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The Lion's Share: Short History of British Imperialism 1850-1995
On its twentieth anniversary, here is a new edition of this leading general history of British imperialism, from its Victorian heyday to present times. For the Third Edition Bernard Porter has revised and updated the full text. As before, he combines a lively narrative of events with detailed analysis, challenging more conventional interpretations of the progress of imperialism - he argues that the empire both aggravated and obscured a deep-seated malaise in the British economy. For the new edition he has added a concluding section on the legacy of empire. In its revised form it remains as Historical Studies described it, ' the best synoptic view yet presented of the Empire since the coming of the New Imperialism'.
432 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1975
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Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews
December 21, 2022
As the author of this book openly admits in the preface of having crafted a biased book, there seems to be nothing more to offer. Oh, wait there is! This book expertly glosses over a cultural, economic, and human genocide, by throwing ambivalent stances and weirdly crafted subjective opinions, which are mostly laughable. For example, it even suggests how several cultures reacted against the British dominance because they were not modern enough to accept the lofty ideas of industrialisation and progress offered by the British. This book is garnished by historical truths, indeed, but ends up chocking the subaltern reader, while some could find this wholesome.
September 3, 2007
Superb narrative covering the last century and a half British imperialism (cf. the British Empire) that simultaneously presents a lucid and compelling argument that material concerns were always paramount to British imperialists.
September 23, 2025
revisited for my thesis. porter tries to be "apolitical" (which is impossible), and this twinge in his approach and language highlights the downfalls of his "short history," which largely stem from his identity as an old, white British man...
this book is helpful in understanding the imperial mindset, but porter himself gets lost in this language.
this book is helpful in understanding the imperial mindset, but porter himself gets lost in this language.
April 18, 2025
Dr. Bernard Porter’s survey of the British empire is to be commended for the vast breadth and depth of its historical, rhetorical, and economic knowledge - as well as his remarkable capacity for amnesia when discussing its human costs. While his assiduous economic know-how knows no bounds, his sketches of the empire’s subjects and their enduring neocolonial footprints are mere scribbles, more often than not glossed over or out of frame altogether. Readers could almost be forgiven walking away from this work believing British imperialism simultaneously an honorable enterprise when the results turned up praiseworthy, and at one and the same time, a force of nature regrettable but inevitable and unintentioned when the results turned out nightmarish.
In fact, Dr. Porter includes in his introduction a seemingly innocuous paragraph serving as an inoculant for those seeking to remember the human casualties of economic expansion and empire. It will prove an essential lens for blurring the deaths to come. “Empires - defined widely and loosely enough - are the rule in human history, not exceptions…. The same could also be said of diseases, famines and wars.” (3) Ah yes, those regrettable but all-too-inevitable force majeures and acts of God - famines, diseases, and Anglo-Saxon free markets at the barrel of a gun. Removing human intention, responsibility, and agency makes the history of imperialism much easier to swallow.
Of course, the absence of culpability mustn’t end in the history textbooks. Dr. Porter informs us that the amnesia must necessarily roll into present-future. He assures us “[m]odern Britons are not to ‘blame’ for the nineteenth century empire, any more than most of them (anyone born after about 1925) can take any credit for resisting Hitler in the 1940s; events whose only connection with them is that they happen to have been perpetrated by people occupying the same patch of ground as they do today…. No-one living in Britain today should feel either proud or ashamed of the old empire; it had nothing at all to do with them.” (11)
How might the subjects of “the old empire” respond to the above? Dr. Porter might be disappointed when the descendents of colonial subjects take a less clinical and distant view of the old empire, which robbed them and continues to rob them of political stability and economic self-sufficiency.
