Gregory Barton’s book is a highly stimulating extended think piece that seeks to explain how it came to be, in his view, that “there is one world culture and this world culture is Western” (1). The book is based most heavily on an expert assessment of the secondary literature of empire, post-colonialism, and decolonization supplemented with primary sources especially growing out of Barton’s earlier work on forestry and the origins of environmentalism. The result is a wide-ranging polemic that deserves a substantial scholarly readership.

Not every reader will agree with Barton’s starting point of the existence of “one world culture”, but it is important that the reader understands what Barton means by this. Above all, he refers to “select strands” of westernization having “transformed most parts of the world”; these aspects include Western conceptions of “law, democratic capitalism, industrialization, professionalization, state-sponsored bureaucracy, socialism, free trade, consumerism, environmentalism, even what we mean by the ‘modern’”. He acknowledges “pockets” remaining outside of this “one world culture”, including those of “ancient religious societies and hunter-gatherer societies”, and even some hybrid blends, but insists that a Western-originating globalization, one that has even “abolished many strands of traditional European culture”, has rendered such admissions mere caveats (9). Whatever the variations around the margins, for Barton the differences are minor, and in substantive qualities, most of the world is unified, not disjunctive. This historical problem in need of an explanation, one more reminiscent of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” than Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations”, is likely to prove controversial. In my own view, the penetration of the “one world culture” is probably thinner than Barton allows, even among political elites.

Indeed, Barton’s model of a “world culture”, and the one for which he provides a historical explanation, focuses predominantly on transnational elite networks, and for that reason, the penetration of any single “world culture” will vary per the extent to which such an elite is organic to a given nation-state as opposed to depending on external support from multinational institutions and the military power of the USA (or its proxies). For Barton, the elite underwriting the “world culture” combines the owners of mobile capital and a meritocratic and technocratic professional class, but is dominated by the latter, largely through its members’ ability to control bureaucracies and appeal to expertise. If this is true—and Barton cites scholarship focusing on the twentieth century, including those by Harold Perkin and Elizabeth Noelle-Neumann—then this elite may itself be in the process of reconfiguration as professionals themselves increasingly are undermined by technologies under the control of global capital.Footnote ¹

One can distinguish, of course, between the current construction of a “world culture”, including its depth and its sustainability, and the historical motor that produced it in the first place. As the book’s title indicates, Barton credits “informal empire”, the nineteenth century “Palmerstonian project” of extending free trade and civilization (as well as strategic security) around the world first on the part of British policy-makers and later presided over by American successors. For Barton, “informal empire” is a relatively neutral descriptor, one that simultaneously avoids the “prescriptive laissez-faire optimism of modernization theory or its counterpart, the prescriptive pessimism and violence of dependency theory” (46-47). Informal empire, according to Barton, was intentional and aimed at creating durable partnerships that facilitated trade and (at least for mid-Victorian policy-makers) a monogenic pursuit of social progress.

Separate chapters consider the evolution of informal empire in Africa, the Americas, Asia, and the Middle East, all initially under the auspices of British and other Western elites. More than anywhere else, the case of Africa shows that while informal empire was preferred when it was not feasible policy-makers would pursue formal empire (ideally via indirect rule); yet after the interlude of formal empire and Cold War interventions, Barton argues that informal empire has returned. In the case of the Americas, Britain competed with the young US republic for ascendancy and, earlier than in any other region, relinquished leadership to the United States. In Asia, in addition to formal empire in certain regions (above all, India), British support for Bangkok’s elites and its domination of teak leases in northern Siam helped to bring all modern Thailand under the control of an increasingly westernized monarchy, while Japan’s imperial expansion from the end of the 19th century comprised the extension of Western institutions and ideas. In the case of the Middle East, Britain’s alliance (until World War I) with the Ottoman Empire and its combination of alliances and League of Nations Mandates in the Interwar period meant that, until the eve of World War II, Britain maintained an informal empire concerned both with strategic and economic goals.

Following World War II, Barton argues, the British “did not lose the battle for informal empire. Rather they moved aside after 1945 to assist the United States in its new role of world superpower” (168). For Barton, the relative ease with which British policy-makers bowed to its loss of great power status reflected the rationale behind Britain’s own informal empire all along: to “protect the network of global trade that it had played such a large role in forming [and] to protect the democratic capitalist system that it largely created” (168). This baton-passing, like the willingness of Westernized elites to collaborate with British or American power, reveals that the global rationalization launched by the Palmerstonian project effectively transcended its origins. In theory, such transcendence should allow the continuation of “one world culture” well after China becomes the world’s largest national economy, but that may depend on how extensive that world culture really is.

Barton’s book offers an erudite narrative of how early twenty-first century international arrangements came into being. In doing so it synthesizes several historiographies, while often providing extended summaries of key historical works. Its polemical tone occasionally reaches into conspiratorial territory, as when Barton argues that scholars who emphasize a “decentred” explanation for the making of modern history are pursuing an agenda that is not only ideologically multicultural but that serves “the interests of a Western elite determined to keep the movement of people and capital fluid and to suppress all attempts at dissent” (43). While implying some sort of tacit alliance between, say, an Antoinette Burton and the architects of, say, the Trans-Pacific Partnership, Barton also pleads inability to go into detail about the composition of current global elites, because of “speech codes and professional punishment” that “disallow such a frank discussion”—not only in the “heartland of the imperial network” but also in Thailand, China and the Middle East, which have “elites who tightly control freedom of speech” (3 and 198n1). Such provocative rhetoric, combined with Barton’s powerful and concise synthesis, should give this book a wide readership among those interested in imperial or international history.