History:Britain relinquished the Indian "jewel in the crown" of its empire 60 years ago this August 15th, and has taken most of the intervening time to get over it. Post-colonial guilt and the effects of relegation as the world's number-one power have not been easy burdens to carry.
Only in recent years has interest, even admiration, for Britain's imperial experience re-emerged, not in any kind of jingoistic way, but in recognition that, however flawed, the British empire was an astonishing entity.
Current trends in Indian historiography offer revisionist accounts of empire that emphasise the achievements and legacy of the British in India.
In Britain itself, imperial history, for so long an academic backwater, is thriving; histories of the empire, such as William Dalrymple's The Last Mughal, regularly hit the bestseller lists. The empire, it seems, is striking back.
Peter Clarke's commanding new book, The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire, examines the critical endgame of Britain's imperial experience, from the second World War to Indian independence. (The empire struggled on after 1947, but as Clarke observes in one of his many bon mots, "Much of this list now reads like an upmarket travel brochure: Gibraltar, Bermuda, the Cayman Islands, the Virgin Islands - this is truly imperialism of the last resort.").
There are few historians writing today who are more elegant and lucid than Clarke. His tone is discursive, reasonable and collegial; he never shouts for your attention, but simply invites you to join the conversation. Yet behind the charming facade of The Last Thousand Days lies a combative and highly provocative work of history. Above all, this is a study in the limitations of power and the art of the possible. No doubt the book is already on the holiday reading list of his friend, Gordon Brown (whose doctoral thesis Clarke examined).
CLARKE HERE TURNS upside down a number of commonly held perceptions about decolonisation, not least about the two central personalities of Indian independence, namely the viceroy, Lord Louis Mountbatten, and Mahatma Gandhi. Clarke is too sophisticated to say so explicitly, but these two characters emerge at the end of the story as totemic of the reoccurring struggle between realpolitik and ideological purity that pervades the book.
Clarke makes an impressive case in rehabilitating Mountbatten, whose reputation has been shredded since his death at Mullaghmore, Co Sligo in 1979. Even his official biographer, Philip Ziegler, admitted to keeping a notice in his study reminding him that, in spite of everything, Mountbatten must surely have been a great man. The most pointed attack on Mountbatten's standing came in 1994 from the revisionist historian Andrew Roberts, who made the case "for the impeachment of the last Viceroy of India, on the grounds that his cheating over the India-Pakistan frontier and his headlong rush towards partition led to around one million deaths in Punjab and the north-west frontier in 1947-1948".
Clarke has no truck with this argument. Mountbatten emerges here as shrewd, flexible and imaginative: a man both of substance and charm, whose cajoling and fleet-footedness nudged India [including a new Muslim state of Pakistan] towards the best settlement that could realistically be achieved. The viceroy even turned a blind eye when Nehru, the leader of India's dominant Congress Party, slept with Lady Mountbatten - a striking example of pillow-talk diplomacy if ever there was one.
"The outcome was not independence on the terms that either the Congress had long desired or the Muslim League had more recently demanded; nor on those that the British Government had earlier envisaged. But it was what was feasible in 1947," Clarke writes. "Nobody was entirely happy; few were irreconcilably hostile; most were ready to make the best of it."
Everyone knew that long-standing issues of ethnic and religious identity made bloodshed inevitable. At least 200,000 (and probably hundreds of thousands more) died in the immediate aftermath of independence.
"Even so," suggests Clarke, "in 1946 talk of two or three million deaths had been common. Whatever proposed was bound to be wrong and catch unhappy people of the wrong ethnic identity on the wrong side of the line at the wrong moment."
For Clarke, Mountbatten's achievement was "a transfer of power that maximised the goodwill at the hour of independence". He presents that success in contrast to the malign influence of Gandhi's ideological rigidity. All sides recognised in 1947 that no one had achieved their ideal outcome during negotiations, but each needed to reconcile itself to an agreed solution to avoid a bloodbath.
"Unfortunately, this is not how Gandhi, still the most powerful man in India, looked at the world," observes Clarke. "His failure to rise to the political challenge emerges as the most significant missed opportunity in the whole story."
The pious hero of Richard Attenborough's Oscar-winning biopic instead materialises here as a vain, naive, inflexible fanatic whose unwillingness or inability to see the bigger picture cost many lives and left a bitter legacy on the sub-continent.
The Last Thousand Days is a triumph of stylish, thought-provoking history that brings interpretations of the end of empire full circle. Vapal Pangunni Menon, the renowned Indian civil servant who drafted the constitution, wrote of Britain: "They left of their own will; there was no war, there was no treaty - an act without parallel in history." Sixty years after the event, Clarke establishes that, after all, nothing became the British in India so much as the leaving of it.
Richard Aldous is head of history at
UCD. His new book, Great Irish Speeches, and the US edition of his biography of Gladstone and Disraeli, The Lion and the Unicorn, are both due out in September
History: The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire By Peter Clarke Penguin/Allen Lane, 559pp. £25