Paul Kennedy
From Singapore to San Francisco
Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam, 1830–1930
By John Darwin
Allen Lane 496pp £25 order from our bookshop
For over forty years now, John Darwin, recently retired professor of imperial and global history at Oxford, has been one of the most creative and prolific scholars of the history of empires, particularly the British Empire but also, more generally, world power systems and colonial rule in modern times. Of his many works, fellow scholars would probably rank After Tamerlane (2007) as the most important and wide-ranging, though his The Empire Project (2009) is also an especially thoughtful look at the later phases of the British Empire. Imperial history was ever a contentious and heated field, yet Darwin has always managed to bring to it an assured, unruffled tone, along with fair-minded judgements.
In Unlocking the World: Port Cities and Globalization in the Age of Steam, 1830–1930 (the subtitle is a far better guide to what is in his new book than the title), Darwin looks again at the world order that Western imperialism created, this
Sign Up to our newsletter
Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.@Lit_Review
Follow Literary Review on Twitter
'The trouble seems to be that we are not asked to read this author, reading being a thing of the past. We are asked to decode him.'
From the archive, Derek Mahon peruses the early short fiction of Thomas Pynchon.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/rock-n-roll-is-here-to-stay
'There are at least two dozen members of the House of Commons today whose names I cannot read without laughing because I know what poseurs and place-seekers they are.'
From the archive, Christopher Hitchens on the Oxford Union.
https://literaryreview.co.uk/mother-of-unions
Chuffed to be on the Curiosity Pill 2020 round-up for my @Lit_Review piece on swimming, which I cannot wait to get back to after 10+ months away https://literaryreview.co.uk/different-strokes https://twitter.com/RNGCrit/status/1351922254687383553