British Empire

778 results back to index

Empireland: How Imperialism Has Shaped Modern Britain by Sathnam Sanghera

Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, coronavirus, COVID-19, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Etonian, European colonialism, food miles, ghettoisation, global pandemic, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Neil Armstrong, period drama, phenotype, Rishi Sunak, school choice, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Shamima Begum, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce

., Our Island Story, Digireads.Com Publishing, 2013 Marshall, P. J. (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996 Marshall, P. J., ‘The British Empire at the end of the Eighteenth Century’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 16–23 Marshall, P. J., ‘The Diaspora of the Africans and the Asians’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 280–95 Marshall, P. J., East Indian Fortunes: The British in Bengal in the Eighteenth Century, Clarendon Press, 1976 Marshall, P. J., ‘Imperial Britain’, in P. J. Marshall (ed.), British Empire, Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 318–37 Marshall, P.

…

Elsewhere other historians point variously to 1497, the year that John Cabot sailed from Bristol on the Matthew and ‘discovered’ the coast of North America under the commission of Henry VII of England, or to 1708, which saw the publication of John Oldmixon’s The British Empire in America (a year after the Act of Union between England and Scotland officially made Britain a thing), or to 1757, when Indians lost the Battle of Plassey to the East India Company, or to 1858, when the Government of India Act resulted in the abolition of the East India Company and the supremacy of the British Crown. And this is far from the last elastic aspect of British empire. Perhaps the main lesson I imbibe from my reading is that there is very little about British empire that is certain or knowable, the books I consult teaching me, among other things, that: Britain’s relationship with its colonies varied across the globe and over time.

…

Presumably his people did some market research, and presumably this research brought up a notorious YouGov poll from 2014 in which 59 per cent of respondents deemed the British empire to be ‘something to be proud of’, only 19 per cent claimed to be ‘ashamed’ of its misdeeds, and more than a third claimed ‘they would like it if Britain still had an empire.’ Two years later, in January 2016, a YouGov poll found that 44 per cent of Britons thought their country’s ‘history of colonialism’ was something to be proud of, and 43 per cent deemed the British empire to be a ‘good thing’. More recently, in March 2020, a global YouGov poll found that 30 per cent of Britons believe former colonies were better off as part of the British empire. So the number of people who feel nostalgic about empire might be falling but around a third of people in the UK still believe Britain’s colonies were better off for being part of an empire, a higher proportion, according to the Guardian report of the poll results, ‘than in any of the other major colonial powers’.

Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, Corn Laws, death from overwork, European colonialism, imperial preference, income per capita, information security, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Livingstone, I presume, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, military-industrial complex, night-watchman state, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, profit motive, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, union organizing, zero-sum game

Morgan’s career was a classic example of the way the British Empire started out, using enterprising freelances as much as official forces. Pirates It used to be thought that the British Empire was acquired ‘in a fit of absence of mind’. In reality the expansion of England was far from inadvertent: it was a conscious act of imitation. Economic historians often think of England as the ‘first industrial nation’. But in the European race for empire, the English were late beginners. It was only in 1655, for example, that England acquired Jamaica. At that time, the British Empire amounted to little more than a handful of Caribbean islands, five North American ‘plantations’ and a couple of Indian ports.

…

Anything, in other words, but take over Mexico – which would have been the British solution. What such attitudes implied for the future of the British Empire was made blatantly clear in an open letter by the editors of Life magazine ‘to the People of England’, published in October 1942: ‘One thing we are sure we are not fighting for is to hold the British Empire together. We don’t like to put the matter so bluntly, but we don’t want you to have any illusions. If your strategists are planning a war to hold the British Empire together they will sooner or later find themselves strategizing all alone.’* The American president, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, agreed.

…

‘We have made declarations on these matters,’ Churchill assured the House of Commons: the British government was already committed to ‘the progressive evolution of self-governing institutions in the British colonies’. ‘Hands off the British Empire’ was his pithy slogan in a December 1944 minute: ‘It must not be weakened or smirched to please sob-stuff merchants at home or foreigners of any hue.’ He had egged the Americans on to join the war. Now he bitterly resented the feeling that the Empire was being ‘jockeyed out or edged nearer the abyss’. He simply would not consent to forty or fifty nations thrusting interfering fingers into the life’s existence of the British Empire … After we have done our best to fight this war … I will have no suggestion that the British Empire is to be put into the dock and examined by everybody to see whether it is up to standard.

