I suppose I can look past this book’s grossly biased Eurocentricism, under the umbrella of it being of a singular historical lens.
I cannot forgive how freaking b o r i n g it was though.

A thorough, insightful and well-rounded look at the British Empire and it's effects for good and ill.

This book is fine if you are reading it with an appreciation for the purpose that I suspect the historian, Ferguson, was aiming for -- which is to say, framing Britain's role in the empire as positively as you possibly could in a modern environment. I won't ruminate on this point too much. Quite simply, you will either find this irritating, or not. If you are the former don't read this. If you are the latter, and are reading to enlighten yourself on the benefits of the empire, well, this book is adequate, but not brilliant.

Firstly this account is more of an overview than anything else. A book just shy of 400 pages could never possibly begin to dive into the complexity of the British Empire (nor most other topics, for that matter). What you have here is a quick, somewhat bumpy ride through the annals of history by a driver with a fairly stable, and yet not entirely trustworthy, grip. He admits his own biases at the start of the book, but as I have said this is not a historical novel that seeks to reinvent the wheel.

The actual benefits of empire isn't discussed as deeply as I hoped - for example there was little technical discussion about changes to legal systems/law enforcement across the Empire - and was largely only talked about in the conclusion. So instead this book is more of a tamed-down chronology of the past, avoiding the worst elements of the Empire while tiptoeing around the best.

What pushes me toward giving this book 3 stars (rather than less) is how Ferguson constructs the narrative. He begins with the early empire and ends with its destruction, but having read a fair amount on this topic I would say he manages to select some of the most crucial elements and retells them concisely, and in a digestible way. As a Dummy's Guide to the British Empire Through the Eyes of a Fairly Sympathetic Brit, which is what the book is really intended to be, it succeeds relatively well. I would cautiously recommend this to anybody who knows nothing about the Empire, and would like to dip a toe into the subject. As a historical account, it is interesting but lacks flavour.

For a detailed dive into the Empire, Jan Morris' Pax Britannica trilogy is the far superior option. Similar to Ferguson, she has a personal involvement with empire and is therefore nostalgic toward elements of it, but while appreciating its motivations and desires, better expresses where it fell short and how some of its lasting impacts have failed in the long-term.

I think I've mentioned before that I have developed a habit of listening to controversial audiobooks while running. Ideally, it should be something I disagree with a bit but not out-and-out frothing awfulness. People like Ferguson, Douglas Murray and Peter Hitchens are perfect for this because I get a mixture of thought-provoking passages and chapters that make me want to scream in frustration, and this boosts the adrenaline and makes me run faster.
Considered from that point of view, this was a tiny bit disappointing because he's not in full own-the-libs mode. He criticises the empire a lot but differentiates it from other regimes (tha nazis for example) with whom it is sometimes stupidly compared. All in all, fairly tame, really, and I hold Ferguson personally responsible for my lacklustre 10k time.
It's quite a good history though, tracing the empire's ramschakle growth through trade, piracy, well-meaning missionaries and ruthless bastards, outlining the crimes, the unintended consequences and the legacy, both good and bad. He comes to bury the empire, not praise it, and he's a pretty good undertaker.

Westerners have a tendency when they think of the Imperial Era (if they think of it at all) as a thing that happened, but we're not quite sure how or why . Some greedy people somewhere in Europe, probably, and we should feel a bit bad about it. Niall Ferguson, Satan love him, is willing to dog a bit deeper. Which is nice, but for the fact that he largely shares the perspective of the Imperialists. His book has some really fascinating anecdotes or perspectives ("The British Empire was founded on a sugar high" or the glorious insanity of the British government in India being carried on elephants from Calcutta to the foothills of the Himalayas where they built a little village straight out of the Midlands), but gives only pat answers to the grave sins of colonialism and thinks that the age produced a pretty huge net benefit for humanity. I...could not disagree more strongly. The introduction of legalism, some form of democracy, and property rights does not make up for things like the slave trade, plantation systems around the globe, colonial conquest, piracy, and genocide. I'd say this is worth reading if you want a reminder of why we live in a post-colonial world (sort of).

Engrossing account of the way the British empire reshaped the world (often in very bad ways) and how it ultimately died. A retrospective that has aged well as the UK’s goal broke continued to diminish and it’s far reaching legacy becomes ever more complicated

I find Ferguson's writing very enjoyable even as I disagree with many of his arguments and in fact many of his basic premises. Here he argues for the benefits of (the British) Empire and how America ought to take of the mantle of empire now. His writing is just so enjoyable that even when I want to hit his bigoted head, I also want to keep reading.

Compelling.

If you've ever walked into a pub in Scotland and wished that one of those middle aged men at the bar would come over to you and talk about the good old days of the empire, with lots of details but a fair bit of (beer-in-hand-)waving to gloss over most of the numbers than this is the book for you.

Ferguson sets out to, or claims to, write a book that tells the truth of the British Empire, to counteract the morality arguments that are prominent in historical accounts of its rise and fall. However, this book is hardly fresh or new take on imperial history, but a repetition of British imperial glorification that is very common in British historians before the 21st century. He largely focuses on how better the lives of colonized peoples were with the British as their overlords (as opposed to any other imperial power, or god forbid self-sovereignty) without many citations or proof. Some economic theory is sprinkled in at some points, but no where near the amount one expects from his introduction or even his summarizing conclusion.

Ferguson writes well, and provides a smooth narrative of the British imperial gains, but struggles to include anything outside the antiquated narrative. Women are only victims of colonial horrors, or mentioned as cheating on their loyal husbands, and nationalist leaders, or any non-white prominent figures from British colonies, are vilified or trivialized. His apparent stab at diversity lays at the awkward insertion of queer history, in which he separates the real homosexuals from those men who just found men easier to talk to than women, and explicitly suggests that a guy told everyone he was violently gang raped because it was his gay fantasy. Okay.

Basically, be ready for mansplaining without citations and a lot of justifications of imperialism that ends with that's summed up with Ferguson's conclusion that Britain heroically sacrificed her empire in order to save the unknowing savages from the far worse fate of being ruled by the Japanese and Germans, and that this sacrifice expunged her from all previous sins.