The subtitle of the book is 'How th

The subtitle of the book is 'How the British saw their Empire'. Cannadine is therefore overwhelmingly concerned with perceptions and not with the extent to which social hierarchies could be effectively consolidated or even constructed within imperial territories. In his chapter on Limitations he is very willing to concede that human material throughout the imperial world was often extremely resistant to being moulded into hierarchical shapes in the approved British model. Some existing hierarchies, such as caste in India, seemed to common British understanding to put the wrong people on top. Imperial intervention, at least in not preventing the racially determined apportionment of land, could underpin for a time settler gentries in Southern Rhodesia or Kenya. Elsewhere outside South Africa, white farming communities tended to displace indigenous inhabitants rather than to conscript their labour, and then to create generally egalitarian communities based on extensive rather than intensive cultivation of land. In fertile and heavily populated parts of India, Southeast Asia or West Africa, elites who were in control of the land before colonial rule could maintain their hold on it and on the output of those who cultivated it. Paradoxically, the British, even in late nineteenth-century India, were more inclined to intervene on the side the peasant than of the landlord.