'Marvellous...escapes the inane, balance-sheet view of Empire and sees its full complexity' Sathnam Sanghera, bestselling author of Empireland
The story of the British Empire at its maximum territorial extent, including a wider range of voices of the colonised than have ever been recorded before
29th September 1923. The British Empire was 14 million square miles, just under a quarter of the globe's land area, and 460 million people, a fifth of the world's population. In One Fine Day Matthew Parker takes a snapshot of this astonishing edifice in all its glory but with all of its ugly underbelly clearly visible, and with the seeds of its demise already evident.
This book is a new way of looking at the British Empire. It travels from east to west with the rising sun and immerses the reader in the contemporary moment, focusing on particular people and stories from that day, gleaned from newspapers, letters, diaries, official documents, magazines, films and novels. This takes in the new, more independent attitudes of the Dominions to the Empire, resistance and demands for change centred on Rotan Tito in the Pacific, Nehru and Gandhi in India, Tan Cheng Lock in Malaya, U Ottama in Burma, Harry Thuku and A.M. Jeevanjee in Kenya, Herbert Macaulay, Kobina Sekyi and Joseph Casely Hayford in West Africa, and the huge influence of Marcus Garvey across Africa and the Caribbean.
'An engrossing and wide-ranging account of the zenith of the British Empire - with all the contradictions, brittleness, ambition and hubris that moment entailed. Across Continents and characters, Matthew Parker provides a new, global history of British imperialism which feels both epic and immediate' Tristram Hunt
