I finished this book a while ago so it's not amazingly fresh in my mind but I'll give this review my best shot. I really enjoyed reading this book and I feel it has given me an excellent education into Britain's colonial history. I'm British and throughout the book, I wrestled with the ideas behind colonialism and the actions and events that occurred in its name. I disagreed with Ferguson's perspectives as being biased and then when explaining them to my wife, often seemed to change to my mind and support his arguments so the book really got me to think deeply.

The most interesting idea of this book for me was that the reason the British Empire collapsed because it attempted to defend its colonies from rival colonial powers and the evidence seems to point quite clearly that colonies under the control of rival empires such as Germany or Belgium seemed to fare much more poorly in comparison to those under British control. This seems to be because the British had (for the time) more enlightened views surrounding concepts of liberty which the colonists ironically used to make a case for independence. The British even enforced these ideas of liberty on other European countries (such as securing Portugal's permission to board ships suspected of transporting slaves). In sum, the British serve up their fair share of oppression and atrocity but it was better than the alternative (as Burma discovered with the Japanese).

The book does describe many of the atrocities committed in name of colonialism and is scathing of the ineptitude of some of those responsible. However, it was refreshing to read a book that included advantages of colonialism or comparisons of what could have happened to those countries economically or socially. We have to understand history not from today's expectations of moral behaviour but rather what was the norm at that time and who tried to establish a better sense of ethical conduct (although one suspects those with more enlightened moral views were probably wiped out by those who wrote the history books?)

I found Ferguson's writing just as his work on TV - concise and gripping.

A Tory poster boy who has fled to the USA where his political leanings are more acceptable, Ferguson’s narrative facility is squandered by his failure to critique empire from a reasonable perspective. The work of the historian is fundamentally interpretative, and Ferguson falls at the first hurdle because ideology is more important an informed analysis. There are achievements of the Empire worth celebrating, but this book — which is really a TV companion and not a work of serious history — fails to deal with the human cost of empire. What else is history except placing human acts in the context of time and times?

I suppose I can look past this book’s grossly biased Eurocentricism, under the umbrella of it being of a singular historical lens.
I cannot forgive how freaking b o r i n g it was though.

A thorough, insightful and well-rounded look at the British Empire and it's effects for good and ill.

This book is fine if you are reading it with an appreciation for the purpose that I suspect the historian, Ferguson, was aiming for -- which is to say, framing Britain's role in the empire as positively as you possibly could in a modern environment. I won't ruminate on this point too much. Quite simply, you will either find this irritating, or not. If you are the former don't read this. If you are the latter, and are reading to enlighten yourself on the benefits of the empire, well, this book is adequate, but not brilliant.

Firstly this account is more of an overview than anything else. A book just shy of 400 pages could never possibly begin to dive into the complexity of the British Empire (nor most other topics, for that matter). What you have here is a quick, somewhat bumpy ride through the annals of history by a driver with a fairly stable, and yet not entirely trustworthy, grip. He admits his own biases at the start of the book, but as I have said this is not a historical novel that seeks to reinvent the wheel.

The actual benefits of empire isn't discussed as deeply as I hoped - for example there was little technical discussion about changes to legal systems/law enforcement across the Empire - and was largely only talked about in the conclusion. So instead this book is more of a tamed-down chronology of the past, avoiding the worst elements of the Empire while tiptoeing around the best.

What pushes me toward giving this book 3 stars (rather than less) is how Ferguson constructs the narrative. He begins with the early empire and ends with its destruction, but having read a fair amount on this topic I would say he manages to select some of the most crucial elements and retells them concisely, and in a digestible way. As a Dummy's Guide to the British Empire Through the Eyes of a Fairly Sympathetic Brit, which is what the book is really intended to be, it succeeds relatively well. I would cautiously recommend this to anybody who knows nothing about the Empire, and would like to dip a toe into the subject. As a historical account, it is interesting but lacks flavour.

For a detailed dive into the Empire, Jan Morris' Pax Britannica trilogy is the far superior option. Similar to Ferguson, she has a personal involvement with empire and is therefore nostalgic toward elements of it, but while appreciating its motivations and desires, better expresses where it fell short and how some of its lasting impacts have failed in the long-term.

I think I've mentioned before that I have developed a habit of listening to controversial audiobooks while running. Ideally, it should be something I disagree with a bit but not out-and-out frothing awfulness. People like Ferguson, Douglas Murray and Peter Hitchens are perfect for this because I get a mixture of thought-provoking passages and chapters that make me want to scream in frustration, and this boosts the adrenaline and makes me run faster.
Considered from that point of view, this was a tiny bit disappointing because he's not in full own-the-libs mode. He criticises the empire a lot but differentiates it from other regimes (tha nazis for example) with whom it is sometimes stupidly compared. All in all, fairly tame, really, and I hold Ferguson personally responsible for my lacklustre 10k time.
It's quite a good history though, tracing the empire's ramschakle growth through trade, piracy, well-meaning missionaries and ruthless bastards, outlining the crimes, the unintended consequences and the legacy, both good and bad. He comes to bury the empire, not praise it, and he's a pretty good undertaker.