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. ■ Edited by Brian Stewart. This series of recollections shows the sheer variety of jobs and situations that members of the Malayan Police had to undertake during the decade of the Malayan Emergency. In many ways the police were more of a paramilitary force with enormous counter-insurgency responsibilities placed upon them. It is also the account of an ultimately highly successful collaboration at all levels although many did indeed pay a high price indeed to keep the Communist threat at bay. 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. 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.

To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of colonial trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led to hostilities with the United Dutch Provinces—a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars—which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at the expense of the Dutch. [43] In 1655, England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas. [44] 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.This book by Agnes Machar was compiled in 1914. It is really a collection of the important nation-building stages in British history and would have served as a text book to many. It has as many stories about Britain as it does the Empire, but it was all part of the glorification process to inspire young readers to service in the wider Empire and beyond. It would also be used to teach those growing up within the Empire, the history of the 'mother country' and her imperial expansion. 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”. 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.

T he British Empire was and is many things to many people: a civilising endeavour, a bringer of peace, an exploitative force or a project based on white supremacy. Arguments exist for each characterisation. But there is one thing that the British Empire is not: completely over. This was a book written in 1940 and published in America. It was designed to demonstrate to an American audience that the USA had far more in common with The British Empire than with the Fascist states of Germany and Italy currently engaged in war with Britain or even with Communist USSR who were still technically signatories of the Nazi-Soviet pact at this time. The book was designed to nudge US support towards the British. Sharpe is better known as a Napoleonic era hero, but in the early days of this character, he saw extensive action in early imperial India! In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland granted a charter to the Company of Scotland, which established a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama. Besieged by neighbouring Spanish colonists of New Granada, and affected by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later. The Darien scheme was a financial disaster for Scotland: a quarter of Scottish capital was lost in the enterprise. [59] The episode had major political consequences, helping to persuade the government of the Kingdom of Scotland of the merits of turning the personal union with England into a political and economic one under the Kingdom of Great Britain established by the Acts of Union 1707. [60] "First" British Empire (1707–1783) Robert Clive's victory at the Battle of Plassey established the East India Company as both a military and commercial power.Some may look at this and feel as though it’s too much,” Elkins said of her graphic descriptions. “I don’t want readers to feel like they just came away with a bunch of statistics. I want them to feel the lived experiences.” 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. The aftermath of empire has rightly spawned a huge literature, and I found it excruciating to choose just 10.

Kipling, Henty and Rider Haggard were all wildly popular writers of imperial stories for boys of all ages. This book has three examples of their work in a very nicely designed book: King Solomon's Mines, The Man who would be King, With Clive in India The drive towards the annihilation of dissidents and peoples in 20th-century Europe certainly had precedents in the 19th-century imperial operations in the colonial world, where the elimination of "inferior" peoples was seen by some to be historically inevitable, and where the experience helped in the construction of the racist ideologies that arose subsequently in Europe. Later technologies merely enlarged the scale of what had gone before. As Cameron remarked this month, Britannia did not rule the waves with armbands on. An Indian who grew up in Bangladesh, Amatav Ghosh examines the effect of Empire from the bottom up and neatly captures the forces unleashed by this particular brand of globalisation in books like his Ibis Trilogy.Ronald Hyam has written a thematically based overview of topics that help explain the motivation, extent and consequences of Empire. Most tellingly, Biggar seems not to recognise as a moral issue the fact that while slave owners received reparations, slaves themselves did not. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, Biggar imagines that freed slaves continued working on the old plantations not out of economic necessity, having been deprived of all resources, but because of the generosity of former masters in providing housing and food. In Jamaica, the abolition of slavery in 1833 had not actually freed enslaved people. They were forced to work as unpaid apprentices for their former masters. The British rulers were concerned that those formerly enslaved could now vote in elections and threaten their power. In 1838, the British governors of Jamaica made plans to introduce a law that ensured only property owners could vote.