History would have it that far more than the same “patch of ground” connects the colonial past and post-colonial or neocolonial present. Power, wealth, economic structures, cultural bodies, and political institutions - even ones viewed as antiquated or on their way out - have stubborn ways of reproducing themselves in novel and newly legitimized ways (see The New Jim Crow and America's own transitions from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration). True enough, people today can’t be blamed for their country’s empire a century ago, but privileged people today can be blamed for benefitting from past empire even one or two hundred years later, hence the argument in the US and UK in support of reparations to their minority populations and to a Global South still yoked in debt to the West. No one’s retrospectively assigning blame to upper crust people for their nation’s empire a century prior or taking “credit for resisting Hitler in the 1940s”; this is a straw man misrepresentation of the core argument to redistribute wrongly inherited wealth and respect international law.
Perhaps just as disturbing as Dr. Porter’s amnesia is his casual adoption of the same language of lords like the Earl Greys and statesmen like Gladstone. This choice may at first appear an attempt to tell the imperial story from the imperialists’ perspective, with the author’s own thoughts and opinions somewhere in the background, that is, until one realizes Porter’s personal musings bleed alarmingly well into the language of the imperialists, the author’s representations of the colonial situation and those of Earl Grey’s increasingly difficult to parse.
“Consequently here [in mid-19th century West Indies and South Africa] the government had to intervene directly, and expensively, to defend its interests” (60). Is it the job of the historian construe the occupation of the West Indies and South Africa as ‘defense’? Where do England’s borders end? The English Channel? Or wherever “its interests” lie?
Further down the same page, Dr. Porter informs us that New Zealand in the 1850s was a common clash “over land between an obstinate native population which had more than it could use, and a voracious immigrant population which wanted more than it had.” (60) He is quick to enlighten us that the immigrants’ voracity was based on “a real, material need for more territory to satisfy their growing numbers” and a strong obsession “that land should not be held on to only to be neglected or misused” (60).
How might the Maori people view the above? Might they have a history of their land different from one of ‘neglect’ or ‘misuse’ for some 700 years before European contact? It’s worth mentioning that Dr. Porter is not explicitly quoting some colonial footsoldier in these paragraphs, nor has he made any reference or note to journals, treatises, or parliamentary speeches or debates on the subject; these are his judgements as a historian playing devil’s advocate (at best) or apostle (at worst) with English colonialism. I can count on two hands the times Dr. Porter quotes the empire’s subjects. Here, the amnesiac, clinical, and distant nature of his assertions when evaluating colonialism’s more sordid legacies evaporate away. His intimacy with the intentions and ideas of imperialists become ironclad whenever evaluating them in their 19th-20th century habitat.
The clincher comes in the final chapters, as Dr. Porter evaluates the formal empire’s passing and its potential reemergence. “Is it not also arguable - today, in the early twenty-first century, more than it was, perhaps, thirty years ago, when the first edition of this book appeared - that empires may not necessarily be the worst things to befall their subjects, if they protect them from the kinds of forces that fill the vacuums that are left when they disband? Governments are not always the most powerful or cruel of masters. They can protect people from other cruelties: their own among themselves, for example; foreign aggressors’; or natural afflictions, like an unreliable climate, or wild beasts, or a free-roaming capitalism, red in tooth and claw.” (348)
At last, we are confronted with a cornerstone in Dr. Porter’s sand castle thesis; that is, the British empire protected the people under its heel from themselves. Oh, of course, without the British empire, how would the people of Africa or Asia have protected themselves from the “unreliable climate” or “wild beasts” they protected themselves from since the dawn of their civilizations? How else could the Global South have protected themselves from the “free-roaming capitalism” which Britain (and its sibling western powers) injected them with? How else could the Indian people have defended themselves against the internal religious strife which Britain helped to foment in the years leading to its independence? How else could the Irish have protected themselves from the 19th-century famine, during which England actively siphoned food from Ireland?
Or perhaps, should a historian bother to sample from the colonial or neocolonial subjects they purport to write about - from the Indians under the British Raj to the East Timorese under US-Indonesian occupation - most anyone would prefer a tumultuous but decolonized reality than a gilded cage.
The concluding paragraph of the 2004 edition states: “‘Benevolence’ is a matter of opinion and judgement. ‘Progress’ may not be.” (369) Only Dr. Porter could be so adept at his own rhetorical games as to confuse the ambiguities of benevolence and progress, to believe that benevolence - a value universal to humanity - is obscure and progress alone - something more subjective than most any word invented by the English - is certain. Should he have bothered to quote his colonial subjects in depth, he might have come across a line by a certain Mr. Gandhi which complicates his conclusions: “there is no path to peace. Peace is the path.”
