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Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire. (Books: a class act).-

Article Excerpt
Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire, by David Cannadine; Viking/Penguin, 2001, $45.

WELL KNOWN for his trenchant views on the monarchy in its years of decline, with Ornamentalism David Cannadine extends some of his earlier work on class in Britain to the janissary cosmopolis that was once the British empire. Now that it has ended up as pap for tele-visual nostalgia, where it is often portrayed as a Retreat for Gracious Living (which it surely was for some), Cannadine seeks to give us a view from the inside--a view of the empire as a social entity rather than a political construct (though that is pre-eminently what it was).

What attitudes kept the empire on the stage of world history, to its last act in 1950, the year the author was born? One influential view holds that it was a ramshackle edifice acquired by men who knew not what they did (and who lost it with similar absent-mindedness); Cannadine attempts to show that, as an imagined community, it was a good deal more robustly self-deceiving than that. Though what the ordinary mass of people thought of it will, of course, probably remain forever beyond the historian's reach.

While many famous Continental thinkers thought the British successful empire-builders because they were "naturally" individualistic (every man his own Crusoe), Cannadine lends weight to the static. Ornamentalism, as he defines it, leaning on Edward Said's...