Empire Lost: Britain, the Dominions and the Second World War by Andrew Stewart

British Empire, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, Monroe Doctrine, union organizing

Lord Rosebery, speaking to students at Edinburgh on the British Empire, saw its achievements being directed by human hands and minds but was also certain even the 'most heedless and most cynical must see the finger of the Divine' in its long history. Lord Blanesburgh, speaking publicly in January 1933, had argued that it was essential to preserve the Commonwealth of Nations as 'a civilizing force', one which would if needed be 'the final protector of Western civilization'.4 Lionel Curtis, one of the leading Imperial thinkers, thought that the British Empire and Commonwealth would eventually evolve into a federation in which the British government would provide the central authority; once again, he believed that this would bring not only order but spiritual fulfilment.5 In the early days of colonial governments the Parliament at Westminster was the supreme legislative authority for all British possessions.

…

Lord Blanesburgh, speaking publicly in January 1933, had argued that it was essential to preserve the Commonwealth of Nations as 'a civilizing force', one which would if needed be 'the final protector of Western civilization'.4 Lionel Curtis, one of the leading Imperial thinkers, thought that the British Empire and Commonwealth would eventually evolve into a federation in which the British government would provide the central authority; once again, he believed that this would bring not only order but spiritual fulfilment.5 In the early days of colonial governments the Parliament at Westminster was the supreme legislative authority for all British possessions. It had the authority and jurisdiction to legislate and did so for every part of the British Empire. The refusal of settlers in what became the United States of America to recognize the right of the Westminster body to impose taxation upon them when they had their own legislature which had the power to, and did, tax them ultimately led to the American revolution and the end of the first British Empire. The catalyst for the Dominions' creation was, however, John Lambton, more commonly known as Lord Durham, who was sent to what was then termed as 'the Canadas' in 1838 to investigate two rebellions of the previous year and produced, by way of response the following year, his detailed and celebrated 'Report on the Affairs of British North America'.

…

As one report written much later—in 1946—by a member of the DO put it, this document was a 'landmark' in the British Empire's constitutional development as it established legally the equality of the Dominions with Britain and 'their complete independence to this country, subject only to the binding link of the Crown'. The Sovereign was still common, Britain's king remained their king, they shared a common allegiance to the Crown and the inhabitants of the Dominions were still deemed to be 'British subjects'.50 Crucially, in Balfour's opinion, it was 'the only constitution possible if the British Empire is to [continue] to exist'.51 The statute would be adopted formally by each of the Dominions but it would take time.

Imperial Legacies by Jeremy Black;

affirmative action, British Empire, centre right, colonial rule, Donald Trump, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

The rise and fall of empires has become a narrative that adds epic interest and moral notes to the cyclical patterns beloved by so many writers. This cycle is particularly observed in the treatment of the British Empire and the (“would-be”) treatment of the United States, even if the process can be subliminal (for writer and readers) as much as it can be explicit. Separate to such narratives, the bitter identity politics of empire and even more “ex-empire” lead to claims and assertions about collective memories, amnesia, and forgetfulness.8 These often-angry politics, encourage the deployment of empire, especially the British Empire, as a case study for modern intellectual concerns, notably, but not only, about race and gender; this is a process that is repeated with the United States.

…

This is readily apparent when considering present hostility to the United States, which, in a highly unsettling fashion, is often greater than that toward Russia, China, Iran, or Turkey. In this context, however, there is no sign that the particularly hostile character of the treatment of Western imperialism, and notably of the British Empire, will cease. This treatment can be reconceptualized by looking at the important distinction between Western empires, notably that of Britain, and those in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries of the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, and Manchu. With all its faults, the British Empire, like, subsequently, the American state, arose in the context of modernity and the Enlightenment as broadly conceived: they came with promises of the rule of law, participatory governance, freedom, autonomy, and individualism, to at least some of their members.

