Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain

by Sathnam Sanghera

Nevertheless, it is also relentlessly fascinating. Did you know that when the British empire was at its territorial peak in the early 1920s, it covered 13.71 million square miles, which represents 24 per cent of the earth’s land area or equivalent to 94 per cent of the moon’s surface area or almost exactly twice as large as the surface area of Pluto?2 Did you know that despite Canada’s vast resources Britain actually considered handing it back to France during peace negotiations, in exchange for the sugar island of Guadeloupe?3 That Adolf Hitler was fascinated by Britain’s global strength and once remarked that Germany should ‘learn from the English, who, with 250,000 men in all, govern four hundred million Indians!’ That in the early seventeenth century, a pageant was arranged on the Thames to mark the flourishing trade with the East India Company’s new ports, which included several artificial floating islands featuring unusual spice trees and international fruit?4 That Lord Curzon, Viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905, had such a passion for detail that he even ordered the removal of pigeon droppings from Calcutta’s Public Library? That we inherited Bombay, as it was

known then, as a dowry, when in the 1660s Charles II of England entered an arranged marriage with Catherine of Braganza, daughter of King John IV of Portugal?

That, initially, as a result of a missing map, no one at court knew where ‘Bumbye’ was located, with the Lord High Chancellor wondering out loud whether it was ‘somewhere near Brazil’.5 And that Britain inherited the now mighty island of Manhattan from the Dutch as part of a 1667 settlement of a dispute abou...

There are intense disagreements about what happened during empire and what it means. Frankly, it’s difficult to find any aspect of empire that isn’t subject to animated academic argument. Was 1783 the point when the first empire became the second empire, or was there an overlap? There are reams of articles and books taking opposite positions, and some arguing that there was such a thing as a third empire. When did empire reach its peak? Jan Morris says it was in 1933 when it became ‘the greatest expanse of territory ever presided over by one ruler in the history of mankind’, while the National Archives rather vaguely claim that ‘the British empire reached its height in the 1920s and 1930s’, and other experts give different dates. Then there is the biggest argument of all: was the British empire good or bad? This ‘balance sheet’ view of history, with ‘colonial crimes’ such as the use of poison gas and the deaths of millions in famines being weighed against the supposed elimination of ‘native crimes’ such as sati, foot-binding, infanticide, slavery and cannibalism, is futile and misleading. History and the people who made it were complicated. You can’t apply modern ethics to the past. To read history as a series of events that instil

pride and shame, or a balance of rights and wrongs, is as inane as listing the events in your own life as good and bad. But one of the most startling discoveries I made as a result of the broadcast of my documentary on Jallianwala Bagh is that this debate has a gravitational force of its own. It’s impossible to discuss British empire in the twenty-first century, or even admit to ignorance or curiosity about it, without getting dragged into this binary consideration.

The people who thought that Britain could no longer seize the initiative for herself. The people who thought we could no longer do the great things which we once did. Those who believed that our decline was irreversible – that we could never again be what we were. There were those who would not admit it – even perhaps some here today – people who would have strenuously denied the suggestion but – in their heart of hearts – they too had their secret fears that it was true: that Britain was no longer the nation that had built an empire and ruled a quarter of the world. Well they were wrong. The lesson of the Falklands is that Britain has not changed and that this nation still has those sterling qualities which shine through our history.4

Not least, the economic importance of empire is reflected in the privileged position of the City of London as one of the world’s major financial centres. Sure, London was already a fairly important player on international financial markets as early as the sixteenth century, and it really came into its own with the end of the Napoleonic Wars, which undermined some of London’s rivals (for example, with the French invasion of Amsterdam). But why, despite the fact Britain mines very little gold itself, is London at the centre of the international bullion trade? As the relevant website explains: ‘The roots of the London Bullion Market can be traced to the partnership between Moses Mocatta and the East India Company, who started shipping gold together towards the end of the 17th century.’ More generally, why did the City become lined with the offices of clearing or high-street banks, merchant banks, overseas banks, insurance companies, shipbrokers, mining engineers and maritime insurance providers which are required by global finance? As John Darwin outlines in Unfinished Empire, the scale of it all was originally established by the fact of British imperialism: he points out that the City of London was where the ‘developing’ economies of the world beyond Europe came for the capital to ‘build the infrastructure that would bring their products to market. By 1913 perhaps half the world’s total of foreign investment had been raised in London. Whether constructing a railway, sinking ...

