1945: The Reckoning. War, Empire and the Struggle for a New World, Phil Craig, Hodder & Stoughton, £24.99

Shattered Lands: Five Partitions and the Making of Modern Asia, Sam Dalrymple, Harper Collins, £25

Imperial history is in a parlous state. Universities, museums, country houses, the church, all find themselves needled by an unwholesome concoction of HR and PR into facing up to ‘legacies of empire’. An industry has sprung up to meet demand: on TV, the history shelves of bookshops, even at academic conferences, ‘Imperial Miasma Theory’ prevails. Serious discussion of empire tends, meanwhile, to devolve into a bitter culture war.

So it was with some surprise that I came across a book that boasts the endorsements of two commanders from opposing sides in that war. Nigel Biggar praises Phil Craig’s 1945: the Reckoning for having ‘complicate[d] the moral picture’. Alan Lester speaks even more effusively: this is ‘the best popular history book I have read for a long time’.

With 1945, Craig completes a hat-trick on the Second World War that began in 1999 with Finest Hour. Much has changed, he acknowledges, since that first book was published; now there is a ‘sharper focus in publishing and in public life on questions of colonialism and race’. Craig addresses those questions in a skilful and decisive manner; sometimes ‘nuance’ is a cop-out, but not here. That he manages to do so, to the satisfaction of men as different as Biggar and Lester, speaks to his ability to ‘complicate the moral picture’ without becoming unmoored.

For the events which culminated in 1945 were morally complex in ways some of us would rather forget. The push for decolonisation, now usually celebrated as a righteous cause, could and did align with the objectives of the Axis. Sometimes the actions of collaborationists like Subhas Chandra Bose in India, or Ba Maw in Burma, are presented merely as marriages of convenience: of well-intentioned nationalists naïvely holding their noses to Japanese atrocities, for the sake of their own eventual liberation. In fact, as Craig tells us, those atrocities against Europeans were often, at least in part, a ‘performance for the benefit of those master’s former subjects’, some of whom ‘wanted to see it’.

Even Kodendera Subayya Thimayya, or Timmy – a hero of the British Empire during the Second World War, and of Craig’s book – could sense the attraction of the other side. His own brother Ponnappa had gone over to Bose’s Indian National Army (INA). ‘It was difficult for us to view this’, Timmy confessed, ‘as anything but patriotic’, but still he fought for Britain: both sides, both brothers, thought they were fighting for a free India.

So, too, did the Allied cause sometimes overlap with the uglier side of colonialism. One of the most arresting parts of Craig’s book tells an extraordinary story from after the war had ended. The British conscripted surrendered Japanese soldiers – ‘Mountbatten’s Samurai’ – to help secure France’s imperial grip over Indochina. From a Vietnamese perspective in 1945, Axis and Allies can’t have looked much different.

Still, Craig is adamant: ‘of the rightness of the cause, and Britain’s pivotal role, there can be no doubt’. This is not something that needed saying a few years ago, but we are living in a moment, as memories fade and first-hand witnesses die, when the moral certainties of the past are beginning to falter.

On the right, Darryl Cooper bloviates to Joe Rogan that Churchill was the ‘chief villain’ of the war; on the left, Kehinde Andrews – implicitly lauded in one of the essays in Lester’s recent ‘anti-Biggar’ book – can contend outright that the British Empire was worse than the Nazis.

The British Empire’s contribution to victory in the Second World War figured prominently in Biggar’s moral ‘reckoning’, and so, too, now in Craig’s. The recent emphasis in public discourse on empire and race has rightly reminded us that Britain did not fight the war; the British Empire did. It surely follows, then, that those of us who take pride in Britain’s victory should take pride in the British Empire.

In Shattered Lands, Sam Dalrymple also grapples with the thorny question of the relationship between anticolonialism and collaboration during the Second World War. Even the Burmese founding father Aung San – who otherwise comes off quite well in Dalrymple’s narrative – momentarily succumbs to fascist fever. ‘What we want is a strong state’, he wrote shortly after a trip to Tokyo in 1941; ‘there shall be no parliamentary opposition, no nonsense of individualism… everyone must submit to the state which is supreme over the individual.’

