By FOUAD AJAM
August 26, 2001, New York Times.

A quarter-century ago, James Morris gave Pax Britannica a magnificent retrospect in ''Farewell the Trumpets.'' ''Is this the truth? Is that how it was?'' Morris wrote. ''It is my truth. It is how Queen Victoria's empire seemed in retrospect to one British citizen in the decades after its dissolution. Its emotions are colored by mine, its scenes heightened and diminished by my vision, its characters, inevitably, are partly my creation.

If it is not invariably true in fact, it is certainly true in the imagination.'' Morris, born in 1926, had seen the imperial sunset, followed the retreating imperial armies. Now the British historian David Cannadine, born in 1950, has come forth with his own evocation of the empire. His generation, he tells us, had barely ''hung, by its finger ends, on the coattails of empire.'' His project is, by necessity, a different enterprise, for the imperial idea was destined to shift and change with time.

Cannadine is writing against the background of postcolonialism and postmodernism and all the literature of third worldism that has produced ''history from below,'' from ''the periphery,'' and has seen precious little in the empire save for its ''construction of otherness,'' its alleged racism and plunder and arrogance. Though Cannadine may take issue with the observation that he has come forth to defend the empire, something of a defense of the imperial idea animates his thoughtful and spirited book.
Cannadine is a student of British metropolitan history and is best known for a seminal work, ''The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy.'' ''Ornamentalism,'' his venture into imperial history, is derivative of his concern with class in Britain. That imperial edifice was less about race than about class and status, he insists. It was an aristocratic system, carried to distant dominions by a predominantly rural gentry that valued hierarchy, elaborated it and ornamented it, through the institutions of class it found among the princes of southern Asia and the kings of the Ashantis and the sultans of Malaya and the desert chieftains of Araby.
The British grandees who built and maintained the empire were squires ill at ease with the modern world. In Simla and Cairo, in the White Highlands of Kenya and in the pristine Arabian deserts, they recreated the traditional, layered society they avored at home. There was escapism and fantasy, there was kitsch, but, Cannadine insists, there was little racism. The taipans, the big merchants in Hong Kong, may have maintained a color bar against the Chinese, but that was the exception, not the rule. Truer to the imperial edifice was the sentiment of one of its towering figures, Lord Curzon (viceroy of India, foreign secretary), who thought of race consciousness as a lower-class attribute. For Curzon, a man with roots in a country estate in
Derbyshire that reached back 800 years, the magic of empire was the splendor and the ceremony, the emirs and chiefs who yearned for imperial honors and savored imperial ritual.

Britain may have been lost to democracy and industry, but the empire offered the disaffected patricians an alternative; a better world could be had ''east of Suez.'' For Cannadine, it is thus that the empire -- nostalgic, conservative -- is best understood. It was about neither race nor profit. It was about ''antiquity and anachronism, tradition and honor, order and subordination; about glory and chivalry, horses and elephants, knights and peers, processions and ceremony, plumed hats and ermine robes; about chiefs and emirs, sultans and nawabs, viceroys and proconsuls; about thrones and crowns, dominion and hierarchy, ostentation and ornamentalism.'' It had all begun, this culture of ornamentalism, with Benjamin Disraeli, who passed the Imperial Titles Act in 1876 that declared Queen Victoria Empress of India. ''This audacious appropriation consolidated and completed the British-Indian hierarchy, as the queen herself replaced the defunct Mughal
emperor at the summit of the social order: she was now an Eastern potentate as well as a Western sovereign.'' Gone was the zeal for the remaking and the Westernization of India that had been the ideal of Thomas Babington Macaulay and the reformers let loose on India policy in the 1830's and 40's. The princes were now the pillars that held up the Raj. And for nearly a century, until India's independence in 1947, the British ideal called up an image of a timeless India to keep at bay the very forces British rule was fostering: modernity, nationalism, the idea of a unified Indian nation that the railroads and mass education had made possible. The architecture of the Raj gave expression to this escapism. Its dominant style, ''Indo-Saracenic,'' consisted of ''flamboyant confections with turrets, domes, pavilions and towers, atavistic in their cultural resonances, and redolent of continuity, order and tradition.'' It was ''instant antiquity,'' Cannadine observes, the Gothic Revival transported to India. In 1911, the ground was broken for a whole new imperial capital in New Delhi. The Raj would implant itself there, away from Calcutta and commerce, away from the agitators and the gathering storm. The plumed hats and the ceremonial swords have been put away, the Union Jack hauled down again and again, Cannadine tells us with some measure of nostalgia. The empire expired as it had to; Empire Day became Commonwealth Day in 1958; seven years later, Winston Churchill died, and his grand funeral was a requiem of sorts for imperial power. There remained one big possession: Hong Kong. Its handover in 1997, the centenary of Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee, brought the imperial venture to a close.
In vast stretches of the old empire, the ground now burns, and plunder and breakdown are nationalism's harvest. In the privacy of their small worlds, away from the postmodernists and the radical historians writing ''peripheral'' history, there can be heard fond retrospects of the empire and its pageantry by ordinary, unfashionable men and women. Were these people to tell us what they recall of the empire's doings, I suspect that they would echo some of the truths of Cannadine's subtle and learned retrieval of that imperial history. A choice was given the peoples of the British imperium: good government or self-government. We know the choice they made. But the dead are owed a word of gratitude, some acknowledgment of what they labored for and bequeathed in distant outposts.

(Fouad Ajami is a professor of Middle Eastern studies at Johns Hopkins
University. He is the author of ''The Dream Palace of the Arabs.'' )