Review: Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World (Documentary)

In the course of researching the moral and cultural decline of the Western world, I have come to realize that what I am studying is closely related to the rise and fall of the British Empire.

The story of America begins within the context of the nascent British Empire in Virginia and Massachusetts. Before and after the American Revolution, the key cultural developments in American history are never really separate from developments in the metropole. The Great Awakening in the 18th century was brought to the American colonies by George Whitfield and John Wesley’s preaching. The British Enlightenment with its rhetoric about liberty had a massive cultural impact on the future United States. Romanticism was similarly influential on both of the Atlantic.

The abolitionist movement triumphed in the British Empire before it triumphed in the United States. Britain had its Olaudah Equiano and America had Frederick Douglass. America later followed the British down the road of imperialism in Spanish-American War. The United States followed the lead of Britain and was drawn into the First World War and Second World War.

In Niall Ferguson’s six hour documentary Empire: How Britain Made The Modern World, you can see two contending forces in the British mind that played out over the course of four centuries. On the one hand, the British (and later the Americans) could be quite ruthless in conquering and dominating others, which alone explains how Britain accumulated the largest empire the world had ever seen. On the other hand, the British (and also later the Americans) want to feel good about their empire and have a tendency to moralize and act self-righteous about it. A good example of this which is brought up in the documentary is the ruthless conquest of the Boers in the Boer War, a truly disgraceful war motivated by greed for gold, and how the British public was scandalized by the concentration camps.

The moral compass of the British middle class is largely the product of Enlightenment liberalism and evangelical Christianity. In the 20th century, that evangelical Christianity died and was replaced by post-evangelical atheism, which has produced the cultural degeneration we see today in Britain.

Note: If you have been following what is going on with the Southern Baptist Convention, you should be worried that America is headed toward a British-style “post-evangelicalism.”






About Hunter Wallace 12378 Articles
Founder and Editor-in-Chief of Occidental Dissent

13 Comments

  1. Maxim Force is my favorite from that series. Ferguson is, of course, the court historian of the Rothschild family.

    What happened to British self confidence is the Maxim gun being turned on Tommy Atkins by the Germans at the Battle of the Somme.

    • “Ferguson is, of course, the court historian of the Rothschild family.”

      Yes Siree, which means double-check all his work.

  2. Western civilization has been in decline for 100 years, since the end of the Great War. And all because the Allies didn’t want a unified Germany to have an empire of its own.

    • @Spahn

      The Jew created Left is the culprit. Feminist groups calling for womens rights (when they already have them) or more immigration because one nog did something heroic…..and we usually fall for it. When minority groups have nothing to whine about, they’ll whine about it anyway and use it to further their cause. A victimhood industry thats destroying us.
      If you were a leftist prior to about the 90’s-you kind of have my sympathy, as you had to rely on msm and encyclopedias for your info (and the education system). But for those that still are now…..there’s no excuses.
      Fortunately, you realize all this.

  3. The picture from Documentary part 3 makes it look like a Jewish Crustaceans cannibal party. Barbecued smoked crab with Cajun seasoning with a side of onion rings.

    • That’s Hindu Sutttee. The widows of the dead man are thrown on the funeral pyre.

  4. Of the Boer Wars, the first was fought for diamonds, the second for gold, both for Jews.

  5. I think most of us on here despise the moral rot and the amazing stupidity of the modern world, but it may not be possible to make religion the way it once was, or even to bring a little bit of sanity back, and we may have to prepare for that, unfortunately.

  6. The enemy has picked the wrong hill to die on.

    Rather than resting content with the cake already being baked in, they want to go to the mat over illegal immigrants – using “separating families” as the fig leaf.

    First of all, no families will be separated; they all have to go back.

    Secondly, it is time to marshal all the forces to win this battle. The entropy of the movement must end, and order must return. It would have been better had Trump done this last summer, but ah well, here we are.

    PS Bannon is looking much healthier after his hiatus; I think it is symbolic of the movement as a whole, who have put the lulzy alt right phase behind us and have gotten on to the heart of the matter, namely the existential questions, of which race is but one of several.

    • Catherine Austin Fitts did a great interview with Daniel Liszt (aka Dark Journalist) where she said she thinks the velvet gloves will come off of Trump after the 2018 elections. She stated some interesting things about her opinion on the forces behind the Trump presidency and the agenda that goes along with it. It’s on YT and was done in the past month or so.

      Keep in mind that this is coming from a woman who was in the U.S. government (Assistant Secretary of Housing at HUD) and actually fought the Deep State? and won (it took, I believe, 15 years and $7 million in order to do so but she has said I had a successful business, no spouse, and no kids. Unlike General Flynn, I had nothing else to lose),

Comments are closed.