I knew the late Neil Faulkner, and I have always meant to review his last book. Neil was hugely influential in my understanding of revolutionary theory and politics. If there was one book he thought everyone should read, it was Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution—‘it’s all there,’ he would say. He had a rare ability to fuse rigorous Marxist analysis with an accessible, urgent style, making history feel like something unfolding in real time, its contradictions alive and unresolved.
In Neil’s writing, you can always hear his voice. He was a storyteller, someone who could hold a room, who got everyone to listen. He understood, like all great political orators, how to talk to a crowd, how to build an argument, how to bring history to life, how to remind you that the past is never just the past. His final book, Empire and Jihad: The Anglo-Arab Wars of 1870–1920, is no exception. It is a sweeping account of British imperialism in North-East Africa and the Middle East, told with his characteristic blend of narrative and analysis. Like all of Neil’s books, it is written with a clear sense of purpose: history, for him, was never a neutral record of events, but a battleground of ideas. He understood that empire was not simply about conquest, but about capital, the extraction of wealth, the management of crises, the control of labour. And, just as crucially, he knew that empire always produces resistance.
The book takes us through a series of wars fought between Britain and various forces across the region, from the Egyptian nationalist revolt of 1882 to the Mahdist uprising in Sudan, the Anglo-Somali war, and the Ottoman-backed jihadism of the First World War. Faulkner situates these conflicts within the larger history of British capitalism, showing how financial crises and industrial expansion drove the need for colonial control. He has no patience for the liberal fantasy that empire was an accident, or a well-intentioned misadventure. For him, it was always a project of accumulation and domination, bound up with the economic structures of late Victorian capitalism. ‘Without empire, Britain would have collapsed into class war,’ he writes, a line that neatly captures both the necessity of imperial expansion for the dominant class and the way in which empire functioned as a means of dividing and controlling the working class at home.
Where Empire and Jihad excels is in its unflinching materialist analysis of British imperialism. Faulkner does not simply recount battles and diplomatic manoeuvres; he lays bare the economic and social forces that made them inevitable. He is particularly good on the role of the financial sector in driving British intervention, showing how the control of trade routes, debt repayment, and investment opportunities were central to every decision made in Westminster. The invasion of Egypt in 1882, he argues, was not about ‘restoring order’ but about ensuring that European bondholders continued to receive their interest payments, at the expense of the Egyptian peasantry.
At the same time, he is deeply attuned to the ideological justifications of empire. He examines how the language of ‘civilisation’ and ‘order’ was used to mask the brutal realities of colonial rule, and how these narratives were internalised within Britain itself. The dominant class, he shows, was remarkably effective at using imperial conquest to manufacture consent at home, turning military victories into nationalist spectacles that reinforced British exceptionalism. He quotes Cecil Rhodes, who understood this process better than most: ‘If you want to avoid civil war, you must become imperialists.’
One of the most compelling aspects of the book is its treatment of resistance. Faulkner is keen to dismantle the simplistic binaries of colonial historiography, in which the British are rational administrators and the colonised either passive victims or irrational fanatics. He pays close attention to the class dynamics of anti-imperial struggle, showing how different social forces—tribal leaders, religious figures, peasant militias—responded to British expansion in ways that were shaped by their own material conditions. He is critical of the romanticisation of certain resistance movements, pointing out that some, like the Mahdist state in Sudan, were themselves deeply oppressive. But he never falls into the trap of dismissing these struggles as futile or reactionary. Instead, he treats them with the seriousness they deserve, recognising that they were part of a broader, ongoing history of anti-colonial resistance.
That commitment to resistance was not just historical but deeply personal for Neil. In his final years, he helped to found Anti*Capitalist Resistance, a project he hoped would bring together the fragmented revolutionary left in Britain. He saw the need for a radical alternative to both the exhausted remnants of old organisations and the inertia of left-reformism, believing that only a genuinely revolutionary movement, one rooted in struggle, internationalist in perspective, and uncompromising in its opposition to capitalism, could meet the challenges of our time. While we have not yet fully realised his vision, the project is growing, and just recently, Anti*Capitalist Resistance became a part of the Fourth International, a step towards the kind of revolutionary coordination he spent his life fighting for.
Faulkner’s final chapter draws a direct line between the imperial wars of the 19th century and the conflicts of the present. He argues that the ‘War on Terror’ is simply the latest iteration of the same logic: capital in crisis, seeking new markets and new justifications for military intervention. The language has changed, ‘jihad’ has replaced ‘barbarism’ as the favoured term of moral condemnation, but the structure remains the same. This is where the book feels most urgent. It is not just a history of empire, but a history of the present.
Neil should be remembered as one of the great Marxist historians. I say without hesitation that he can stand with Christopher Hill, E.P. Thompson, and Eric Hobsbawm. His historical writing was always engaged, always committed to the idea that history is not something to be studied at a distance, but something to be fought over and used as a tool for struggle. At Resistance Books, where we publish several of Neil’s books, one of our biggest sellers continues to be Mindfuck: The Mass Psychology of Creeping Fascism—a book that, like Empire and Jihad, captures both his intellectual sharpness and his deep political commitment.
Reading Empire and Jihad now, three years after Neil’s death, I am struck by how much of his voice is in it, his clarity, his passion, his relentless commitment to making history a tool for understanding the world as it is, and for imagining how it might be changed. It is a book that demands to be read, not just as a historical account, but as a challenge. To understand empire is to understand capitalism. And to understand capitalism is to understand the necessity of struggle.
