One Fine Day: Britain's Empire on the Brink

This is an excellent and very scholarly account of the British Empire in a year (1923) when it was at its largest while on the brink of rapid decline. It explores the many bad traits of the empire (and they were very bad) while also accepting there were some advantages for the colonists living within the empire. Very detailed and very readable.

An interesting concept, which Parker delivers well. Valuable sections on the Pacific and Malaya, rather sketchier ones on the West Indies, nothing on southern Africa. The really glaring omission is the Middle East, where we see today the disastrous results of British rule. Worth reading, but could have been still better.

An excellent book covering the British Empire during its last days. It is well written and extensively researched, with lots of detail and stories that are new to me. Highly recommended.I hope you find my review helpful.

If you look in this product page under the sub-heading Product description, , About the author to see the author's website address then go there, you'll find a direct download link for the Source notes [that you'll see numbered in the text].I have posted this review in order to pass on the Source notes link because I saw old reviews that reported not having the Source notes.I only received the book a few minutes ago so have not read it yet. Read more

I like to buy hard copies, at higher cost, for gifting. Disappointingly this arrived with a dent and tear at the top.

A great book, marred by the absence of any notes. Yet the narrative is peppered with reference numbers. I have hard back but it seems Kindle is the same. What has gone wrong here?

Excellent book

This is a remarkable work of social history. Although focused on one day in September 2023 it covers the years either side of that snapshot in time, to give a wider context to what was going on. This was the apogee of the British empire, so large that famously the sun never set on all of it the same time. It becomes clearer than ever in reading this book that racism underpinned the whole thing. That racism, which we still see appallingly today, led to vicious and murderous behaviour. It led to ridiculous levels of inequality in education and health care spending and practice ( if I white man was considered to be more valuable that those he exploited, then it follows that the exploitation would just get worse - and it did).Among the many evils of empire was that it taught children to seem themselves as inferior to their British overlords - many of whom went to rule in the 'colonies' because they couldn't cut it at home. Ill educated, bigoted, self regarding and greedy beyond measure, these people brought grief on an unimaginable scale. Occasionally of course there were acts of kindness, or relative kindness, usually based on a paternalist approach by people who had been convinced or had convinced themselves that they were somehow doing good work for the people subjugated, humiliated and killed by those in power.This book isn't a polemic - it is more of a social history - and it is all the more powerful from its showing rather than telling approach. It is a long book, of around 570 pages of narrative, but it is never boring and always informative. A clear 5 stars

Extensive research across the British empire. Shows both sides of the story. Well written.

This is a scholarly work. The kindle edition has numbers denoting a footnote or endnote in the text. These are NOT hyperlinked and just go to the TOC. There isn’t even a separate section of endnotes which would at least show sources. Extremely frustrating and very poor. I gave it 5 stars for content and approach but 0 stars for the kindle edition because of lack of footnotes.