The Legacy of British Imperialism

All have an element of truth. The island nation did have the material basis and the ships and sailors to eventually best the Dutch, Spanish, and French. After the disasters of the American War of Independence, British statesman had the foresight never again to tax a colony, and never for long to deny self-government to a British population. Imperial possessions, notably the “sugar islands” of the Caribbean and the trading forts of India, contributed materially to British wealth in the eighteenth century, and, it has been argued, enabled the Industrial Revolution. The strength of the British domestic economy allowed Britain to dominate world trade and provided both the material basis for the rapid expansion of the nineteenth century and the motivations for the acquisition of many imperial territories.

The “man on the spot,” in the Victorian phrase, had much to do with many imperial acquisitions, from the Indian conquests of Clive and Lawrence to the later African acquisitions of Rhodes. The self-conscious imperialism of the late nineteenth century, characterized by systematic programs of imperial expansion and rationalization, lasted for only a generation and, although it created pressures for expansion in Africa, was not responsible for creating any of the main imperial holdings. As David Lloyd George said, with characteristic cynicism, “the British empire has done very well out of side-shows,” an observation that is both true and provocative of the further question of how and why divergent events and motivations led to the acquisition of the largest and arguably most influential empire the world has ever seen.

The decline of empire is susceptible to the same variety of explanations. Economic growth created an Indian and an African middle class able to confront the British on their own terms. The Indian National Congress, founded in 1885, was closely linked to the Fabian society in England, and was able to make effective use of anti-imperial ideologies created by British liberals such as J. A. Hobson. The decline of British economic power after, and in part as a result of, the world wars undermined Britain’s ability to maintain a large empire, and the unprofitability of large parts of that empire reduced the incentives to resist its decline. The myth of Britain’s liberal empire-containing, like most myths, an element of truth-and the precedent of the gradual evolution of the settlement Dominions to full self government undermined the justifications for imperial rule, and provided a path from empire to Commonwealth. Britain fought colonial campaigns in Kenya, Cyprus, and Malaya, but none were as bloody and traumatic as those of the French or Portuguese empires. The one attempt that Britain made to reverse imperial decline by military means, the Suez intervention of 1956, lasted 24 hours and split the British political nation.

The historiography of the British Empire is enormous. No focus or approach has been ignored. Older histories spoke of great men and the acquisition of enormous wealth. More recent histories have also addressed topics of current concern, such as the relation of masculinity to imperial conquest and of discourses of race and alterity to the justifications of empire. The evolving, and it must be said rapidly expanding, state of British imperial historiography is perhaps best captured by the two great multivolume histories produced by England’s ancient universities: The Cambridge History of the British Empire, in eight volumes, is a comprehensive survey of the acquisition and rule of the British Empire. Published from 1929 forward, it is quite Whiggish in its emphasis on the export of British constitutional practices yet is an invaluable reference work, based as it is on primary sources, full of names and dates, facts, and details.