Indeed, British domestic politics in the twentieth century is often interpreted in terms of the famous City–industry divide. The City of London developed at the heart of the British Empire, somewhat divorced from the UK’s mainland economic needs, to finance trading and manufacturing throughout the formal and informal British empire … The Bank of England consistently pursued policies that favored the City’s position as a world financial center, even when such policies were seen as harmful to the UK’s mainland manufacturing needs.

Even worse was the harrowing brutality of what happened after the Indian Uprising of 1857, when Indian troops in Meerut, Delhi, Lucknow and beyond revolted, ostensibly over the introduction of a new Enfield rifle. A rumour had spread that the cartridges for the gun, the ends of which had to be bitten off before loading, were lubricated with a mixture of pigs’ and cows’ lard – the ingesting of which was considered offensive by Muslims and Hindus. But events quickly escalated beyond the issue, with various parties responding to mounting dissatisfaction about British India and seizing the rebellion as an opportunity to drive the British out. The mutineers tried to restore the emperor in Delhi, shot British officers and were responsible for massacres of Britons including women and children, and the British empire’s subsequent rage was often unconstrained.

Moreover, when it came to brutal racial violence, it has been argued that the colonized were also capable of racialized horror. The single most commonly cited example is the so-called Black Hole of Calcutta,7 a notorious incident in June 1756, when, following the capture of the city by the Nawab Siraj al-Dawlah of Bengal, a group of British colonists surrendered and were taken prisoner. A total of

144 men and two women were crammed into the fort’s ‘black hole’, a cell measuring 18 feet by 14 feet 10 inches. It was horrendously hot, and the prisoners fought each other to get near the two small windows, and over the limited supply of water, begging for their lives while the guards laughed at their plight. The story goes that the next morning, only twenty-three of the prisoners were still alive, among a pile of corpses. Also, though there’s a strong argument to be made that it was less about race and more about resisting subjugation, both the Vellore Mutiny of 1806 and the Indian Uprising of 1857 featured examples of gruesome violence against the British, with Lord William Bentinck remarking in relation to the former that ‘the white community for many nights together went to bed in the uncertainty of rising alive’; a single monument in a church in Delhi conveys the horrors endured by the British in the latter, marking as it does the deaths of Thomas Collins, a deputy collector of the city, his wife, his mother, his brother and a further twenty-three members of their extended family, including three grandchildren.

It was notoriously articulated by the Victorian author Sir Henry Newbolt, whom we met earlier as the presenter of a BBC Empire Day special and as a friend of Sir Francis Younghusband of the Tibet expedition, but who is most famous for his 1897 poem about a schoolboy cricketer who, as an adult, travels to Africa to battle for empire. The hero’s memory of his school sports master spurs him on to triumph in battle, and the poem’s famous line ‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ encapsulates the popular view that the war spirit was seeded on the sports field. And it says something that when, in order to keep Tsarist Russia from getting near India, Britain fought a series of arduous Afghan wars, the battles were dubbed the ‘Great Game’, with Lord Curzon, later Viceroy of India, remarking that ‘Turkestan, Afghanistan, Transcaspia, Persia’ were to him ‘pieces on a chessboard upon which is being played out a game for the domination of the world’.fn2 The most notorious remark on this theme came, of course, in the form of the Duke of Wellington’s apocryphal line about how ‘the battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’ (though I’m informed by a historian that the school didn’t actually have any playing fields then, and saying that it was won ‘in the fagging corridors’ doesn’t have quite the same ring), and in the case of Eton you can get a sense of how imperialism might have been indoctrinated in the nineteenth century through a story that Lord Meath, the founder of...