THE IDEOLOGICAL ORIGINS OF THE BRITISSH EMPIRE By David Armitage, Cambridge, £12.95 The famous 19th century historian John Seeley will be remembered for two remarkable aphorisms. In the more famous of the two, he wrote that the British Empire was acquired in 'a fit of absentmindedness'. In the other, he commented, that 'the history of England is not in England but in America and Asia.' David Armitage's book, lucid in style and solid in research, argues against the first aphorism to uphold the second one. If, as Armitage so persuasively demonstrates, the British Empire had ideological underpinnings, it could not have been a mindless exercise. It had behind it an intellectual apparatus that propelled it forward and also justified it. The Empire moulded developments within Great Britain. Without the overseas developments, many of the developments within Britain cannot be adequately comprehended. The history of England (read Britain) is thus inextricably linked to events in the colonies. Armitage begins his analysis by correcting the conventional view of the British Empire. According to this view, the British Empire dates from a fortuitous military victory in a field in the village of Plassey in Bengal (June 1757). The spate of military conquest continued till the first two decades of the 19th century and resumed again during the European 'scramble for Africa'. The endgame of empire began after World War II. In Armitage's words, 'William Pitt was its [empire's] midwife, Lord Mountbatten its sexton and Winston Churchill its chief mourner in Britain.'' This, as Armitage rightly notes, was the 'second' British Empire. The first empire refers to British dominions in the Americas. This empire was a maritime empire of trade and settlement and not of conquest. Armitage sees the division between the first and the second ones as being too simple and one that has encouraged the divorce between British imperial history and British history. Armitage analyses the ideology of the first empire: it was an ideology of trade and commerce, of maritime power; it was also an ideology that was emphatically Protestant and free. It was an ideology whose location was the Atlantic seaboard. These features were in sharp contrast to the ideology of the second empire buttressed as it was by military force, economic exploitation and racial subjection. Some of the ideology of the first empire lingered on in the first, 'vestigially but reassuringly', Armitage adds as an important qualification. In a telling line, which Armitage quotes, the master historian, Marc Bloch warned, 'In popular usage, an origin is a beginning which explains. Worse still, a beginning which is a complete explanation. There lies the ambiguity, there the danger!' Armitage's work does not offer an explanation of the British Empire. It traces how the idea developed in intellectual and political discourse. He shows how the evolution of the idea of *empire was related closely to state formation in Britain. The idea reflected the gradual and even imperfect development of the state. The ultimate justification of *Empire for Britons was the notion that it had served to civilize large parts of the world by imparting the gifts of western education, rule of law and so on. This is what gave to Britain its self-esteem. An ideology, Armitage notes, became an identity.