was a man who thought globally. Rather in contrast to most European statesmen of the early twentieth century, his political vision was not at all Eurocentric. Fascinated by the United States, China and Japan, he regarded them as countries of the future – not such a bad prediction about the subsequent hundred years. Admittedly, Wilhelm did coin the phrase "the yellow peril", yet for all his racist ideas about the Chinese, he contemplated a military alliance between Germany and China and saw the centre of global politics in East Asia.

Röhl demonstrates very convincingly the extreme vacillations of the Emperor's foreign policy views. Sometimes, he wanted to lead a league of European countries against the United States; at other times, he envisaged an Anglo-Saxon-Teutonic racial alliance of Germany, the UK and the US; at still other times, he thought about a German–US–Chinese alliance directed against the British Empire. Great Britain and its empire were the subject of a passionate love-hate relationship, all too evidently tied up in Wilhelm's deeply ambivalent feelings about his mother, the English princess Victoria, and his grandmother, Queen Victoria. Wilhelm repeatedly went from seeking close ties with Britain to regarding the country as Germany's greatest enemy. His attitude towards the Tsar's Empire had no such profound psychological roots, but there as well he swung between seeking an alliance and regarding Russia as a dangerous racial antagonist. Flexibility can be a virtue in conducting foreign policy, but these inconsistencies seem more like mania.

This outlook on the world raises questions about Wilhelm's governmental role. In today's terms, he was incapable of delegating authority or responsibility. He had to do everything – from drawing up plans for new warships to approaching personally the monarchical rulers of other European powers and imploring them to ignore the policies of their government ministers. It is not that these rulers were not influential, or that dealing with them personally was a bad idea, but Wilhelm's initiatives would have worked much better as a supplement to or back channel of ordinary diplomacy – an idea he could not accept, because he could not do it all himself. One cannot help but make comparisons with Hitler, whose power as a ruler put Wilhelm's in the shade, and whose manias make Wilhelm look distinctly sane. Hitler certainly knew how to implement his plans and to strengthen his rule by assigning tasks to his subordinates and getting them to anticipate his wishes; Wilhelm was incapable of it.

Röhl documents very incisively the growing criticisms of the Emperor on the part of Germany's political class, although from his account it is less clear if this criticism was shared by a broader public. He emphasizes attacks on Wilhelm's reactionary and absolutist actions and policies by the social democrats and progressives, which form the basis of his own evaluation of the Emperor. But his conscientious detailing of sources includes the critical observations of the nobility, courtiers and officer corps that Wilhelm was not reactionary enough – opposing high agricultural tariffs in favour of Junker landowners, and incapable of taking decisive measures to smash the labour movement. Above all, they criticized him for being too timid in foreign affairs, unwilling to risk the dangers of war.

Röhl shows very clearly how in the crisis of July 1914 Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg and Chief of the General Staff Helmuth von Moltke consciously sidelined the Emperor, sending him off on his yacht to Norway, leaving him uninformed, or carefully editing official documents they sent him. They perceived him as an obstacle to their aggressive policies leading to the brink of war and beyond. On closer examination, one version or another of this way of dealing with Wilhelm had been going on for at least a decade, starting with the Moroccan Crisis of 1905, the first of the great pre-1914 diplomatic crises. Rather than a determined absolutist ruler driving his country to war, the impression is of Germany's leading state officials trying to pursue a consistently aggressive foreign policy and finding ways to take a vacillating and erratic monarch with them.

The biography only reaches the First World War on p1,106, and Röhl must admit that Wilhelm played little role in that conflict. As Germany lurched towards a military dictatorship, the Emperor was the least of the obstacles in the way of the general staff. With defeat looming, the generals had no compunction about sacrificing him in a final attempt to save the German power structure. Röhl's portrayal of Wilhelm's sudden descent to ignominy between 1914 and 1918 raises questions about the accuracy of his description of the Emperor's previously dominant position.

The concluding chapters detail the last two decades of Wilhelm's life. He spent his time in Dutch exile ranting against the Jesuits, Freemasons and, especially, the Jews, who had supposedly thwarted his policies and driven him from his throne. The Nazi seizure of power raised Wilhelm's hopes of a restoration. When his personal emissary, General von Dommes, met Hitler in 1933, he found that the latter was unwilling to discuss any concrete plans for a return to the monarchy, but spent his time railing against the Jews. Like many pre-1914 conservatives, Wilhelm exulted in the Nazis' foreign policy and military triumphs, although more than most he was appalled by their totalitarian excesses, such as the Night of Long Knives (Wilhelm's gay youngest son, August Wilhelm, a prominent stormtrooper, had been on the list to be shot, and was only saved by the personal intervention of Hermann Goering) or Kristallnacht, which disgusted Wilhelm, for all his vehement anti-Semitism.

Röhl's portrait of Wilhelm's last years is of a piece with the picture painted – not always as the author intended – throughout the book. The Emperor was mentally unstable as well as an adherent of an aggressive and militaristic foreign policy, which led up to the catastrophe of 1914. But his mental instability prevented him from effectively pursuing his aims, or even formulating them clearly. Diametrically opposed to Joseph Schumpeter's judgment, John Röhl shows us an Emperor who was partly responsible for an erratic and dangerous foreign policy, but increasingly became an insignificant ruler.