InkBlog

The night of 13 July 1958 was a leisurely affair at the Qasr al-Rihab, the royal palace in Baghdad. With his habitual louche taste, King Faisal II and his court were watching a private performance of the 1950s romance The Pajama Game. Meanwhile, the tanks of Colonel Abdul Salam Arif were rumbling toward the palace.

At 7.45am the royal family was surrounded. A captain of Arif's brigade emerged with a machine gun in hand and fired a volley of shots. This prompted a "burst of bullets from every direction", with the king and crown prince instantly hit. The encircling mob grabbed the body of the prince, dragged it through the Baghdad streets, then cut his remains into pieces and hung them over telephone poles in front of the ministry of defence.

So ended the Hashemite dynasty in Iraq – puppet of the British state and tool of western oil interests. And so begins Kwasi Kwarteng's compelling and important history of the British empire. It is an apt opening for a book that focuses as much on the contemporary legacy of empire as its past. For Kwarteng, as Tory MP for Spelthorne, is both politician and historian. And this is a consciously post-Iraq war work. Its target is those neoconservative cheerleaders of empire – Niall Ferguson, Michael Gove – who regard British colonialism as a "good thing" and the model for a modern Pax Americana. "The British empire is not some prelude to a modern 21st-century western world democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics," Kwarteng insists. "The British empire was something different."

Instead, Ghosts of Empire marks a return to traditional, Tory scepticism shorn of ideology and purpose. There is little rhyme or rhythm to this history; it is a tale of chaps doings things and then other things happening, mostly to foreigners. Which is both its strength and weakness.

Holding together his chronicle on the end of empire in Iraq, Kashmir, Sudan, Nigeria, Burma and Hong Kong is Kwarteng's thesis of "anarchic individualism". In essence, there was too much autonomy given to imperial agents on the ground. "Officials often developed one line of policy only for successors to overturn it and pursue a completely different approach. This was a source of chronic instability in the Empire."

And here was where the "ghosts" of empire were laid. David Cameron used a recent trip to Pakistan to suggest that many of the world's problems could be blamed on British imperial policy, and Kwarteng offers up the data. Again and again, British officials made wrong choices at crucial moments in both empire building and decolonisation with terrible long-term consequences.

As such, this is a study of a colonial elite, as Kwarteng seeks to unpick "the mentality of the empire's rulers, to describe their thoughts and their ideals and values". It is an uncomplicated top-down story of governor-generals and colonial secretaries, heavily influenced by David Cannadine's work on "ornamentalism" and the role of social class in British imperialism.

So, with relentless obsession, Kwarteng charts the class and schooling of the great men of empire. Lord Curzon, we are told, finished Eton as captain of the Oppidans, "the senior boy in the school who was not one of the seventy King's Scholars (who were from less distinguished social backgrounds but were generally academically more able)". And there is more than a hint that if Faisall II had gone to Eton, not Harrow, things would have worked an awful lot better in Iraq.

In certain contexts, this works well. "Sudan: 'Blacks and Blues'" is a brilliant account of the Sudan political service, almost entirely composed of Oxbridge sporting blues ruling over African blacks. Here the Victorian notion of character, manfulness, and playing the game constituted all the necessary attributes for governing this bifurcated Arab-African state. Sir Reginald Wingate, governor general of the Sudan, rejected one candidate on the grounds that there was "something Levantine about him and as you know that fact alone makes him undesirable".

There are obvious objections to this approach to empire. There is little sense of indigenous agency; events simply happen to the colonised. Any appreciation of subaltern studies – an investigation of those at the lower end of the imperial foodchain – is absent. And there is a tendency to read back into the entirety of the empire – which encompasses Virginia in the 1620s, Dublin in the 1790s, Melbourne in the 1850s – the rather specific mentality of late 19th-century imperialism.

But the more interesting omission is the absence of ideology. We are back, under Kwarteng's direction, to empire being built "in a fit of absence of mind". This is a practical, empirical account of Kipling-esque characters buggering on, carrying out the white man's burden. Yet what recent scholarship, most notably the multi-volume Oxford History of the British Empire, has shown is the place of ideas in empire – be it geo-political attempts to outmanoeuvre France and Spain; free-market capitalism; Christianity; racism; even notions of human rights. This, instead, is a Namierite interpretation of empire where what matters most is what house at Winchester the governor went to.

Equally frustratingly, Kwarteng doesn't pursue the ghosts of empire back home. Twentieth-century British culture was immeasurably influenced by empire – from music halls to mass migration to chicken tikka masala. The chapter on Kashmir touches on modern Mirpuri communities in Britain but shies away from exploring the domestic legacy of partition in the context of militant Islam.

Equally, the book pulls its punches on the international aftermath. In a scathing chapter, Kwarteng attacks Chris Patten's tenure as governor of Hong Kong for all the failings of a politician, "he courted the popularity of the masses… but knew very little about China or diplomacy". But Kwarteng has himself become enough of a hack to dodge the issue. His final paragraphs on modern Iraq are full of rhetorical questions – "To what extent was the settlement in Iraq after the first world war responsible for the wars, the chaos and confusion?" – but precious few answers.

However, his purpose is not to provide answers. With scholarly distance, Kwarteng rightly argues that "the phenomenon of British imperial rule must be understood in its own terms". And, in his energetic account of the late imperial world, this book does that with much elan. But there is little in Kwarteng's imperial past to inform the present. It is Tory history as it should be – glistening prose, urgent narrative, class-ridden and relentlessly, refreshingly pessimistic.

Tristram Hunt is Labour MP for Stoke-on-Trent Central

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tbTEoKyaqpSerq96wqikaJqfpLi0e5FpaGpnkaq0cH2TaJ6hp6OpwG67xWacpqiZp7Jut9aaqa2dnpx6s7HVopyw