Bernard Porter writes:

‘The end of empire is not a pretty thing if examined too closely,’ as Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper put it in their two-volume history of Britain’s colonial wars in India and South-East Asia from the 1940s to 1963, which forms the perfect complement to Hyam’s work. It was clearly not as pretty as that ‘great ship goes down’ image implies, certainly for those on board. It seems uglier in this account than in most others because of the authors’ insistence on describing these events at ground, and even underground, level – what they call the ‘darker underside’. Another effect of this (and part of its purpose) is to shift the perspective from which most Britons (though not Americans) view World War Two, from the European fronts to the ‘Great Asian War’ that Bayly and Harper see as raging from 1937 to 1975, and which might well be more significant in the long term, especially if Asia continues to rise in terms of world power. This is what makes these volumes so original and compelling.

(LRB 2 August 2007)

Allen Lane | hardback 673 pp. |ISBN: 9780713997828