I feel sorry for poor old Steven Grasse, nursing his nation's grievances down there in Philadelphia, muttering away about our preoccupation with queens and lords, and the shocking mess we made of our past.
He, like many of his fellow Americans, hankers in vain for some fragment of imperial glory. They find this tragically elusive, and it hurts.
The Empire Strikes Back
by MAX HASTINGS
2nd March 2007
A new book cynically tries to deflect hatred of the U.S. by blaming Britain for all the world's ills. The fact is, we were actually rather good at ruling the globe - unlike the Americans...
Steven Grasse is the sort of salesman who could make John Prescott seem to possess a brain, or Basra appear a fashionable holiday destination.
While possessing no discernible gifts as a writer or historian, after a lifetime in marketing Mr Grasse is storming America with a work entitled The Evil Empire: 101 Ways In Which England Has Ruined The World.
Out there in Little Rock and Grand Falls, it seems, they are lapping up this catalogue of British crimes and follies, from the Industrial Revolution (which caused pollution and global warming) to the Opium Wars (giving rise to drug addiction).
World War I was our fault because Germany wanted an Empire like ours; so was the rise of Nazism, thanks to British prewar appeasers sucking up to Hitler.
In Mr Grasse's book, poor old Britain is to blame for world poverty, Islamic terrorism (we created Saddam), even the Vietnam War - because we set the world trend for colonial expansion and the war would never have happened had the country not been a French colony.
Now, before readers of the Daily Mail overbook planes to the U.S. to punch this Steven Grasse, let me explain that his book is quite funny - maybe even intentionally so.
It reads as if every bar bore in Philadelphia, where the author hails from, got together one night and wrote down every half-assed insult they could remember about Britain, somewhat handicapped by the fact that none did high school history past sixth grade.
It sounds exactly like the lads at the Dog & Duck in Epping holding forth on a Saturday night about how Americans never join wars until the hard bit is over and play a brand of football that looks like giant turtles mating.
Steven Grasse is no more worth getting angry about than Mel Gibson's risibly anti-English version of the Battle of Stirling in Braveheart, or Steven Spielberg's film Saving Private Ryan, a portrait of D-Day without any Brits.
All nations cherish clichès about each other. We think the French chronically duplicitous, though maybe better at sex than we are. The French think that history is a chronicle of English stitch-ups, of which the triumph of our language is the most painful.
The Germans want to be admired as the nation of Goethe, Thomas Mann and BMW, but are stuck with the fact that everybody else envisages them in terms of barked orders, jackboots and leaders with moustaches and - well, you know.
The Belgians, who make rotten soldiers (failed GCSE in every conflict of modern times), must make do with being deeply respected as chocolate-makers.
British soldier Clive of India raises a British Red Ensign after victory for the British East India company in the Battle of Plessey in 1757 which ensured the British conquest of Bengal was complete. So mighty was British military power that the British East India Company itself had its own military.
Yet there is a serious point about Steven Grasse's silly little book and its U.S. success.
Americans are sick to death of being the world's whipping-boys. They hate seeing their own young generation voice its shame about Iraq, environmental destruction, George Bush, McDonald's, Microsoft's monopolism and all the other global atrocities laid at America's door.
They want to see their own people walk tall again, and they are groping around for ways to achieve this. The most obvious is to find somebody else to chuck mud at. The British are as handy as you can get. We are the ones who ran the world before America tried.
We are snooty enough to think that we made a better job of it. Nowadays, in the eyes of Grasse and his fans, we simply sit in the dress circle and crow every time the U.S. screws something up.
Underlying his book's cheap jokes, there is a real grievance and a taunt: were the British ever any good?
The short answer, of course, is yes. For about 150 years, between the mid-18th century to the early 20th, we exercised greater influence over the world than any nation in history, and on the whole we did it benignly.
We carried trade, invention and - most important - the rule of law to all manner of societies which had never known these things.
For all the imperfections of the British Empire, it was overwhelmingly a force for stability and good.
Even many Indians today acknowledge a debt to us, for bequeathing them institutions without corruption, and the English language which gives them a huge advantage over China.
The record in Africa is more mixed, but the stories of Canada, Australia, New Zealand speak for themselves.
Britain's achievements in exploration, science, industry and literature are unmatched by any other nation of its size. Our martial heritage is not much appreciated by the modern Labour Party or the descendants of Napoleon, but awes everybody else.
Even before Gordon Brown muddied the waters, the British have often been a trifle confused about our own past.
Thackeray's Miss Tickletoby, who gave lectures on English history in his lampoon on such events, told her audience: "The Battle of Hastings occurred - let me see, take 1066 from 1842 - exactly 776 years ago; yet I can't help feeling angry that those beggarly, murderous Frenchmen should have beaten our honest English as they did."
This inspired cries from her audience:
"Never mind, we've given it 'em since!"
Anyhow, the American humorist Ogden Nash observed in 1936: "I think the English people are sweet/And we might as well get used to them because when they slip and fall they always land on their own or somebody else's feet."
