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The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empire
Sir Alan Burns was the most prominent defender of the British empire in its final stages. The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns' Epic Defense of the British Empires studies Burns' career and his arguments in defense of European colonialism. Bruce Gilley describes Burns' intellectual and policy battles with opponents of colonialism and his efforts to slow the decolonization process. The Last Imperialist takes readers through Burns' critical roles in World War I, the economic development of British Honduras (contemporary Belize), the forging of the Anglo-American alliance in World War II, and the political development of the Gold Coast (contemporary Ghana). The Last Imperialist closes with an examination of Burns' final contributions to colonial affairs in the 1960s and 1970s, a time when his worst predictions had been vindicated. A revisionist history of European colonialism, The Last Imperialist analyzes anti-colonial arguments in the context of the colonial encounter as seen through the life and works of Sir Alan Burns.
278 pages, Hardcover
First published October 15, 2020
27 people are currently reading
1402 people want to read
About the author
Bruce Gilley
13 books67 followersBruce Gilley is Professor of Political Science at the Mark O. Hatfield School of Government at Portland State University. His research centers on comparative and international politics and public policy. His work covers issues as diverse as democracy, climate change, political legitimacy, and international conflict. He is a specialist on the politics of China and Asia. He is the author of four university-press books, including The Nature of Asian Politics (2015), The Right to Rule: How States Win and Lose Legitimacy (2009) and China’s Democratic Future (2004) in addition to several co-edited volumes. His scholarly articles have appeared in journals including Comparative Political Studies and the European Journal of Political Research and his policy articles in journals including Foreign Affairs and the Washington Quarterly. A member of the editorial boards of the Journal of Democracy and the Journal of Contemporary China, Gilley has received grants from the Smith-Richardson Foundation and the Taiwan Foundation for Democracy. He was a Commonwealth Scholar at Oxford University from 1989 to 1991 and a Woodrow Wilson Scholar at Princeton University from 2004 to 2006. From 1992 to 2002, he was a journalist in Hong Kong where he wrote for the Eastern Express newspaper and then the Far Eastern Economic Review magazine.His biggest scoop was exposing an illicit technology transfer by a Stanford professor to China's military.
Dr. Gilley is the Principal of Policy Foresight Associates LLC, a Portland-based firm providing research and strategy advice on public policies and programs for clients in the United States and abroad. He is chapter president of the Oregon Association of Scholars, the state chapter of the National Association of Scholars and member of the Heterodox Academy. He is founding signatory of the Oregon Academic Faculty Pledge on Freedom.
Dr. Gilley is the Principal of Policy Foresight Associates LLC, a Portland-based firm providing research and strategy advice on public policies and programs for clients in the United States and abroad. He is chapter president of the Oregon Association of Scholars, the state chapter of the National Association of Scholars and member of the Heterodox Academy. He is founding signatory of the Oregon Academic Faculty Pledge on Freedom.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
November 14, 2021
The author of this book is a regressive thinker who proudly proclaims on the About the Author page that he's "probably the academic most likely to be no-platformed in Britain". I didn't know that when I signed up for a Goodreads giveaway.
Anyway you can tell that the author is very pro-colonialism but even more so is anti-anti-colonialist. There's a version of this book which examines the life and views of Sir Alan Burns and evaluates them in the context of his own times and the broad history of colonialism, looking at a relatively liberal colonialist who meant well (and may have even been good) but who had blindspots to the evils of colonialism and the fact that the apparently strong colonial institutions were just covering a rotten system.
This is not that book.
The polemic is strong throughout the book. The people we're supposed to view as "the bad guys" are strategically named while the other bit players are not. Burns brother being a Communist leader is trotted out in almost every chapter. Every mention of "black spots" on the colonial record are outweighed 30-1 by apologetics.
Meanwhile Burns is pretty interesting as a character and the parts that aren't heavily laden with polemics are pretty good biography. Its mostly well written and readable, not a given with a biography of a relatively minor player.
Overall wouldn't buy but interesting nonetheless.
Anyway you can tell that the author is very pro-colonialism but even more so is anti-anti-colonialist. There's a version of this book which examines the life and views of Sir Alan Burns and evaluates them in the context of his own times and the broad history of colonialism, looking at a relatively liberal colonialist who meant well (and may have even been good) but who had blindspots to the evils of colonialism and the fact that the apparently strong colonial institutions were just covering a rotten system.
This is not that book.
