Rhetorical devices

Allusion

In the excerpt from the book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, Niall Ferguson makes several allusions:

Of course no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of indigenous peoples. (p. 190, ll. 19-23)

In this example, Ferguson alludes to the ill-treatment of ethnic minorities and indigenous people. This is also an allusion to the British Empire’s colonization of Australia and the treatment of Aboriginal people. In Australia, English settlers have taken over the Aboriginal lands and have discarded the Aboriginal beliefs and way of life...