The Second World War forms only part of Dalrymple’s sweeping book. Its subject is the ‘Five Partitions’ of South Asia. Dalrymple reminds us that the Raj, at its peak, was far larger than we tend to imagine – so large in fact that its size was hidden on imperial maps. Burma was carved out in 1937; then, in the following years, Aden and other bits of Arabia were shaved off; then in 1947 came the ‘Great Partition’ between India and Pakistan, accompanied by that of the princely states; and, finally, the map of South Asia assumed its current form in 1971, with the independence of Bangladesh.

There is a ubiquitous notion on the anticolonial left that all these ruptures and traumas, indeed the plight of the ‘global south’ in general, can be ascribed in one way or another to empty-headed white men ‘drawing lines on maps’. Some white men did of course draw lines on maps, and those lines had world-historical repercussions. Indian nationalists charged Cyril Radcliffe with this task precisely because his obliviousness was supposed to make him impartial: Radcliffe had never been east of Paris. But little of the modern India-Pakistan border, Dalrymple points out, was actually drawn by Radcliffe; roughly 81 per cent was determined by the decisions of seven local princes, and 36 per cent of the border with East Pakistan (modern Bangladesh) by another ten. Thus, Dalrymple does what many of today’s imperial historians fail to do: he restores agency to non-British actors.

So, too, in his careful discussion of the Bengal Famine of 1943. Dalrymple places some of the blame on Churchill, but his was a crime of omission, a ‘callous example of colonial apathy’. More blameworthy was Vinayak Savarkar, the founding father of Hindutva, whose boycott of Bengali Muslims condemned millions to starvation. Craig makes a similar point in 1945, pointing out that, while Churchill did not prioritise the Bengalis, the local government of Khwaja Nizamuddin did not adequately address the situation, either.

Though acutely conscious of the sins of empire, aspects of Dalrymple’s picture of the Raj betray the ache of nostalgia. Viewed a certain way, empire allowed cosmopolitanism and multiculturalism to flourish. In the 1920s, more migrant workers set out for Rangoon than New York. This time of flourishing for Burma, when it was part of British India, has now been all but forgotten there; the country, Dalrymple says, is ‘poorer for it’. His sympathies lie most of all with the princely states. He feels a Romantic attachment to the local particularism for which loose empires may be more conducive than modern, homogenising states. How, quipped Khrushchev, had the Indians managed to liquidate their princely states without liquidating their princes? In Dalrymple’s telling, the liquidation of the princely states was itself a tragedy, shattering vessels of ancient tradition; he mourns the irony that ‘at precisely the moment of decolonisation, British ideas of sovereignty, government, race and religion were extended to a population several times larger than that which the British had ever forced them on’.

The rising tide of nationalism put an end to the religious syncretism and pluralism that empire had, in its way, permitted. The first Bengali-language biography of Muhammad described him as an avatar of Niranjana; it was likewise common for Hindu families in the Punjab to raise one child as a Sikh and to revere the gurus. The strengthening of national identity along largely religious lines put paid to that. Partition proved especially disastrous for communities which could not neatly be pigeonholed, like the Meo Muslims.

By the 1970s, Dalrymple laments, Aden, Dacca, Karachi, and Lahore were all Muslim cities; Rangoon, once the New York of Asia, a homogenously Burmese city; Hyderabad, Delhi, and Agra were all Hindu cities, notwithstanding their history as centres of Islamic culture. Much was gained, of course, in the transition from imperialism to nationalism in South Asia. But something profound was also lost.

Dalrymple’s British imperialists, for their part, are more ‘absent-minded’ than Seeley could ever have dreamt of. In all the events Dalrymple describes, they play a passive – perhaps too passive – role. The Chakma raja decried that his people were ‘just a bit of flotsam in the whirlwind of politics’: but the whirlwind was not whipped up solely by the British, and the British characters of Shattered Lands are as much flotsam as everyone else. Everything they do is coloured with a kind of camp improbability. When the Japanese march into Burma in 1942, the British governor, a suitably moustachioed Sir Reginald Dorman-Smith, climbs into his plane with his pet monkey, Miss Gibbs. When Humphrey, Lord Trevelyan, withdraws from Aden in 1967, the band plays ‘Fings Ain’t Wot They Used T’be’.