The polemic is strong throughout the book. The people we're supposed to view as "the bad guys" are strategically named while the other bit players are not. Burns brother being a Communist leader is trotted out in almost every chapter. Every mention of "black spots" on the colonial record are outweighed 30-1 by apologetics.
Meanwhile Burns is pretty interesting as a character and the parts that aren't heavily laden with polemics are pretty good biography. Its mostly well written and readable, not a given with a biography of a relatively minor player.
Overall wouldn't buy but interesting nonetheless.
March 20, 2024
This is the use of biography for a political purpose. The author tells us the story of Sir Alan Burns, who worked across the British Empire from before World War One into the 1960s. Burns was a committed British Imperialist, and Gilley uses his experiences and voice to make the case that being colonized by the most powerful, liberal state in the world was much better for human flourishing in the places where it happened than the alternatives. Further, decolonization generally was a tragedy for the majority of those caught up in it, which made everything worse for them for decades.
The author, Bruce Gilley is famous (or infamous) for writing the article “The Case for Colonialism” in 2017, which he withdrew from the journal “Third World Quarterly” after the editors received death threats. This is a sort of riposte to his critics: the answer to post-colonial studies. "[O]rdered rule by a relatively liberal state was almost always better than premodern rule by a traditional enemy or indigenous tyrant." For someone looking for a balanced view, this is not it. It is valuable, though, because books like this are so rare. The other side has been done over and over. It amazes me that scholars can declare themselves Communists, which means that they follow a ruined ideology responsible for the death of tens of millions, and still be published using that perspective in a respectable journal. Having any sort of riposte, however, is considered so awful that it will draw death threats. The author used private papers and photographs held by the Burns’ family, official documents, other scholars’ works, and Burns’ writings themselves for his sources.
Burns’ story is one of rags to responsibility. He was born in the British Caribbean and grew up poor and fatherless in St. Kitts. His family had the money for only a few years of schooling in England before he joined the colonial service as a teenager. Burns worked across the British Empire: Bahamas, British Honduras, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Colonial Office in London, and for 10 years after World War Two as the British representative to the United Nations Trusteeship Council. He started at the lowest grade and eventually made it to become a much-celebrated, competent, progressive governor of two colonies. He fought as a young man in World War One in Africa and helped hold together the empire as a governor in West Africa in World War Two. His brother, Emile Burns, was a leading British Communist and helped to train some of Alan Burns’ great nationalist rivals. As a staunch imperialist, Burns lived long enough to watch everything he had worked for fall apart.
The author has some good points. Read Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s “Empires in World History”. Colonialism requires the consent of the colonized. Alien rule has to be perceived as legitimate by most of the people most of the time because there just aren’t enough police and army to repress everyone all the time. The book details how this was so. During World Wars One and Two, when police and army garrisons were withdrawn from the colonies in Africa to fight in more active theaters, people stayed loyal. Had they rebelled, as in Ireland, the British would have had to withdraw. They didn’t, and when asked to fight against the Germans, hundreds of thousands did. Riots and disorders that were often started by common street thugs were not precursors of an anti-colonial struggle, as post-colonial writers have stated. The common people were glad to see them brought to justice.
The author details all the other good things that late British colonialism brought to places like the Caribbean and Africa. Hospitals, schools, the cures for diseases, roads, sewage systems, power plants, railways, constitutional, relatively corruption-free government, antislavery, courts and the rule of law, the list goes on. The colonizers brought the forgotten history of the colonized to light. During Burns’ time as governor in Belize, London became a center of Mayan research. This is one example of many. Archaeologists’ excavation methods were often crude, and they often took the objects back to London, both condemned now, but the alternative was that the sites would have been looted by locals who had no idea what this stuff was, and the stones would have been taken away to build houses or roads or something. Burns himself wrote the first history of Nigeria.
Further, it was better to be colonized by a liberal power than an illiberal one. George Orwell said the British Empire was bad, but what wanted to replace it (German fascism and Japanese militarism) was worse. In “War in Human Civilization”, Azar Gat had a good point when he asked what would have happened to Gandhi had he faced Hitler.
Anyway, the book narrates Burns’ career in the context of the interwar period, when the rationale for colonization was to build up the colonies so that they could govern themselves. Build infrastructure and political institutions so that they could become functioning, democratic, liberal, capitalist states. That is what Burns did as best he could. And he believed in his mission. Independence someday, when the colonials were ready. As the author documented, many, perhaps most, colonials agreed with him.
