EMPIRE: HOW BRITAIN MADE THE MODERN WORLD By Niall Ferguson Allen Lane Price: £20 Pages: 392

Less than 100 years after it spanned 25 per cent of the earth's surface and embraced 444 million people, the British Empire has become a term of derision, if not outright ridicule. In an age of globalisation, democracy and human rights, the idea of conquest and subjugation seems distinctly reprehensible. Indeed, it is sometimes difficult to believe that the great grandfathers of the lager louts who stagger around London on Saturday nights personified enterprise, adventure and the stiff upper lip.

For someone whose best childhood years were spent singing robust hymns in morning assembly and cheering, in sultry afternoons, a school house named Charnock as it took on rivals honouring Lord Macaulay and Warren Hastings, it is impossible to be neutral about the Empire. The values we imbibed-fair play, decency, no swotting and no snitching-may have been transplanted from a distant land and may even be woefully inadequate to cope with the rigours of a hustling democracy. Yet, they were just as real in Calcutta, Colombo and Karachi as they were in the Home Counties and Natal. The cost-benefit analysis be damned, the Empire nurtured a fraternity built on common assumptions, values and-let's be ruthlessly honest-a grotesquely romantic belief in "England's green and pleasant land".

NEW GIBBON: Ferguson (left); Recruits to John Company's Army: Eight Gurkhas (1815)

As an exercise in indoctrination or nurturing "false consciousness", the grand project of Empire worked only too well. As Niall Ferguson's sparkling history-denounced as a hateful "revisionist" exercise by the multiculturalist pamphleteers-informs us, the Empire was undone by its own lofty ideals. A pioneering project of pirates, profiteers and padres, it ended up as an unintended exercise in Anglobalisation.

Like today's Pax Americana where free trade and military arrogance blend with an implied faith in "truth, liberty and the American way", Pax Britannia embraced laissez-faire, armed might, team sports, the rule of law and the idea of liberty. The last, writes Ferguson, "is perhaps the most important because it remains the most distinctive feature of the Empire ... (and) sets it apart from its continental European rivals." The British Empire, given its self-image, was naturally "self-liquidating".

The point is well-taken. It is interesting, for example, to speculate over what would have been today's India if the French had prevailed over the British in the Seven Years War. French colonialism too had its own ideology and "white man's burden". Like Macaulay, the French too wanted to transform the colonised into French-speaking and French-thinking natives. Where the British differed was in juxtaposing an impossible ideal with pragmatism.

After the explosion of 1857, the Christian evangelists-Ferguson describes them as Victorian ngos-were given short shrift and the Empire tempered its notions of social engineering. The Anglobalisation project did not involve changing local customs and meddling with local religions. Consequently, its effects were more intriguing. Jawaharlal Nehru, for example, disavowed imperialism but remained an Anglophile. Nirad Chaudhuri saw no conflict between his Bengali Hinduness and his appreciation of the ideals of Empire.

Would New Amsterdam be the New York of today, asks the author impishly, if the Dutch had not ceded it to the British in 1664? Might it not resemble more closely Bloemfontein, an authentic survivor of Dutch colonisation?

It is an interesting thought and the stuff of popular history. Ferguson has a broad brush and an even broader canvas-the book is, after all, a companion to Channel 4's answer to the hugely successful BBC series by Simon Schama. He may be cutting a few corners, getting a few facts wrong and offering a plethora of great one-liners. But he asks the right questions and proffers courageous answers.

For the unmourned orphans of Empire, it tells us why we were well and truly ahead of our times.