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What is global history?

military issues, Darwin also writes extensively about the impact of British financial and commercial power. He acknowledges his debt to historians of ‘Gentlemanly capitalism’, and his discussion of this aspect of British power is therefore to some extent a familiar one, but he links it to British grand strategy and foreign policy in illuminating fashion, especially in his discussion of the dilemmas facing British government in the 1930s. The other key element in the book is the discussion of imperial Britishness, in both the United Kingdom and its white colonies. The obvious point here is that, at the time when his story commences, the white colonies added very little to British power andwere to some extent an encumbrance. This was most obviously true of Canada, which made minimal contribution to imperial defence or resources but embroiled London in the defence of its immensely long border with an aggressive and expansionist USA. The evolution of the USA from geopolitical and ideological enemy to saviour, stepchild, and undertaker of the British empire is not ignored by Darwin but more might perhaps be made of it. The contrast between the view of the USA entertained by Lord Salisbury and that of his nephew Arthur Balfour illustrates a crucial shift in British ideology and power. On the other hand, the author has an excellent discussion of the strength and the ingredients of imperial Britishness, above all in the white colonies, whose contribution to British victory in two world wars was immense. As is now the fashion, the Industrial Revolution does not feature greatly in Darwin’s story of British imperial power. Similarly, historians of the causes of the Industrial Revolution are inclined to stress purely economic factors and to leave politics and power to the side. Maybe this is correct but, if so, it is rather remarkable that Britain simultaneously became the world’s greatest empire and first industrial nation without the two developments having much to do with each other. No doubt the City was of overriding importance in the British world system but it is a little surprising, for example, to find so little mention even of the British shipbuilding industry in a study of power and empire. When one thinks of Germany’s extraordinary endurance in two world wars, surely this owed something to its superiority over Britain in many areas of industrial science and technology. My only other quibble about this remarkable book is that its title is misleading. It seems to me that Darwin begins his work at a time when the British world system was actually approaching its apogee. Its rise belongs to an earlier era. The geopolitical foundations of the British world system were already in place by 1815. Seriously threatened by French, Spanish, and Dutch naval power in the 1780s, by 1815 Britain ruled supreme on the seas and had defeated Napoleon’s threat to the continental balance of power. No serious alternative threat was to emerge in the rest of the nineteenth century. By 1815 also, Britain dominated India and the Qing were in evident decline, so the Asian geopolitical foundations of the British world system already existed. If the Industrial Revolution was only just coming over the horizon in 1815, British financial and commercial power was already in full flower. So maybe John Darwin will one day write a first volume, on the rise of the British world system, to complement his remarkable study of its nineteenth-century apogee and twentieth-century demise.