…

This was particularly true of Britain’s leading role, or rather that of the British Empire, in opposition to the genocidal tyranny of Nazi Germany. In addition, its enemy in World War I, Wilhelmine Germany, earlier in the 1900s, followed policies in East and South West Africa that were far harsher than those of Britain, as were those of the Congo when King Leopold II of Belgium ruled it. Moreover, the brutality used by the Italians in the 1920s and 1930s to suppress resistance in Libya and to conquer Ethiopia, and that of the Japanese in Korea and, even more, in China, were far worse than that seen with the British Empire in the same period, or possibly any period.

Empire: What Ruling the World Did to the British by Jeremy Paxman

British Empire, call centre, Cape to Cairo, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Etonian, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, imperial preference, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kibera, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, mass immigration, offshore financial centre, polynesian navigation, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade

: Anti-Imperialism and Exhibitions in Interwar Britain’, p. 78. 251 ‘the fate of’: Quoted in MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire, p. 234. 251 ‘respect the right’: Louis, Imperialism at Bay, pp. 123–4. 251 ‘I have not’: Churchill, ‘The End of the Beginning’ speech, Mansion House, 10 November 1942, quoted in Sandbrook, Never Had It So Good, p. 281. 252 ‘sturdy British infantrymen’: The Times, 8 December 1941. 253 ‘the survival of’: Quoted in James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, p. 491. 253 ‘the possibility of’: Churchill, The Second World War, vol. IV: The Hinge of Fate, p. 43. 253 ‘I trust you’ll’: Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, p. 452. 254 ‘Thus’, Churchill proclaimed: Quoted in ibid., p. 451. 254 ‘until after protracted’: Quoted in Gilbert Churchill: A Life, p. 716. 255 ‘the end of’: Quoted in Brendon, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, p. 422. 256 ‘The British Empire’: Quoted in Judd, Empire, p. 310. 256 ‘We have always’: Attlee, quoted in the Daily Herald, 16 August 1941. 256 The Labour manifesto: Dale, ed., Labour Party General Election Manifestos, pp. 52, 59, 72. 257 ‘their cookery from Paris’: Orwell, The Lion and the Unicorn, p. 63. 258 ‘I hate Indians’: John Barnes and David Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay: The Leo Amery Diaries, 1929–1945, quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 258 ‘if Christ came’: Churchill, ‘Our Duty in India’, speech, 18 March 1931, printed in the Spectator, 6 June 1931, p. 533. 259 ‘the chatterboxes who’: Callahan, Churchill, p. 28. 259 ‘War has been’: Daily Mail, 16 November 1929, quoted in Herman, Gandhi & Churchill, p. 323. 259 ‘a monstrous monument’: Mansergh, The Commonwealth Experience, p. 267n. 259 a peevish telegram: Wavell, Wavell: The Viceroy’s Journal, p. 78. 259 ‘on the subject’: Barnes and Nicholson, eds., The Empire at Bay, pp. 988, 993. 260 ‘territory over which’: Hansard, 5th series, vol. 426, cols. 1256–7, 1 August 1946, quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 260 ‘men of straw’: Quoted in Louis, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’. 260 ‘Britain’s desertion of’: Quoted in Sarvepalli Gopal, ‘Churchill and India’, in Blake and Louis, eds., Churchill, pp. 470–71. 261 ‘melancholy event’: Quoted in Herman, Gandhi & Churchill, p. 591. 261 ‘not aware of’: Churchill note of 6 July 1945, quoted in Sherman, Mandate Days, p. 171. 262 ‘it surely is’: W.

…

., Beyond a Boundary (Durham, North Carolina, 1993; orig. pub. 1963) James, Lawrence, Imperial Warrior: The Life and Times of Field-Marshal Viscount Allenby, 1861–1936 (London, 1993) ____, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London, 1997) ____, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (London, 1994) ____, Warrior Race: A History of the British at War (London, 2001) Jasanoff, Maya, Edge of Empire: Conquest and Collecting in the East 1750–1850 (London, 2006) ____, Liberty’s Exiles: The Loss of America and the Remaking of the British Empire (London, 2011) Jeal, Tim, Baden-Powell (London, 1989) ____, Baden-Powell: Founder of the Boy Scouts (New Haven, 2001) Jeffery, Keith, ed., ‘An Irish Empire?’: Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996) Jenkinson, A. J., What Do Boys and Girls Read?

