Imperial Island: A History of Empire in Modern Britain by Charlotte Lydia Riley

Author:Charlotte Lydia Riley [Riley, Charlotte Lydia]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, Europe, Great Britain, General
ISBN: 9781847926449
Google: DAaMzwEACAAJ
Amazon: B0BNTL3TQT
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Published: 2023-08-23T19:00:00+00:00

6

Britain’s Troubled Conscience: Empire, War and Famine in the 1980s

‘Britain is at war with Argentina!!! Radio Four has just announced it. I am overcome with excitement. Half of me thinks it is tragic and the other half of me thinks it is dead exciting.’1

So Adrian Mole wrote in his diary, on the morning of Saturday 3 April 1982. When he heard the news, he immediately woke up his father, who shot out of bed, under the impression that the Falkland Islands were located somewhere off the coast of Scotland. Adrian somewhat smugly informed him that the islands were in fact thousands of miles away, but that evening at teatime he tried and failed to locate them on a world map. Eventually his mum uncovered them, under a crumb of fruit cake, in the sea off the coast of Argentina.

A teenage boy living in Leicester, Adrian Mole could be forgiven his ignorance. But despite being a fictional character, the comic creation of Sue Townsend, his response to the Falklands War – a mixture of anxiety and excitement, shaded with confusion – is a good barometer of the British population’s as a whole. The three-month campaign, which Britain fought on the other side of the world to defend territories that most British people had never heard of, was perhaps the last gasp of twentieth-century British imperialism. It was used by Margaret Thatcher to tell a story about British identity that evoked nineteenth-century imperial adventure yarns, as well as the spirit of the Second World War. More than anything, it shows how imperial culture continued to suffuse British society long after many people had stopped thinking consciously about empires at all.

Although the Falklands were a less obvious emblem of British imperialism than the jewel in the crown of India or the pith-helmeted settler colonies of East Africa, they had in fact been part of the British empire for far longer than either of these regions. An English naval captain made the first recorded landing on the islands in 1690, and they were declared a Crown colony in 1833. Today these 778 islands are one of the fourteen remaining British Overseas Territories, the last crumbs of empire left over after decolonisation. Most of the population of the Falklands lives on East and West Falkland, and most are descended from British settlers. There is no indigenous population. The islanders were originally mostly whalers and seal hunters, but by the end of the nineteenth century the economy was heavily dependent on sheep farming; today there are half a million sheep spread across the islands, over 140 for every human Falklander.

The British claim to the islands was disputed even before they were formally recognised as colonies: they lie only three hundred miles off the coast of Patagonia, and so Argentina had made a territorial claim to the islands, which they call Las Malvinas, since their own independence from Spain in 1816. The dispute over sovereignty of the islands continued into the twentieth century, but only at a

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