Heaven's Command: An Imperial Progress by Jan MorrisMy rating: 4 of 5 stars
When Victoria ascended to the throne, there was a question of if the empire was worth having by the time of her Diamond Jubilee that thinking had changed. Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress is the first volume, though the second published, of James Morris’ Pax Britannica trilogy that chronicles the rise of the British Empire from the East India Company’s first steps in India to its climax at Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.
Morris divided the first sixty years of Victoria’s reign into three segments in which British attitude towards the Empire changed and as it did, so did the policy and strategies that either led to reform movements, expansion, or the destruction of cultures and people. With only 540 pages of text, this isn’t a comprehensive detailing of the empire’s expansion and how it happened militarily, nor an outright political history though both are featured when Morris chooses. Besides the famous, or infamous depending on the telling, colonial wars written about and featured in documentaries there are the less well known such as the Red River Rebellion in Canada that Morris highlighted to show how different cultures viewed oncoming empire. The different peoples of the empire were covered like the Irish that included the native Gaelic, the Anglos with descent from the earlier Norman crossing, and the Ulster Protestants whose view of their place in the empire was “complicated”; or the sad fate of the Tasmanians who were hunted like animals, taken from their homeland, and then allowed to return to die out. And Morris gives some political background to how situations developed including how the rivalry between Disraeli and Gladstone shaped policy on the ground or vice versa. Though Morris covers sixty years through a variety of incidents both famous and obscure, the advance of the British is always at the forefront even if it seems they are defeated, if only temporarily.
Heaven’s Command reveals the various locations, wars, and reforms that brought the British Empire the pinnacle of global power at the end of the 19th Century. James Morris writes an engaging account of events from across the globe over the course of sixty years.
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