Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

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An ex- and an unconventional soldier who was fascinated by the decline of the upper and officer class at the tail end of empire. Authors who have charted the history of the British involvement in the Caribbean and the various economic and social models put in place and adapted over a part of the World that the British engaged with for the longest in its imperial history. 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. Authors who discuss the implications and purposes of the Second British Empire of the 19th and 20th Centuries. PAY UP FOR THE BRITISH GULAG IN KENYA,” one sign read. It was 2011, and four elderly Kikuyu — once Kenya’s largest ethnic group — stood in a cold, April sun beneath the soaring arches of London’s Royal Courts of Justice. The four were seeking the right to sue the British government over torture they had suffered during the Mau Mau revolt against colonial rule. The group was quiet, but their signs were loud: “JUSTICE NOW FOR THE MAU MAU VICTIMS OF TORTURE!”

The British empire, for Biggar, “was not essentially racist, exploitative or wantonly violent”. It was born out of many motives, from “cultural curiosity” to “the vocation to lift oppression”, none of which was “morally wrong”. Britain’s “involvement in slavery was nothing out of the ordinary” but its attempts to abolish it were particularly selfless given “the higher price that British consumers would have to pay for freely produced sugar”. Narrator: By 1913, the British had built an empire which ruled over 400 million people and covered a quarter of the Earth’s surface. The empire brought Britain wealth, power and influence. However, for the people that were colonised, it brought violence, disease and famine. 1838 was the second year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Looking at this single year, we can get a sense of the different experiences of life in the British Empire. Martin Lewis had a remarkably varied career in the ways that the British Empire used to enable as a matter of course even if the permutations and combinations of postings and roles available made each of these careers utterly unique. The author experienced a similar diversity of roles in his own jobs as first a soldier and then a colonial servant. He had a first hand view of some of the key battles of decolonisation in Cyprus, Malaya, Borneo and Aden but also served in very different roles in the Solomon Islands and Hong Kong amongst other postings before retiring to yet another imperially-influenced New Zealand. This account provides an invaluable insight into the sheer variety of opportunities that the British Empire used to offer, even in its years of decline and decolonisation. John Darwin has written a book that claims that the Empire was a varied, in some ways chaotic and very contingent, construction. Nothing like as permanent or as solid as all those bits of the world coloured red would lead you to suggest. It relied upon a quiescent Europe, United States and Asia and it is that, Darwin suggests, which enabled the British to acquire and engage with large parts of the world. But Darwin points out that as soon as Europe became inhabited by aggressive nations and as soon as America became a world power, and as soon as Asia became non-quiescent in the form of Japan and Indian Nationalism then keeping the British show on the road became much harder.This author has written to sets of books with Imperial themes. One concerns a British soldier (Ogilvie) on the North West Frontier from 1880 to 1900. The other concerns an officer (Halfhyde) in the Royal Navy in the 1890s. No colony in their empire gave the British more trouble than the island of Ireland. No subject people proved more rebellious than the Irish. From misty start to unending finish, Irish revolt against colonial rule has been the leitmotif that runs through the entire history of empire, causing problems in Ireland, in England itself, and in the most distant parts of the British globe. The British affected to ignore or forget the Irish dimension to their empire, yet the Irish were always present within it, and wherever they landed and established themselves, they never forgot where they had come from. This author has taken the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays and allowed him to mature into a cad and bounder who has adventures all over the Victorian Empire and beyond.

Half a century after the end of empire, politicians of all persuasions still feel called upon to remember our imperial past with respect. Yet few pause to notice that the descendants of the empire-builders and of their formerly subject peoples now share the small island whose inhabitants once sailed away to change the face of the world. Considerations of empire today must take account of two imperial traditions: that of the conquered as well as the conquerors. Traditionally, that first tradition has been conspicuous by its absence. 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. Elkins, who was allowed access to these archives, knew her work on the Kenyan insurrection “was part of a much bigger story,” one about England’s broader use of “legalized lawlessness” to justify violent suppression of colonized populations across its vast empire and later to destroy or obscure the evidence. What lingering effects, Elkins wondered, did these tactics have on today’s world? Put another way, what is the British Empire’s legacy of violence? After that is a section on fiction writers who have written about The British Empire or an aspect of British imperialism in some way. It does not list all the books written by these authors but only those connected to The British Empire in some way. The opening volume of Morris’s “Pax Britannica Trilogy,” this richly detailed work traces the rise of the British Empire, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 to the celebration of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897.But before that could happen, Elkins said, bright light needed to be trained on the gauzy narrative of the success surrounding the Empire’s civilizing mission. “I’m trying to challenge these recent historiographical and particularly political defenses of British exceptionalism,” she said, “to puncture the myths of paternalism and progress and demonstrate liberalism’s perfidiousness across the Empire and at home.” In many ways, of course, this long history could not be more timely. Elkins offers an open and shut case for those who believe that Rhodes must fall. Her book should, you hope, also find its way into the hands of at least some of that 60% of the nation who, when polled in 2014, thought the British empire was, in general, “something to be proud of”.

