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- British empire.At its apogee, around 1920, the British empire was the greatest—the biggest, at any rate—ever known. It was reputed to cover a quarter of the world's land area, and a fifth of its population. Most of that, however, was of recent provenance. Like all mighty oaks, this one had a tiny origin. A medieval English proto-empire can be dimly made out, in 12th–13th-cent. Ireland and Gascony. Most historians date the beginnings of the empire proper, however, from Tudor times. It grew out of the great seafaring voyages of that age. Britain was a little behind the Spanish and Portuguese, so initially her empire did not compare with theirs. They took the plums. Britain had to make do with North America and the Caribbean, which were not so obviously valuable. The first British colony was Virginia, which was settled in 1585, but not for long. A ship returning four years later found that the colonists had disappeared. In 1607 the colony was re-established, and this time survived. Other places were also colonized, especially some Caribbean islands, and more of the North American coast. Trading posts were established in India. These became the two main focuses of British imperial dominion for the next two centuries.
It was mainly a commercial empire, run by chartered monopoly *companies, and defended by the Royal *navy. Britain made sure its benefits accrued to her exclusively, by a series of *Navigation Acts passed in the mid-17th cent. to prevent the colonies dealing with anyone else. That was to cause trouble later on. Meanwhile, however, the empire expanded steadily, partly through the extension of British trade, and partly as a result of wars with other colonial powers. The *Seven Years War, for example, saw Britain take control of much of India (1756–7). That marked the peak of what later came to be called the ‘first’ British empire, which came to an end with the rebellion of the thirteen American colonies, originally against Britain's trading restrictions, in 1776...
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- 1838—The British Slavery Abolition ActConfront the harsh realities of the African slave trade and consider the role social mobilization played in eradicating the institution across the British Empire.
- 1600—The British East India CompanyThe English and Dutch East India companies coexisted in the Spice Islands as they worked to outflank the Portuguese, but their rivalry soon escalated into war. Examine the founding and meteoric growth of the East India Company and the violence that ultimately led Britain to establish an empire on which the sun never set.
- Ireland’s Secret War for IndependenceThe Irish Republican Army was a tightly organized secret society battling the greatest power on Earth, the British empire. But they were not the first secret society to practice resistance in Ireland. Professor Spence introduces you to The Whiteboys, the Peep o’Day Boys, the Orange Order, the Sons of the Shamrock, Young Ireland, the Molly Maguires, the Ancient Order of Hibernians, and more.
- Legacy of the British EmpireFrom the 17th through the 20th century, Britain's empire spanned the globe, giving this small island an outsized role on the world's stage. But while Britain was making an impact in India, New Zealand, Canada, and elsewhere, these nations were having an impact on Britain. Explore the ethnic and cultural diversity in Britain today.
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- British Empire: 1. 1707–1914At its peak in the 19th century, the British Empire was the largest empire not only on Earth, but in human history, encompassing one fourth of the land area of the globe and one fifth of its inhabitants...
- British Empire: 2. From 1914World War I presented the British Empire with a major challenge, but it survived this global cataclysm largely intact...
- British Empire: 3. AfricaAfrica has sometimes been depicted as a sideshow to British ambitions elsewhere, but this is only partly true...
- British Empire: 4. Australasia and PacificBritain's Australasian (Australia and New Zealand) and Pacific Empire has its origins in the Enlightenment, James Cook's voyages to the Pacific, and Britain's desire to rid itself of convicts and obtain strategic and commercial advantage...
- British Empire: 5. Caribbean, 1624–1838Between 1624 and 1838, the Caribbean islands were transformed from small tropical islands of little imperial importance to the economic powerhouses of the British Empire...
- British Empire: 6. Caribbean, 19th–20th centuriesResistance by the black majority changed the course of the British Caribbean Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries, which resulted in the abolition of British slave trading and slavery, struggles to overcome post-Emancipation oppressions, and ultimately, the acquisition of independence from Britain starting from 1962...
- British Empire: 7. India, to 1858The entry describes the foundation of the British Empire in South Asia by the East India Company. It shows how, induced by the character of the state, there emerged a distinct set of institutions, an Indo-European society, and new spheres of commercial and intellectual exchange in the 19th century...
Perspectives
The British Empire
Violent, powerful, vast: the British Empire is typically viewed as distant and tropical. By contrast, this book examines the effects of the empire on men, women and children across the globe: both those under imperial rule and those who implemented it.nbsp; Looking beyond politics and diplomacy, Philippa Levine combines a traditional approach to colonial history with an investigation of the experience of living within the empire.nbsp; Spanning the period from Cromwell#146;s rule to decolonization in the late twentieth century, and including an extensive chronology for ease of reference, Levine considers the impact of British rule for people in Africa, India and Australia, as well as for the English rulers, and for the Welsh, Scots and Irish who were subject to 'internal colonialism' under the English yoke. Imperialism often led to serious unrest; Levine examines the cruel side of imperialism#146;s purportedly 'civilizing' mission unflinchingly.
The Oxford History of the British Empire
Volume II of the Oxford History of the British Empire examines the history of British worldwide expansion from the Glorious Revolution of 1689 to the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a crucial phase in the creation of the modern British Empire. This is the age of General Wolfe, Clive of India, andCaptain Cook. The international team of experts deploy the latest scholarly research to trace and analyse development and expansion over more than a century. They show how trade, warfare, and migration created an Empire, at first overwhelmingly in the Americas but later increasingly in Asia.Although the Empire was ruptured by the American Revolution, it survived and grew into the British Empire that was to dominate the world during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.series blurb The Oxford History of the British Empire is a major new assessment of the Empire in the light of recent scholarship and the progressive opening of historical records. It deals with the interaction of British and non-western societies from the Elizabethan era to the late twentiethcentury, aiming to provide a balanced treatment of the ruled as well as the rulers, and to take into account the significance of the Empire for the peoples of the British Isles. It explores economic and social trends as well as political.