In fact, Dr. Porter includes in his introduction a seemingly innocuous paragraph serving as an inoculant for those seeking to remember the human casualties of economic expansion and empire. It will prove an essential lens for blurring the deaths to come. “Empires - defined widely and loosely enough - are the rule in human history, not exceptions…. The same could also be said of diseases, famines and wars.” (3) Ah yes, those regrettable but all-too-inevitable force majeures and acts of God - famines, diseases, and Anglo-Saxon free markets at the barrel of a gun. Removing human intention, responsibility, and agency makes the history of imperialism much easier to swallow.
Of course, the absence of culpability mustn’t end in the history textbooks. Dr. Porter informs us that the amnesia must necessarily roll into present-future. He assures us “[m]odern Britons are not to ‘blame’ for the nineteenth century empire, any more than most of them (anyone born after about 1925) can take any credit for resisting Hitler in the 1940s; events whose only connection with them is that they happen to have been perpetrated by people occupying the same patch of ground as they do today…. No-one living in Britain today should feel either proud or ashamed of the old empire; it had nothing at all to do with them.” (11)
How might the subjects of “the old empire” respond to the above? Dr. Porter might be disappointed when the descendents of colonial subjects take a less clinical and distant view of the old empire, which robbed them and continues to rob them of political stability and economic self-sufficiency.
History would have it that far more than the same “patch of ground” connects the colonial past and post-colonial or neocolonial present. Power, wealth, economic structures, cultural bodies, and political institutions - even ones viewed as antiquated or on their way out - have stubborn ways of reproducing themselves in novel and newly legitimized ways (see The New Jim Crow and America's own transitions from slavery to Jim Crow to mass incarceration). True enough, people today can’t be blamed for their country’s empire a century ago, but privileged people today can be blamed for benefitting from past empire even one or two hundred years later, hence the argument in the US and UK in support of reparations to their minority populations and to a Global South still yoked in debt to the West. No one’s retrospectively assigning blame to upper crust people for their nation’s empire a century prior or taking “credit for resisting Hitler in the 1940s”; this is a straw man misrepresentation of the core argument to redistribute wrongly inherited wealth and respect international law.
Perhaps just as disturbing as Dr. Porter’s amnesia is his casual adoption of the same language of lords like the Earl Greys and statesmen like Gladstone. This choice may at first appear an attempt to tell the imperial story from the imperialists’ perspective, with the author’s own thoughts and opinions somewhere in the background, that is, until one realizes Porter’s personal musings bleed alarmingly well into the language of the imperialists, the author’s representations of the colonial situation and those of Earl Grey’s increasingly difficult to parse.
“Consequently here [in mid-19th century West Indies and South Africa] the government had to intervene directly, and expensively, to defend its interests” (60). Is it the job of the historian construe the occupation of the West Indies and South Africa as ‘defense’? Where do England’s borders end? The English Channel? Or wherever “its interests” lie?
Further down the same page, Dr. Porter informs us that New Zealand in the 1850s was a common clash “over land between an obstinate native population which had more than it could use, and a voracious immigrant population which wanted more than it had.” (60) He is quick to enlighten us that the immigrants’ voracity was based on “a real, material need for more territory to satisfy their growing numbers” and a strong obsession “that land should not be held on to only to be neglected or misused” (60).
How might the Maori people view the above? Might they have a history of their land different from one of ‘neglect’ or ‘misuse’ for some 700 years before European contact? It’s worth mentioning that Dr. Porter is not explicitly quoting some colonial footsoldier in these paragraphs, nor has he made any reference or note to journals, treatises, or parliamentary speeches or debates on the subject; these are his judgements as a historian playing devil’s advocate (at best) or apostle (at worst) with English colonialism. I can count on two hands the times Dr. Porter quotes the empire’s subjects. Here, the amnesiac, clinical, and distant nature of his assertions when evaluating colonialism’s more sordid legacies evaporate away. His intimacy with the intentions and ideas of imperialists become ironclad whenever evaluating them in their 19th-20th century habitat.