Rumer Godden grew up in India on the banks of the Brahmaputra. She later lived in Calcutta and Kashmir as the Raj moved into its swansong years. She was very evocative at recalling the textures, sights and sounds of the sub-continent especially for the many of her books set in and around India. Over two centuries, this resistance took many forms and had many leaders. Sometimes kings and nobles led the revolts, sometimes priests or slaves. Some have famous names and biographies, others have disappeared almost without trace. Many died violent deaths. Few of them have even a walk-on part in traditional accounts of empire. Many of these forgotten peoples deserve to be resurrected and given the attention they deserve. 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. Similarly, with Biggar’s claim that violence was never an important part of empire. He suggests that the cannonading of Indian rebels, while morally explicable, was nevertheless “repudiated” by the “heart of the Raj”. That, again, is a tendentious view that sits ill with the reality of empire. As even John Kaye observes – in his semi-official A History of the Sepoy War in India, written in the the aftermath of the insurrection – the punishment served as “a wonderful display of moral force” designed to erase any “misgivings” about the “superiority of [the English] race”. Anthony Kirk-Greene examines how Colonial Service in Africa was reflected in literature and how the officers of Empire provided inspiration for this genre of writing.

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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 Jeff Shaara dazzled readers with his bestselling novels Gods and Generals, The Last Full Measure, and Gone for Soldiers. Now the acclaimed author who illuminated the Civil War and the Mexican-American War brilliantly brings to life the American Revolution, creating a superb saga of the men who helped to forge the destiny of a nation.

From the Spanish Armada to Eighteenth Century India to the Taiping Rebellion - an eclectic collection of imperial related books. The empire was not established, as some of the old histories liked to suggest, in virgin territory. Far from it. In some places that the British seized, they encountered resistance from local people who had lived there for centuries or, in some cases, since time began. In other regions, notably at the end of the 18th century, lands were wrenched out of the hands of other competing colonial powers that had already begun their self-imposed task of settlement. The British, as a result, were often involved in a three-sided contest. Battles for imperial survival had to be fought both with the native inhabitants and with already existing settlers – usually of French or Dutch origin. This was a text book written and published during the baptism of the First World War. It was written by James Williamson, it spans from the Tudor age to the outbreak of the war. Interestingly, it has some very nice maps to illustrate the growth of the empire over the years.

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At the height of the British Empire, just after the First World War, an island smaller than Kansas controlled roughly a quarter of the world’s population and landmass. To the architects of this colossus, the largest empire in history, each conquest was a moral achievement. Imperial tutelage, often imparted through the barrel of an Enfield, was delivering benighted peoples from the errors of their ways—child marriage, widow immolation, headhunting. Among the edifiers was a Devonshire-born rector’s son named Henry Hugh Tudor. Hughie, as he was known to Winston Churchill and his other chums, pops up so reliably in colonial outposts with outsized body counts that his story can seem a “Where’s Waldo?” of empire. Cameron was right about the armbands. The creation of the British empire caused large portions of the global map to be tinted a rich vermilion, and the colour turned out to be peculiarly appropriate. Britain's empire was established, and maintained for more than two centuries, through bloodshed, violence, brutality, conquest and war. Not a year went by without large numbers of its inhabitants being obliged to suffer for their involuntary participation in the colonial experience. Slavery, famine, prison, battle, murder, extermination – these were their various fates. Joyce Cary was a novelist who actually served in the British Empire as an assistant District Officer in Nigeria and so brought his inside knowledge to the stories he wrote. Anthony Kirk-Greene writes about his service and its impact on his writings here 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.