After World War Two, this became more difficult to do. The international order, particularly in the body of the United Nations, but also including the United States, the USSR, China, and various other post-imperial countries repeatedly attacked the legitimacy of the concept of empire for any reason. Public opinion in Britain was likely to agree. England was broke and empires were expensive. As the political winds shifted against him, Burns dug in his heels and stated his case. There were sympathetic elites, but he could not prevail.
Something missing in the book is the strategic and economic rationale for giving up the empire in Africa, given in P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’ “British Imperialism, 1688-2015”. Except for South Africa, there really wasn't much there to interest the Europeans. They were there as much to deny the space to their rivals as anything else. They were never able to extract enough economically to make the colonies solvent, and so any economic or political development was just an expense for British taxpayers. Once everyone started giving up their colonies, the strategic rationale to keep them evaporated.
"[A] legitimate form of alien rule that brought more justice, opportunity, and prospects for human flourishing than would otherwise have arisen in the places it was found." I think this is true for some places and periods but not others. You need to forget about the massacres and the racism and the famines and the gunboats and opium and many other things in many other places. “Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Burns was an excellent governor, but others were not. The author never misses an opportunity to defend the British Empire and it gets tiring at times.
On the other hand, I generally agree that evolution is better than revolution. Certainly, in many places in Africa and elsewhere, the elites who took over from the colonizers were much worse than those they replaced. They pursued cockamamie socialist economic schemes and massive corruption, with the result that standards of living plummeted. Small, violent elites seized power and erected political structures far more repressive and at the same time ineffectual than those they had inherited. Ethnic cleansing. And most of it was ignored because white people were not involved. Many of the colonies that held off on independence into the later 1960s or 70s, because their political culture had been built up, avoided that. Gilley says that the fact that the United Nations Trusteeship Council never prepared for decolonization, while at the same time advocating for it, was “a crime against humanity”.
The author tells us about a poignant meeting between the ex-governor of the Gold Coast, Burns, and Joseph Danquah, who was a lawyer and major nationalist foil to the governor when he was in office. Danquah was gloating that he had forced out the governor and independence was in the wind. Within a few years after independence, Danquah had been executed by his political rival, Kwame Nkrumah. Burns died in his bed in England in 1980 at the ripe old age of 92.
The author, Bruce Gilley is famous (or infamous) for writing the article “The Case for Colonialism” in 2017, which he withdrew from the journal “Third World Quarterly” after the editors received death threats. This is a sort of riposte to his critics: the answer to post-colonial studies. "[O]rdered rule by a relatively liberal state was almost always better than premodern rule by a traditional enemy or indigenous tyrant." For someone looking for a balanced view, this is not it. It is valuable, though, because books like this are so rare. The other side has been done over and over. It amazes me that scholars can declare themselves Communists, which means that they follow a ruined ideology responsible for the death of tens of millions, and still be published using that perspective in a respectable journal. Having any sort of riposte, however, is considered so awful that it will draw death threats. The author used private papers and photographs held by the Burns’ family, official documents, other scholars’ works, and Burns’ writings themselves for his sources.
Burns’ story is one of rags to responsibility. He was born in the British Caribbean and grew up poor and fatherless in St. Kitts. His family had the money for only a few years of schooling in England before he joined the colonial service as a teenager. Burns worked across the British Empire: Bahamas, British Honduras, the Gold Coast, Nigeria, the Colonial Office in London, and for 10 years after World War Two as the British representative to the United Nations Trusteeship Council. He started at the lowest grade and eventually made it to become a much-celebrated, competent, progressive governor of two colonies. He fought as a young man in World War One in Africa and helped hold together the empire as a governor in West Africa in World War Two. His brother, Emile Burns, was a leading British Communist and helped to train some of Alan Burns’ great nationalist rivals. As a staunch imperialist, Burns lived long enough to watch everything he had worked for fall apart.
The author has some good points. Read Jane Burbank and Frederick Cooper’s “Empires in World History”. Colonialism requires the consent of the colonized. Alien rule has to be perceived as legitimate by most of the people most of the time because there just aren’t enough police and army to repress everyone all the time. The book details how this was so. During World Wars One and Two, when police and army garrisons were withdrawn from the colonies in Africa to fight in more active theaters, people stayed loyal. Had they rebelled, as in Ireland, the British would have had to withdraw. They didn’t, and when asked to fight against the Germans, hundreds of thousands did. Riots and disorders that were often started by common street thugs were not precursors of an anti-colonial struggle, as post-colonial writers have stated. The common people were glad to see them brought to justice.