The clincher comes in the final chapters, as Dr. Porter evaluates the formal empire’s passing and its potential reemergence. “Is it not also arguable - today, in the early twenty-first century, more than it was, perhaps, thirty years ago, when the first edition of this book appeared - that empires may not necessarily be the worst things to befall their subjects, if they protect them from the kinds of forces that fill the vacuums that are left when they disband? Governments are not always the most powerful or cruel of masters. They can protect people from other cruelties: their own among themselves, for example; foreign aggressors’; or natural afflictions, like an unreliable climate, or wild beasts, or a free-roaming capitalism, red in tooth and claw.” (348)
At last, we are confronted with a cornerstone in Dr. Porter’s sand castle thesis; that is, the British empire protected the people under its heel from themselves. Oh, of course, without the British empire, how would the people of Africa or Asia have protected themselves from the “unreliable climate” or “wild beasts” they protected themselves from since the dawn of their civilizations? How else could the Global South have protected themselves from the “free-roaming capitalism” which Britain (and its sibling western powers) injected them with? How else could the Indian people have defended themselves against the internal religious strife which Britain helped to foment in the years leading to its independence? How else could the Irish have protected themselves from the 19th-century famine, during which England actively siphoned food from Ireland?
Or perhaps, should a historian bother to sample from the colonial or neocolonial subjects they purport to write about - from the Indians under the British Raj to the East Timorese under US-Indonesian occupation - most anyone would prefer a tumultuous but decolonized reality than a gilded cage.
The concluding paragraph of the 2004 edition states: “‘Benevolence’ is a matter of opinion and judgement. ‘Progress’ may not be.” (369) Only Dr. Porter could be so adept at his own rhetorical games as to confuse the ambiguities of benevolence and progress, to believe that benevolence - a value universal to humanity - is obscure and progress alone - something more subjective than most any word invented by the English - is certain. Should he have bothered to quote his colonial subjects in depth, he might have come across a line by a certain Mr. Gandhi which complicates his conclusions: “there is no path to peace. Peace is the path.”
October 10, 2012
Really good book on British Imperialism, it is very well written and easy to read. Uses a number of primary and secondary resources, with many quotations from important figures during the height of british imperialism (1901). there was a good use of maps which i find useful, and finally a good use of figures and stats to support Bernard Porters point. My only real criticism will be that Porter does expect the reader to know, or have some general knowledge of british imperialism which does help as porter goes deep into different places around the empire which some readers may start confusing. Overall it is a great book and should be read to seal any doubts of what imperialism is and what it stood for.
January 13, 2011
Great overview of the British Empire. Clear, organized, and easy to read.
July 19, 2019
An eye-opening look at the British Empire and how it was not as mighty as it seemed. The British Empire is a good example that the farther away that one is from it, meaning the more time that has passed, the more one's perception of that thing (here, the Empire) will depend on other people telling you what to think. Here, in other books, the British Empire is often described as a mighty empire, beloved by its subject but what we learn here is that it's hold on its subject was a lot more tenuous than was previously known. Great book!
September 1, 2011
I'd say 3.5 stars, maybe 3.75. It's not as good for a general audience as I had hoped. It's thematic content assumes too much knowledge of the reader-- which is good as a review of major themes of British Empire, but not terribly useful for someone just becoming interested in British Empire and hoping to get a firm footing. We'll see what my students make of this tonight.
January 13, 2013
A phenomenal anthology of the epitome and collapse of the British Empire through it's transition into the European Community. It provides great details of the development of the various dominions and overseas territories.
May 12, 2013
Pleasant narrative to the history of the British Empire, could have been more critical at parts but considerably better than most British historian accounts of Empire - a refreshing alternative to the apologist agendas of most of the British historiography around Empire.
Displaying 1 - 10 of 10 reviews