Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

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Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

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A century after it controlled a vaster empire than the world has ever seen, today Britain is less influential than it has been in memory. It has a diminished military force and has separated from its biggest market, Europe (which Mr Parker reminds readers “had almost always been far more important than the empire”). Marking the centenary of Britain’s largest territorial footprint, many are still asking what the future holds for “little England”. These books, alas, do not hold the answer. ■ And as for the claim that liberal internationalism grew out of what the empire got right: for what it is worth, that creed owes much more to intellectual traditions and luminaries, such as George Orwell, that were opposed to imperialism, than it does to those who thought the empire could be a force for good. In a spirit of open inquiry, it is fair to question contemporary orthodoxy about the British and other empires. But Professor Biggar goes much too far. ■ This is an overview of the continent of Africa written in 1914 - before the outbreak of the World War. It deliberately does not delve into the history of the various colonies, rather it examines their geography, peoples and economic overview and ambitions for the then future. It includes some interesting maps and plenty of facts and figures. This book, a decade on, is that wider history that Elkins had postponed. Partly resting on the Hanslope Park files, it argues that the sadistic methods that marked the last acts of empire in Kenya were not an anomalous aberration but learned behaviours of imperial power. Her detailing of this reality involves a deconstruction not only of the self-delusion, seductive mythology and doublespeak of the largest empire in human history, but also the deliberate official destruction of large parts of its historical record. She coins the term ‘legalised lawlessness’ to describe how Britain spread the rule of law The British often perceived the Irish as "savages", and they used Ireland as an experimental laboratory for the other parts of their overseas empire, as a place to ship out settlers from, as well as a territory to practise techniques of repression and control. Entire armies were recruited in Ireland, and officers learned their trade in its peat bogs and among its burning cottages. Some of the great names of British military history – from Wellington and Wolseley to Kitchener and Montgomery – were indelibly associated with Ireland. The particular tradition of armed policing, first patented in Ireland in the 1820s, became the established pattern until the empire's final collapse.

An ex-soldier and journalist who has written on a wide variety of Imperial related fiction and non-fiction books. They are usually but not exclusively set in Asia or the Pacific Rim. This is a hoary way for Britons to fend off post-imperial guilt: however reprehensible they were, many told themselves for decades, someone else was worse. Self-serving as it seems, Professor Biggar wants to recover this sense of moral superiority. In that way, he writes, the empire can give those “who identify ourselves with Britain cause for lament and shame”, but also “cause for admiration and pride”. I hope the book will move readers away from thinking about things too reductively and start a new conversation that’s far richer and gets to the nuances of how and why things were happening the way they did,” Elkins said. “There are many legacies. We have to put it all on the table.” This is the fourth of the above British Empire Series (not sure where volumes 2 and 3 have got to?). This volume discusses Australasia including the Australian states, New Zealand, New Guinea and various Pacific Islands. Interestingly, it was written just before the Federation of Australia in 1901. The blood-red thread through all of that history, in Elkins’s persuasive reading, is a strain of moralising superiority that convinced successive generations of politicians, from Benjamin Disraeli to Clement Attlee, that restive subject populations must be periodically taught a lesson in the realities of “civilised” power. “The moral effect of immediate mass destruction,” as Elkins describes it. She painstakingly traces how the personnel and methodologies of suppression and torture were passed between territories, at the same time that sentimental propaganda campaigns told a different story of those conquests: from the Nobel laureateship of Kipling to the Boy’s Own potboilers of George Alfred Henty (25m copies of whose books remained in circulation in the 1950s).

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His adventures in these distant and forgotten ends of the earth make compelling, often funny reading and tell a story most of us had thought was over: a tale of the last outposts in Britain’s imperial career and those who keep the flag flying.” A high price was paid by the British involved. Settlers, soldiers, convicts – those people who freshly populated the empire – were often recruited to the imperial cause as a result of the failures of government in the British Isles. These involuntary participants bore the brunt of conquest in faraway continents – death by drowning in ships that never arrived, death at the hands of indigenous peoples who refused to submit, death in foreign battles for which they bore no responsibility, death by cholera and yellow fever, the two great plagues of empire. Biggar describes the compensation as a necessary “political compromise”. That is a legitimate view; but a moral account should surely dig deeper into the ethics of providing recompense for lost “property” when that property consisted of other human beings.

Areas of the world that were part of the British Empire with current British Overseas Territories underlined in red. Mandates and protected states are shown in a lighter shade. None of this has been, during the 60-year post-colonial period since 1947, the generally accepted view of the empire in Britain. The British understandably try to forget that their empire was the fruit of military conquest and of brutal wars involving physical and cultural extermination. Simon Schama's third book in his 'History of Britain' series concentrated on how Britain's national character was changed from being one of exporting its views on civilisation to dealing with the consequences of being an imperial power and transforming itself into a multicultural society.

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Even in the 19th century such claims were challenged. After the Indian mutiny, John Stuart Mill, the lodestone of Victorian liberalism, defended colonial rule, listing as justification, like Biggar 150 years later, the various improvements it had brought to India. Working-class radicals were unimpressed. An editorial in the Chartist People’s Paper insisted that “the revolt of Hindostan” was no different from struggles for freedom by European peoples. Many Britons had supported Poles in their conflict with Russia. They should equally support the struggle of Indians against Britain. During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, [5] England, France, and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left England ( Britain, following the 1707 Act of Union with Scotland) the dominant colonial power in North America. Britain became a major power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.

In the 1700s and 1800s, India experienced several devastating famines. These famines were partly caused by the weather, and the region had suffered from famine before British rule, but British policies often made the situation worse. Under British rule, Indians were pushed to produce crops, such as tea, that Britain could sell for high prices. Therefore when poor weather affected the harvests, there were food shortages resulting in famines across India. During many of these famines Britain did not organise a large enough relief effort, and millions died across India. In the British case, wherever they sought to plant their flag, they were met with opposition. In almost every colony they had to fight their way ashore. While they could sometimes count on a handful of friends and allies, they never arrived as welcome guests. The expansion of empire was conducted as a military operation. The initial opposition continued off and on, and in varying forms, in almost every colonial territory until independence. To retain control, the British were obliged to establish systems of oppression on a global scale, ranging from the sophisticated to the brutal. These in turn were to create new outbreaks of revolt. Mervyn Maciel gives a full account of what it was like to be a Goan working for the British administration in Kenya and the Northern Frontier District from the late 1940s until early 1960s. He had a front row seat in the days of both the Mau Mau insurrection and the Uhuru march to independence. In addition to his professional experiences, he also relates the joys and the challenges of establishing and then raising a family in East Africa. He held several varied postings but seems to have found a particular attraction to the nomadic peoples and wide open spaces of the Northern Frontier District. The early Twentieth Century writer of adventure and thriller stories - many set in an imperial context.

I grew up in the post-colonial states of Kenya, Senegal, and India, and one constant was hearing stirring stories about “fathers of the nation” on the state-run radio. Later, encountering scholarship that reflected Gallagher’s argument that decolonization was “not usually a victory won by freedom-fighters,” I came to view nationalist mythmaking with a cooler eye. A cooler eye, but never quite a cold one: Was what Gallagher had called the great, wave-tossed ship of empire really so imperturbable, I wondered, that it went down “without agony” at its own command? Did the doings of those local heroes amount to nothing? This magazine was published by the Education Department in Nigeria with contributions from other government departments. It was concerned with all sorts of educational, geographical and cultural aspects of life in the colony of Nigeria. This was to be the last of the magazines for a while due to the war.



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