On 29 September 1923, the British empire reached its peak, geographically speaking. As the Palestine mandate, administered by Britain, came into force, the empire was at its largest square mileage. That day was significant across the empire for other reasons too: the prime minister of Canada arrived by steamship in Liverpool for the Imperial Conference that began in London two days later. Adelaide Casely-Hayford opened her technical school for girls in Freetown, Sierra Leone – a school run by Africans that aimed to teach an African rather than European curriculum. There were vibrant street celebrations in Lagos after the first election in British West Africa named three members of the Nigerian National Democratic party to the legislative council of southern Nigeria.
A compelling read, Matthew Parker’s One Fine Day uses this single day to capture a snapshot of the sprawling British empire in the early 20th century. The book begins on Ocean Island, also known as Banaba, in present-day Kiribati, a tiny Pacific island whose rich phosphate deposits had been discovered by a New Zealand businessman in 1900. Ocean Island is the starkest example of the empire’s environmental toll. Over the next few decades, a succession of British companies pushed the British government to allow them to strip more and more of Banaba’s land for phosphate mining. Early on, British officials knew what the end would be. Phosphate was an important fertiliser, the only thing that would make large-scale farming possible in Australia and New Zealand. With demand so high, the corporations intended to strip the entire island, leaving its residents, the Banabans, with no place to live.
From Ocean Island, the narrative moves slowly west, hovering for several chapters over important colonies – Australia, Malaya, India, Burma, Kenya and Nigeria – before ending in Jamaica. As Parker observes, when the sun rose in Jamaica, it was 10 minutes to midnight on Ocean Island. There are also frequent returns to London, where the Imperial Conference debated the place of the dominions within the British empire.
What Parker astutely realises is that, more than anything, peaks are points of decline. In geographic terms, the British empire was at its largest only briefly; treaties handed small chunks of land in east Africa to Belgium and Italy only months later. But there were other more significant signs that the British empire was fast declining. In every region, Britain faced the growing presence of other powers, especially Japan and the US. The first world war had reshaped politics across the empire. The dominions were wary of being called to make such extreme sacrifices again, while West Indian soldiers had been humiliated by their relegation to demeaning support roles rather than the frontline action they had been promised.
British imperialism itself was a destabilising force from the start. The introduction of firearms intensified ethnic conflict, making it considerably more deadly. British commercial interests had turned cosmopolitan societies into sharply divided, and segregated communities by pitting groups against each other that had previously been living in reasonable harmony. This was the case in Malaya, while in India, religious faith became politically important in ways that at times united activists of different faiths, but often divided them.
Parker is especially clear-eyed on the ideas of white supremacy that were at the heart of British imperialism. The “White Australia” policy was a response to Japanese power, and the plan was to make Australia less vulnerable to invasion by populating its interior with white British families. In other regions, as white settlers relentlessly insisted on their superiority, despite the devastation of war calling that into question, they drove away local elites and middle classes who might otherwise have seen value in maintaining a connection with Britain, and turned many others into ardent nationalists. Even ostensibly anti-imperial British texts were riven with racist sentiments, as Parker’s careful readings demonstrate.
Throughout are lively vignettes of people including Jawaharlal Nehru, EM Forster, George Orwell and Marcus Garvey. A handful of colonial administrators recur; a long career in imperial service meant postings all over the empire, with few men allowed to stay in a favourite location for very long. Hugh Clifford shows up in chapters about Malaya, the Gold Coast and Nigeria (where he was in 1923), with other brief mentions in Ceylon and Trinidad and Tobago. Arthur Grimble is most associated with the catastrophe on Ocean Island – after his death, a lawsuit by the Banabans uncovered a letter he had written threatening them if they did not accept his offer to relocate them to another island – but his final posting was in the Caribbean.
By focusing so intently on a single day in 1923, Parker catches life in these colonies in the middle of a very palpable transition. As the subtitle suggests, they were all on the brink. Part of what makes this book such a fascinating read is that we all know what’s about to come, but since Parker sticks to his premise, we remain in a sense of suspense throughout. The choice to begin and end with Ocean Island works especially well, since it’s among the lesser-known tragedies explored. Parker smartly tells us how this story ended, with the relocation of Banabans in the late 1940s and their unsuccessful lawsuit in 1977. The end of empire does not come at the end of One Fine Day, but we leave with a much clearer sense of why its demise, if not inevitable, was certainly impending.
Christienna Fryar’s Entangled Lands: A Caribbean History of Britain will be published by Allen Lane
• One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker is published by Abacus (£25). To support the Guardian and Observer order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
