Empires of the Mind: The Colonial Past and the Politics of the Present. By Robert Gildea (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2019) 366 pp. $24.95

Abstract

Gildea’s Empires of the Mind makes a cogent argument that empire has molded the present and continues to shape the future of our planet. As a British historian of France, well known for his work on the Occupation and collective memory, Gildea is well placed to explore how the long-term networks of the two great nineteenth-century global empires of Britain and France were kept in place over the long term by cajoling, bargaining, and force where necessary.The opening chapters set out—if in an inevitably schematic form—the construction and crisis of the British and French empires to 1945. The ensuing chapters about the “Imperialism of Decolonisation” are the historical crux of the book, synthesizing, in a big-picture way, the research by Elkins, Shepard, and others that has put paid to the “twin myths of a peaceful transfer of power by the British to former colonial authorities and of the French Empire defending itself by violence” (95).1 Gildea makes an eloquent case for the ways in which decolonization became a cover for the restoration of dependency through “cronyism, bribery and bullying” (103).The new postcolonial “empires” were not national affairs, but subtler alliances between states and multinational companies. From the disaster of Franco–British involvement in Suez in 1956, the more coercive forms of neo-colonialism gradually gave way to economic muscle, in what Gildea calls the “global financial republic” (117). Moreover, as they simultaneously ceded sovereignty to a supranational Europe and saw increased flows of people from the former colonies, both Britain and France succumbed to hysteria about metropoles becoming colonized “in reverse.” But anti-racists and people of color themselves pushed back against this discrimination, creating alliances and changing mentalities throughout the 1980s. Most disheartening in Gildea’s sweeping view of this history is his suggestion that a brief “multicultural moment” of the late 1990s was swept away by the interlocking challenges that marked the dawn of the twenty-first century. Islamism and its obverse, the “War on Terror,” installed seemingly intractable and atrociously violent conflicts across the world. The overthrow of dictatorships in the “Arab Spring” of 2011 sparked a winter of civil wars, refugee flows, and xenophobic reaction in Europe, helping to bring a new anti-cosmopolitans to power.In the end, however, what interests Gildea most are the divergent courses of France and Britain. His book begins as a parallel history of empires, but it shifts into a kind of prehistory of Brexit, tracing the emerging logics of resurgent British imperialism through wartime propaganda, decolonization, Europe, immigration, and globalization. France is more a touchstone and point of comparison. Gildea asks why France took a decisive shift away from empire and toward Europe while Britain drifted backward to insularity and imperial nostalgia. Much of the answer is focused on Emmanuel Macron, as a Gaullist-Napoleonic contrast to Britain’s feckless political leaders. Although Gildea gives voice to critics of Macron’s dirigisme, in the end, he puts his money down on a France “with its eyes resolutely on the future against a Britain “trapped in the past” (254). Gildea once characterized the French as “Children of the Revolution,” but such a revolutionary legacy seems largely absent from this book.In drawing its opposition between France and Britain, the book leaves in the background the larger global context in which colonial pasts are reframed. The new frontiers of data, and the climate crisis that will surely transform the geopolitics of the planet, figure little among the challenges that Gildea sees as shaping future forms of empire. Curiously, he makes slight reference to Russia and China, which may well offer better cases for “empires of the mind” pursued through cyberwarfare, information control, and media manipulation, backed by brute force where necessary.The book retains a vigor of ideas and directness of voice from its origin as a lecture series. Unfortunately, however, it is littered with niggling errors, particularly regarding details familiar to specialists of empire: Anghor Wat for Angkor Wat, Khalifat movement for Khilafat movement, Ishqlal party for Istiqlal party, “Allalahu Akbar” for “Allahu Akbar,” among others. Nonetheless, Gildea deserves congratulations for a bold venture to uncover the imperial histories needed to understand our present predicament.