Lord Mountbatten spends most of the narrative getting cuckolded by Nehru: when Edwina is present, they lounge around, watching Bob Hope films. At the very moment his wife’s paramour delivers his famous ‘Tryst with Destiny’ speech, inaugurating what is now the most populous country in the world, Mountbatten masticates on how to spend his final moments as viceroy; at 11:58pm, with two minutes to spare, he settles on giving the title ‘Her Highness’ to the Australian wife of the Nawab of Palumpur. The choicest moment in the Mountbatten farce comes when he is pressing the Hindu maharaja of Kashmir on whether he would commit his Muslim-majority state to India or Pakistan. Before Mountbatten could get an answer, he accidentally hit a switch, triggering the bell which notified the band to play ‘God Save the King’. Everybody stood up solemnly and awkwardly: and thus the opening act in an ongoing tragedy, which reared its head again only a few weeks ago.

There is a peculiar bit, at the end of Shattered Lands, when Dalrymple throws some red meat at his more zeitgeisty readers. After chiding the British for their ‘historical amnesia’, he asserts that ‘between 1931 and 1971 Britain went from being the largest Muslim power in the world to having a tiny Muslim minority’. This is a bizarre claim, based on cheap linguistic trickery: having a large Muslim population does not a ‘Muslim power’ make. One suspects this line would be as baffling to an early-20th-century Indian Muslim as to today’s most ardent Little Englander.

Then comes this non-sequitur: ‘Today most Brits seem convinced that immigration is a relatively new phenomenon… but of course, Bengal was annexed by the British East India Company in 1757, just 50 years after the Act of Union with Scotland’. Britain was not the East India Company; there was a distinction between the metropole and its possessions; and, in any case, this has nothing to do with immigration.

Such disclaimers as these might simply be mandatory in popular books about empire. Without wishing to get submerged in the Straussian swamp, consider now the book’s closing lines: ‘The last decade has witnessed the decline of globalisation, the strengthening of borders and the resurgence of nationalism across the world… India’s Partitions are a dire warning for what such a future might hold.’ This may appear at first glance as a banal platitude, a pro forma comment on Putin and Brexit and Trump, of the sort that surfaces in almost all contemporary non-fiction. But if we follow Dalrymple’s narrative, and take seriously his argument, the implications of these concluding words are stark, perhaps even subversive. Dalrymple’s world of empire was a ‘globalised’ one; decolonisation involved the erection and strengthening of impermeable borders; and, regarding the great traumas of the 20th century, nationalism, not imperialism, was most to blame.

These unfortunate oddities can anyway be forgiven in such an impressive scholarly achievement. That Dalrymple is a polyglot comes in handy, and he is clearly at the cutting edge of his field. He cites Matthew Bowser’s doctoral thesis on Burma, to be published later this year as Containing Decolonisation; and on a fraught question involving the Nizam of Hyderabad, he makes use of another forthcoming publication, Imran Mulla’s The Indian Caliphate. Popular history is at its best when it makes the latest results of good academic research intelligible and accessible to the reading public.

There is indeed, as Craig says, a ‘sharper focus in publishing and in public life on questions of colonialism and race’, and historians have sometimes failed to respond to those pressures with much authority and integrity. But it is possible to consider the good that the British Empire did along with the bad, and to do so in a way that avoids the much-scorned ‘balance sheet’; it is possible to make serious moral judgements about the British Empire without umming and ahing about whether it was good that it won the Second World War; it is possible to accord the colonised as much agency as the colonisers; it is possible to imagine alternative courses that empire, and decolonisation, might have taken. The reading public likes interesting stories, and they like moral complexity; they do not need to be hectored at or condescended to. Books like these can show us how it’s done.