|
     
 A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British Empire and the moment when America became a world superpower — published on the sixtieth anniversary of Britain’s withdrawal from Palestine.
“I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.” Winston Churchill’s famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the worldwide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a global scale to defeat Hitler and his allies—and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill’s defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain’s empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned.
How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke’s book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swift-paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures through whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events.
Clarke traces the intimate and conflicted nature of the “special relationship,” showing how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and reveals how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it ended. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.
“It is a complicated story—involving economic imperatives, political obstacles and social demands—but Mr. Clarke makes it all clear and captivating.” —Wall Street Journal
“Sharp…Clarke’s greatest strength is that he recounts in painful detail the numerous humiliations and embarrassments that came with being the junior partner in a wartime alliance. His description of Churchill’s correspondence with Roosevelt is almost moving in its pathos…[Clarke] is an engaging narrator and a skilled summarizer. His generally anti-imperialist analysis is also made more persuasive by a wistfulness about the empire that will be familiar—even understandable—to anyone who has read John Buchan or Ian Fleming or any of the brilliant Indian-born authors writing in English, from Anita Desai and her Kiran to Vikram Seth.” —New York Times Book Review
“A bold and thought-provoking work, as
well as a hugely enjoyable read.”
—Independent
“Clarke has created a brilliant popular
history...he tells [the story] with such wit, verve and
scholarly insight that one seems to encounter a brave
new world.” —Sunday Telegraph
“There are few historians writing today who
are more elegant and lucid than Clarke. ...The Last
Thousand Days is a triumph of stylish, thought-provoking
history…” —Irish Times
Length: 559 pp
Genre/Category: History
UK/Commonwealth rights: Penguin Press
US rights: Bloomsbury Press
For all other rights contact The Cooke Agency.
| |
|
A Fellow of the British Academy since 1989, much of
Peter Clarke’s academic career was spent at the University of
Cambridge, where he latterly combined the posts of Professor of
Modern British History and Master of Trinity Hall.
Over the last twenty-five years he has been a regular
contributor to the Times Literary Supplement, the London Review
of Books and the London Sunday Times.
Peter Clarke lives on Pender Island, British Columbia,
working as a full-time writer.
|
| |
|