The author details all the other good things that late British colonialism brought to places like the Caribbean and Africa. Hospitals, schools, the cures for diseases, roads, sewage systems, power plants, railways, constitutional, relatively corruption-free government, antislavery, courts and the rule of law, the list goes on. The colonizers brought the forgotten history of the colonized to light. During Burns’ time as governor in Belize, London became a center of Mayan research. This is one example of many. Archaeologists’ excavation methods were often crude, and they often took the objects back to London, both condemned now, but the alternative was that the sites would have been looted by locals who had no idea what this stuff was, and the stones would have been taken away to build houses or roads or something. Burns himself wrote the first history of Nigeria.
Further, it was better to be colonized by a liberal power than an illiberal one. George Orwell said the British Empire was bad, but what wanted to replace it (German fascism and Japanese militarism) was worse. In “War in Human Civilization”, Azar Gat had a good point when he asked what would have happened to Gandhi had he faced Hitler.
Anyway, the book narrates Burns’ career in the context of the interwar period, when the rationale for colonization was to build up the colonies so that they could govern themselves. Build infrastructure and political institutions so that they could become functioning, democratic, liberal, capitalist states. That is what Burns did as best he could. And he believed in his mission. Independence someday, when the colonials were ready. As the author documented, many, perhaps most, colonials agreed with him.
After World War Two, this became more difficult to do. The international order, particularly in the body of the United Nations, but also including the United States, the USSR, China, and various other post-imperial countries repeatedly attacked the legitimacy of the concept of empire for any reason. Public opinion in Britain was likely to agree. England was broke and empires were expensive. As the political winds shifted against him, Burns dug in his heels and stated his case. There were sympathetic elites, but he could not prevail.
Something missing in the book is the strategic and economic rationale for giving up the empire in Africa, given in P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins’ “British Imperialism, 1688-2015”. Except for South Africa, there really wasn't much there to interest the Europeans. They were there as much to deny the space to their rivals as anything else. They were never able to extract enough economically to make the colonies solvent, and so any economic or political development was just an expense for British taxpayers. Once everyone started giving up their colonies, the strategic rationale to keep them evaporated.
"[A] legitimate form of alien rule that brought more justice, opportunity, and prospects for human flourishing than would otherwise have arisen in the places it was found." I think this is true for some places and periods but not others. You need to forget about the massacres and the racism and the famines and the gunboats and opium and many other things in many other places. “Whatever happens, we have got/The Maxim gun, and they have not.” Burns was an excellent governor, but others were not. The author never misses an opportunity to defend the British Empire and it gets tiring at times.
On the other hand, I generally agree that evolution is better than revolution. Certainly, in many places in Africa and elsewhere, the elites who took over from the colonizers were much worse than those they replaced. They pursued cockamamie socialist economic schemes and massive corruption, with the result that standards of living plummeted. Small, violent elites seized power and erected political structures far more repressive and at the same time ineffectual than those they had inherited. Ethnic cleansing. And most of it was ignored because white people were not involved. Many of the colonies that held off on independence into the later 1960s or 70s, because their political culture had been built up, avoided that. Gilley says that the fact that the United Nations Trusteeship Council never prepared for decolonization, while at the same time advocating for it, was “a crime against humanity”.
The author tells us about a poignant meeting between the ex-governor of the Gold Coast, Burns, and Joseph Danquah, who was a lawyer and major nationalist foil to the governor when he was in office. Danquah was gloating that he had forced out the governor and independence was in the wind. Within a few years after independence, Danquah had been executed by his political rival, Kwame Nkrumah. Burns died in his bed in England in 1980 at the ripe old age of 92.
June 28, 2024
I wish I could rate this 6 stars - Essential reading for understanding the modern political context for Africa, South America, and Eastern Europe.