The Company-State
Almost since the event itself in 1757, the English East India Company's victory over the forces of the nawab of Bengal and the territorial acquisitions that followed has been perceived as the moment when the British Empire in India was born. Examining the Company's political and intellectual history in the century prior to this supposed transformation, The Company-State rethinks this narrative and the nature of the early East India Company itself. In this book, Philip J. Stern reveals the history of a corporation concerned not simply with the bottom line but also with the science of colonial governance. Stern demonstrates how Company leadership wrestled with typical early modern problems of political authority, such as the mutual obligations of subjects and rulers; the relationships among law, economy, and sound civil and colonial society; the constitution of civic institutions ranging from tax collection and religious practice to diplomacy and warmaking; and the nature of jurisdiction and sovereignty over people, territory, and the sea. Their ideas emerged from abstract ideological, historical, and philosophical principles and from the real-world entanglements of East India Company employees and governors with a host of allies, rivals, and polyglot populations in their overseas plantations. As the Company shaped this colonial polity, it also confronted shifting definitions of state and sovereignty across Eurasia that ultimately laid the groundwork for the Company's incorporation into the British empire and state through the eighteenth century. Challenging traditional distinctions between the commercial and imperial eras in British India, as well as a colonial Atlantic world and a "trading world" of Asia, The Company-State offers a unique perspective on the fragmented nature of state, sovereignty, and empire in the early modern world.
Unfinished Empire
John Darwin's After Tamerlane, a sweeping six-hundred-year history of empires around the globe, marked him as a historian of "massive erudition" and narrative mastery. In Unfinished Empire, he marshals his gifts to deliver a monumental one-volume history of Britain's imperium-a work that is sure to stand as the most authoritative, most compelling treatment of the subject for a generation. Darwin unfurls the British Empire's beginnings and decline and its extraordinary range of forms of rule, from settler colonies to island enclaves, from the princely states of India to ramshackle trading posts. His penetrating analysis offers a corrective to those who portray the empire as either naked exploitation or a grand "civilizing mission." Far from ever having a "master plan," the British Empire was controlled by a range of interests often at loggerheads with one another and was as much driven on by others' weaknesses as by its own strength. It shows, too, that the empire was never stable: to govern was a violent process, inevitably creating wars and rebellions. Unfinished Empire is a remarkable, nuanced history of the most complex polity the world has ever known, and a serious attempt to describe the diverse, contradictory ways-from the military to the cultural-in which empires really function. This is essential reading for any lover of sweeping history, or anyone wishing to understand how the modern world came into being.
The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire
A sweeping, brilliantly vivid history of the sudden end of the British Empire and the moment when America became a world superpower--published on the sixtieth anniversary of Britain's withdrawal from Palestine. "I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire." Winston Churchill's famous statement in November 1942, just as the tide of the Second World War was beginning to turn, pugnaciously affirmed his loyalty to the worldwide institution that he had served for most of his life. Britain fought and sacrificed on a global scale to defeat Hitler and his allies--and won. Yet less than five years after Churchill's defiant speech, the British Empire effectively ended with Indian independence in August 1947 and the end of the British Mandate in Palestine in May 1948. As the sun set on Britain's empire, the age of America as world superpower dawned. How did this rapid change of fortune come about? Peter Clarke's book is the first to analyze the abrupt transition from Rule Britannia to Pax Americana. His swift-paced narrative makes superb use of letters and diaries to provide vivid portraits of the figures around whom history pivoted: Churchill, Gandhi, Roosevelt, Stalin, Truman, and a host of lesser-known figures through whom Clarke brilliantly shows the human dimension of epochal events. Clarke traces the intimate and conflicted nature of the "special relationship," showing how Roosevelt and his successors were determined that Britain must be sustained both during the war and after, but that the British Empire must not; and reveals how the tension between Allied war aims, suppressed while the fighting was going on, became rapidly apparent when it ended. The Last Thousand Days of the British Empire is a captivating work of popular history that shows how the events that followed the war reshaped the world as profoundly as the conflict itself.
Ornamentalism
With the return of Hong Kong to the Chinese government in 1997, the empire that had lasted three hundred years and upon which the sun never set loosened its hold on the world and slipped into history. But the question of how we understand the British Empire--its origins, nature, purpose, andeffect on the world it ruled--is far from settled.In this incisive new work, already being hailed as a landmark, David Cannadine looks at the British Empire from a new perspective--through the eyes of those who created and ruled it--and offers fresh insight into the driving forces behind the Empire. Arguing against the views of Edward Said andothers, Cannadine suggests that the British were motivated not by race but by class. The British wanted to domesticate the exotic world of their colonies and to reorder the societies they ruled according to an idealized image of their own class hierarchies. In reestablishing the connections betweenBritish society and colonial society, Cannadine shows that Imperialists loathed Indians and Africans no more nor less than they loathed the great majority of Englishmen and were far more willing to work with maharajahs, kings, and chiefs of whatever race than with "sordid" white settlers. Revoltedby the triumph of democracy in Britain itself, the Empire's rulers embraced a feudal vision of the colonies which successfully endured until the 1950s.Written with verve, clarity, and wit--and characterized throughout by highly original thinking--Ornamentalism will fundamentally alter the way we view the British Empire.