British Empire: A Very Short Introduction by Jackson Ashley

Author:Jackson, Ashley [Jackson, Ashley]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: OUP Oxford
Published: 2009-10-29T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 4

Rise and fall

The British Empire grew in stages over the course of many centuries: from ‘internal colonization’ within the British Isles in the Middle Ages to seventeenth-century growth in North America and the West Indies, through phases of expansion in South Asia and Australasia in the eighteenth-century, and in Africa, the Pacific, and South-East Asia in the nineteenth-century. A final flourish of empire-building occurred in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. The Empire’s character shifted over time, from an original emphasis on settler communities and a mercantile economic system to a multi-ethnic, global conglomeration powered by an industrial economy.

Notwithstanding its island status, Britain was always connected to wider worlds: to Ireland and continental Europe, and across the waters of the Atlantic to Africa, the Americas, and beyond. Britain itself had been colonized by invaders, most completely by the Romans and the Normans. Just as Britain’s history cannot be understood without reference to these overseas connections, the history of the British Empire cannot be understood without reference to the wider international setting. The British Empire was an integral feature of the wave of European expansion that transformed the world, and was always an empire among empires. The tides of global history governed its fortunes, and whilst British governments might have been able to influence them, never, even at the height of Britain’s power, were they able to control them. Tellingly, when other European empires began to crumble, the writing was on the wall for Britain’s sprawling imperial edifice too; the European empires rose and fell together.

Historians have written of a ‘first’ British Empire all the way to a ‘fourth’ in seeking to describe the changing nature of imperial power and the shifting geography of the imperial estate. The first British Empire was largely destroyed by the loss of the American colonies, followed by a ‘swing to the east’ and the foundation of a second British Empire based on commercial and territorial expansion in South Asia. The third British Empire was the construction of a ‘white’ dominion power bloc in the international system based on Britain’s relations with its settler offshoots Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa – the original Commonwealth club. The fourth British Empire, meanwhile, is used to denote Britain’s rejuvenated imperial focus on Africa and South-East Asia following the Second World War and the independence in 1947–8 of Britain’s South Asian dependencies, when the Empire became a vital crutch in Britain’s economic recovery.

The British Empire grew from salients established by soldiers, sailors, traders, and adventurers, and in the interstices of empires in decline (such as the Chinese, Moghul, Ottoman, and Spanish). It grew through successful competition with rival empires, some of them, such as the Burmese, relatively small, localized, and weak, others, such as the French, global and capable of challenging Britain economically, politically, ideologically, and militarily. Even at its zenith, the British Empire was constantly buffeted by the claims of rival empires or would-be imperial states, as well as the centrifugal forces generated by

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