September 17, 2022
This is a bit of a strange hybrid between a decent if impartial biography and an insufficiently developed pro-colonial polemic. Burns' life certainly provides rich material for a study of the waning years of empire. As another reviewer noted, the "Burns good X bad" framing is tiresome and detracts from the sense of adventure and self-effacing humor of its subject. Colonial services appear to have attracted a range of personalities, with an interesting interplay of British, expatriate British, and various "subject" cultures and social mores. Between ethnically diverse territories, migration between territories within the empire (discussed briefly in the case of Fiji), and London politics, there's far to much to cover for one biography, so I can't really fault the author for not covering these issues comprehensively. Nevertheless, there is a certain breathlessness in the political context provided in each chapter, as if lingering on more uncomfortable incidents would detract from the message. This gets to the main problem with the attempt at a broader historical argument here - Gilley's defense of colonialism is simply not presented with sufficient scope to properly evaluate. There's a convincing portrayal of Burns as one of the most capable officials in the later part of the British Empire, but Gilley seems to be attempting to leap beyond that to defend the entire history of the British Empire and potentially all European empires.
October 17, 2024
The Last Imperialist: Sir Alan Burns’ epic defense of the British Empire by Bruce Gilley
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A thought provoking and relevant piece on the overall effects of British colonialism on the world. We learn the story of Sir Alan Burns and his dedicated life of service to the British Empire from his various governorships (British Honduras, Bahamas, Gold Coast) to being representative to the United Nations for the UK 🇬🇧, as well as his unapologetic stance and defense of colonial policies and stewardship. In the book it is argued, backed by data and historical context, that British colonialism has had an overall benevolent effect on its subjects around the globe, preparing them for independence and self rule much better than countries who jumped into self governance much too quickly with disastrous and deadly results (i.e. Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Congo, etc..). Certainly a controversial topic/book in an age where it is still all the rage to look down on western culture and influence and embrace socialist/communist ideologies that sound good on paper but lead to widespread suffering and death( i.e. China, North Korea, USSR, Cambodia). After reading about Sir Alan’s life and exploits the reader can clearly see a man who gave his life to making the word a better place for all in the places he served. Every form of governance has its shortfalls and mistakes with grave consequences are often made, but eventually it is important to reflect on the decisions made through history and weigh the benefits and costs of such decisions.
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#read #colonialism #british #siralanburns #uk #africa #reading #bookstagram #bookrecommendations #books #imperial #england #empire #britishempire
.
.
.
A thought provoking and relevant piece on the overall effects of British colonialism on the world. We learn the story of Sir Alan Burns and his dedicated life of service to the British Empire from his various governorships (British Honduras, Bahamas, Gold Coast) to being representative to the United Nations for the UK 🇬🇧, as well as his unapologetic stance and defense of colonial policies and stewardship. In the book it is argued, backed by data and historical context, that British colonialism has had an overall benevolent effect on its subjects around the globe, preparing them for independence and self rule much better than countries who jumped into self governance much too quickly with disastrous and deadly results (i.e. Nigeria, Pakistan, Somalia, Congo, etc..). Certainly a controversial topic/book in an age where it is still all the rage to look down on western culture and influence and embrace socialist/communist ideologies that sound good on paper but lead to widespread suffering and death( i.e. China, North Korea, USSR, Cambodia). After reading about Sir Alan’s life and exploits the reader can clearly see a man who gave his life to making the word a better place for all in the places he served. Every form of governance has its shortfalls and mistakes with grave consequences are often made, but eventually it is important to reflect on the decisions made through history and weigh the benefits and costs of such decisions.
.
.
#read #colonialism #british #siralanburns #uk #africa #reading #bookstagram #bookrecommendations #books #imperial #england #empire #britishempire
September 7, 2025
This is going to be a short review as I think the world needs more Bruce Gilleys and Nigel Bigger's brave enough to counteract the modern false narrative about the British Empire, I am sure both of them left themselves open to abuse, just for saying the inconvenient historical truth.
If you have any interest in the British Empire and you subscribe to the modern empire of violence narrative, this book will change your view point if you still have an open mind and it like me you don't it will give you lots of points to counter the inevitable " the empire was quite like the Nazis" (and yes I have heard this quite often).
If you have any interest in the British Empire and you subscribe to the modern empire of violence narrative, this book will change your view point if you still have an open mind and it like me you don't it will give you lots of points to counter the inevitable " the empire was quite like the Nazis" (and yes I have heard this quite often).
September 22, 2023
I’ve always believed that the British empire was a bad thing for the native peoples but that was just the way the world was back then.
After reading this book I’m convinced that the British empire was an amazing thing for the native peoples and that it’s a shame it came to an end so early.
After reading this book I’m convinced that the British empire was an amazing thing for the native peoples and that it’s a shame it came to an end so early.
August 30, 2023
A fantastic defense of colonialism and empire
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews