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    Pax Britannica
    Pax Britannica
    Pax Britannica
    Audiobook (abridged)7 hours

    Pax Britannica

    Written by Jan Morris

    Narrated by Roy McMillan

    4.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’s masterly telling of the British Empire from the accession of Queen Victoria to the death of Winston Churchill. It is a towering achievement: informative, accessible, entertaining and written with all her usual bravura. Pax Britannica, the second volume, is a snapshot of the Empire at the Diamond Jubilee of 1897. It looks at what made up the Empire – from adventurers and politicians to communications and infrastructure, as well as anomalies and eccentricities. This humane overview also examines the muddle of jumbled ideologies behind it, and how they affected its 370 million people.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherNaxos Audiobooks
    Release dateJul 1, 2011
    ISBN9781843794721
    Pax Britannica

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    Reviews for Pax Britannica

    4.5/5

    80 ratings4 reviews

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    • 4/5
      Not as much fun as the first book in the trilogy. Nonetheless this is a fine picture of the British Empire at the time of Queen Victoria's jubilee in the late 19th century. Also, there is a good explanation regarding why the Empire could not last. Again, we see Gladstone, Disraeli, Lord Salisbury, etc. This shows the white colonies such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand identified with Great Britain but would not fiancé the British Navy. Some Brits truly had the imperial attitude:

      It is with nations as with men ---
      One must be first, we are the mightiest,
      The heirs of Rome.
      By John Davidson

      Or the British attitude to native subjects:

      Whatever happens we have got
      The Maxim gun and they have not!

      Then there is the reminder by Kipling in Recessional in 1897:

      Far called, our navies melt away;
      On dune and headland sinks the fire;
      Lo, all our pomp of yesterday
      Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!
      Judge of the nations, spare us yet,
      Lest we forget---lest we forget!
    • 3/5
      This a good first book dealing with the complexities of that curious construction "the Empiah". Perhaps one should also read "King -of the Khyber Rifles" or the Memoirs of John Masters at the same time. But it's smooth and a polished presentation.
    • 4/5
      Second part of Morris's British empire trilogy, providing a survey of Britain's overseas possessions at the high point of "new imperialism", Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee of 1897. Like the first part, it's a very lively read, full of colour and anecdote, and occasionally quite satirical, but the analysis is mostly rather indirect. We're allowed to work out for ourselves that empire may have been a good thing for a few middle-class investors and provided useful employment for the sons of the indigent upper classes, but it didn't usually do much good for the people of the countries Britain tried to rule, or indeed for the great mass of the working classes back home.
    • 5/5
      The conclusion to the best survey of the British Empire that I have ever read.