Excerpt from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Other brave commentators suggested there might be a more complex pre-history to this handover. Author Martin Jacques thought the ceremony showed, 'no sense of contrition, of humility, of history. This was British hypocrisy at its most rampant and sentimental.'4 Instead of a moment of self-regard and imperial nostalgia, the journalist Andrew Marr thought this final, colonial retreat should have been an opportunity for a new British identity to emerge. 'So enough Last Posts and folded Union Flags. Enough "Britannia" and enough weary self- deprecation from the Prince of Wales. We should not leave Hong Kong with too much regret.'5

In his memoirs, Prime Minister Tony Blair admits to a startling failure to appreciate the historic significance of the return of Hong Kong to China, as a rising, newly prosperous country sought to take its place in the world and shed the memory of its 'century of humiliation' at the hands of British, French and American forces.* After President Jiang Zemin teased the jet-lagged and jejune British premier about his poor knowledge of William Shakespeare

he then explained to me that this was a new start in UK/China relations and from now on, the past could be put behind us. I had, at that time, only a fairly dim and sketchy understanding of what the past was. Ithought it was all just politeness in any case. But actually, he meant it. They meant it.6

However, one member of the British delegation remained determined to cling on to the past. In a confidential diary entry entitled 'The Great Chinese Takeaway', His Royal Highness the Prince of Wales laid bare his despair at seeing the Crown colony returned to the mainland. Watching another piece fall from his family inheritance, the prince lamented the 'ridiculous rigmarole' of meeting the 'old waxwork' Jiang Zemin, and the horror of watching an 'awful Soviet-style' ceremony in which 'Chinese soldiers goose-step on to the stage and haul down the Union Jack'. Charles Philip Arthur George Mountbatten-Windsor knew all too well that, when his time came to assume the throne, the loss of Hong Kong meant Britain's imperial role would be long past. 'Such is the end of Empire, I sighed to myself.'7

As Great Britain's formal empire finally receded into the distance, the public debate about the legacies and meaning of that colonial past has grown only more agonized.8 Famously, in his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the historian Niall Ferguson made a stirring and influential case for the British Empire as the handmaiden of globalization and force for progress. 'No organization has done more to promote the free movement of goods, capital and labour than the British Empire in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. And no organization has done more to impose Western norms of law, order and governance around the world,' he wrote. Since globalization and the modern world were, for Ferguson, a 'good thing', this also meant the British Empire–for all its messy crimes and misdemeanours–was equally praiseworthy. 'Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies.' Much of the chaos of the twentieth century was, he suggested, a product of the decline oftransnational empires. And he went on to urge the White House of President George W. Bush to take up what Kipling called 'the white man's burden' and show some imperial leadership. For Ferguson, the British Empire offered the most salient guide for Washington's diplomats and generals as they sought to craft their own Pax Americana across the Middle East.9

As critics pointed out, there were numerous problems with Ferguson's version of empire: its Whiggish focus on the heroic age of Victorian achievement to the exclusion of the more amoral adventurism of the eighteenth century or bloody counter-insurgencies of the twentieth century; its unwillingness to chart the broader impact of colonialism on indigenous peoples; its concentration on the free-trade period of British imperialism as the Empire's defining ethos; and its dichotomous, good versus bad balance-sheet approach to the past.

Excerpted from Cities of Empire by Tristram Hunt. Copyright © 2014 by Tristram Hunt. Excerpted by permission of Metropolitan Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.