Overview

The imperial aspect of Churchill's career tends to be airbrushed out, while the battles against Nazism are heavily foregrounded.
A charmer and a bully, Winston Churchill was driven by a belief that the English were a superior race, whose goals went beyond individual interests to offer an enduring good to the entire world. No better example exists than Churchill's resolve to stand alone against a more powerful Hitler in 1940 while the world's democracies fell to their knees. But there is also the Churchill who frequently inveighed against human rights, nationalism, and constitutional progress--the imperialist who could celebrate racism and believed India was unsuited to democracy. Drawing on newly released documents and an uncanny ability to separate the facts from the overblown reputation (by mid-career Churchill had become a global brand), Richard Toye provides the first comprehensive analysis of Churchill's relationship with the empire.
Instead of locating Churchill's position on a simple left/right spectrum, Toye demonstrates how the statesman evolved and challenges the reader to understand his need to reconcile the demands of conscience with those of political conformity.

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9780805087956

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<p>Praise for Churchill's Empire <p> Superb, unsettling new history .... Can these clashing Churchills be reconciled? Do we live, at the same time, in the world he helped to save and the world he helped to trash? Toye, one of Britain&#8217;s smartest young historians, has tried to pick through these questions dispassionately .... Of course, it&#8217;s easy to dismiss any criticism of these actions as anachronistic. Didn&#8217;t everybody in Britain think that way then? One of the most striking findings of Toye&#8217;s research is that they really didn&#8217;t: even at the time, Churchill was seen as standing at the most brutal and brutish end of the British imperialist spectrum .... Toye is no Nicholson Baker, the appalling pseudo&shy;historian whose recent work Human Smoke presented Churchill as no different from Hitler. Toye sees all this, clearly and emphatically .... In the end, the words of the great and glorious Churchill who resisted dictatorship overwhelmed the works of the

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