Fight or Flight: Britain, France and their Roads from Empire

摘要

In Fight or Flight Martin Thomas has added yet another major contribution to his several volumes on the French Empire in the twentieth century. This one introduces a new component to his analyses where he compares the decline of the French and British Empires. It is thus even more ambitious than his previous works and represents an impressive synthesis of many years of new and older research. His task is made slightly easier because the processes were contemporaneous and from similar geographic parts of the world, even if from often very different cultural contexts. The greatest merit of his approach is that he manages to avoid, indeed to debunk, the oft-cited dichotomy of 'British success; French disaster'. This is of clear significance given the latest revelations from the 'lost'British colonial files that have miraculously reappeared in recent times.