We know that we usually won, anyway, which was the important bit. We possessed the great advantage, in the days when we were top nation a century or two ago, that might was right.
The British were able to build their empire, impose their will, suppress piracy and put down revolts without anybody else being much able to argue, whether we were right or wrong.
And yes, sometimes we were wrong. If you want to pick one example of folly Steven Grasse has got right, the Opium Wars of the mid-19th century will do.
British soldiers, 1854. Men of the 77th Regiment of Foot. The British enjoyed being Top Dog, unlike many Americans nowadays
Britain invaded China to enforce its right to maintain the lucrative drug trade from India to the Chinese market. Even by the standards of the day, this was not exactly a noble cause. But Britain ruled the waves, and that was that.
When an Anglo-French force reached Beijing in 1860, it found that the Chinese had murdered several British captives with every refinement of cruelty - death literally by a thousand cuts. Among the victims was the local Times correspondent.
To teach the Chinese a lesson, the invaders burned down the Summer Palace, China's Versailles. When even the French commander was moved to make some mild remonstrance, the British envoy, Lord Elgin, replied gravely: "What would The Times say of me, if I did not avenge its correspondent?"
One up for Grasse there. Yet nobody at the time used the Opium Wars seriously to question Pax Britannica. And of course, we were wrong in the brutal way we supressed the Indian Mutiny of 1857, but Britain must have been doing something right in the sub-continent, to maintain its rule there for 90 more years with just 1,000 officials of the Indian Civil Service, in a society of hundreds of millions.
The truth is that in almost all Europe's great wars of the past 500 years, Britain has thrown its power into the cause of freedom against that of tyranny - and has prevailed.
Where the Americans are unlucky is that they have gained supreme military power in an era when this no longer counts for nearly as much as once it did.
In 1898, Kitchener was able to march up the Nile to Omdurman on no better pretext than George Bush went into Iraq in 2003.
But Kitchener could meet the Dervishes in battle one September morning, kill 11,000 of them in exchange for just 48 of his own men dead, and almost immediately hand over the Sudan to peaceful rule by a handful of British officials for half a century.
The British with their rifles faced Zulus and Dervishes with spears - "Whatever happens we have got/the Maxim gun and they have not", as the poet Hilaire Belloc put it smugly.
Today, America's Stealth bombers, massive aircraft-carriers, nuclear weapons and heavy tanks, seem almost irrelevant in the face of AK-47s and suicide-bombers.
The verdict of battle is no longer decisive. The world's moral scruples have become vastly more highly developed.
Down in Philadelphia where Steven Grasse and his friends do their drinking, this seems terribly unfair.
Just as it no longer seems anything like as advantageous to be a king or a duke, in modern times when it is no longer possible to exercise droit de seigneur over passing virgins or chop off people's heads, so it is no longer anything like as much fun being top nation.
It is no longer possible to strike moral attitudes as successfully as we did. Consider the case of John Newton, devout clergyman and parson from Olney, Northamptonshire, from 1764 to 1779.
You think you don't know John Newton? You certainly know his great hymn Amazing Grace: "Amazing Grace how sweet the sound/ That saved a wretch like me/I once was lost but now am found/Was blind but now I see."
Yet this same John Newton was first mate and later captain of a slave ship, while in the full flight of his Christian fervour.
It would be unjust to suggest that many evangelists of the 19th century possessed values as muddled as Newton, but we got away with cloaking some pretty shameless acts in Christian garments.
In those days, nobody thought of crying foul about double standards or hypocrisy. Morality was simply whatever the top nation decided it was.
Nowadays, that has changed dramatically. When George Bush and Tony Blair tell us that we need not worry about the mess they are making in Iraq, because they have squared it with God, they get a resounding raspberry.
We can make a good case, therefore, that the British Empire had it easy, by comparison with the Americans.
"Come and stay with us in India," wrote Lord Curzon as Viceroy to a friend in England a century ago, "and we will arrange for you to shoot tigers from the back of elephants, or elephants from the back of tigers, whichever you prefer."
What fellow-countryman of Roosevelt or Kennedy or Nixon or Bush has ever had a quarter as much fun out of Pax Americana as the British people had out of our own centuries of superiority? In the eyes of many Americans, it has all been pure pain: the Cold War, Korea, Vietnam, scores of thankless little regional engagements, and now Iraq and Afghanistan.
Nobody says "thankyou" to them. There never seems much scope for victory parades, only for war memorials.
There is no tigershooting. Who can imagine modern American writers serving as the bards of their imperial glories as did Kipling, Buchan, and the great boys' writer G.A. Henty, for the British?
Our nation was fortunate enough to achieve power in an era when power was worth having. We have our national shames and regrets, of course, but the record is overwhelmingly one of success, worthy of pride.
I feel sorry for poor old Steven Grasse, nursing his nation's grievances down there in Philadelphia, muttering away about our preoccupation with queens and lords, and the shocking mess we made of our past.
He, like many of his countrymen, hankers in vain for some fragment of imperial glory. They find this tragically elusive, and it hurts.
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