…

John Vincent (Manchester, 1984) Livingstone, David, Missionary Travels and Researches in South Africa (London, 1857) Lloyd, Trevor, Empire: The History of the British Empire (London, 2001) Longford, Elizabeth, A Pilgrimage of Passion: The Life of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (London, 1979) Looker, Mark, ‘ “God Save the Queen”: Victoria’s Jubilees and the Religious Press’, Victorian Periodicals Review 21 (1988) Louis, Wm. Roger, ‘Churchill and the Liquidation of the British Empire’, Crosby Kemper Lecture (29 March 1998) ____, Ends of British Imperialism: The Scramble for Empire, Suez and Decolonisation (London, 2006) ____, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire (Oxford, 1978) ____, Ultimate Adventures with Britannia (London, 2009) ____, and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Decolonisation’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 22 (1994) Lucas, Sir Charles, The Empire at War, 5 vols.

Ghosts of Empire: Britain's Legacies in the Modern World by Kwasi Kwarteng

Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, corporate governance, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of penicillin, Etonian, illegal immigration, imperial preference, invisible hand, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, sceptred isle, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

It openly repudiated ideas of human equality and put power and responsibility into the hands of a chosen elite, drawn from a tiny proportion of the population in Britain. The British Empire was not merely undemocratic; it was anti-democratic. The United States, on the other hand, despite its difficult history, proclaims itself to be democratic, plural and liberal. Its avowed values could not be further removed from those of the British Empire. As I hope to show in many of the examples of imperial history I outline in the following chapters, the anarchic individualism and paternalism which underpinned the British Empire led to messy outcomes. Transitions from British rule to independence were difficult, because the Pax Britannica was itself transient and without any firm foundation.

…

Other institutions have a more mixed legacy; they are neither wholly good nor wholly bad, and these must be understood within their own terms and in their own context. I place the British Empire in this category. By putting institutions in their own context, I am arguing against a rather Whiggish view of history in which the past is merely a prologue to the present, where one thing leads inevitably to another, in a steady ascent of progress. History is more interesting and complicated than that. The British Empire is not some prelude to a modern twenty-first-century Western world of democracy, multiculturalism and liberal economics. The British Empire was something different. Some of its aspects, its hierarchy, its open disavowal of the idea of human equality and its snobbery, would strike the metropolitan reader of twenty-first-century London or New York as unpleasant and alien.

…

GHOSTS OF EMPIRE Britain’s Legacies in the Modern World Kwasi Kwarteng Liber dicatur hic parentibus meis amore grati filii piissimo Contents Map Introduction PART I Iraq: Oil and Power 1 The Spoils of War 2 Rivals 3 Monarchy and Revolution 4 Saddam Hussein and Beyond PART II Kashmir: Maharaja's Choice 5 Land for Sale 6 The World of Sir Hari Singh 7 Deadlock PART III Burma: Lost Kingdom 8 White Elephant 9 The Road from Mandalay 10 Twilight over Burma PART IV Sudan: ‘Black and Blues' 11 Kitchener: An Imperial Hero 12 ‘The Finest Body of Men’ 13 North and South PART V Nigeria: ‘The Centre Cannot Hold' 14 Indirect Rule 15 Yellow Sun PART VI Hong Kong: Money and Democracy 16 Hierarchies 17 Democracy Postponed 18 Red Dawn Conclusion Plate Section Notes Bibliography Acknowledgements A Note on the Author Introduction The British Empire remains one of the most popular themes in history. We all know, or think we know, about its character. We have a hazy image of officers in pith helmets, pukka sahibs and turbaned and bejewelled maharajas; we have a sense of the grandeur and splendour of the empire, but it remains, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, very remote. The workings of the empire itself are even more obscure, as is the long roll of colonial governors and officials who administered it. In this book, I have tried to show what the British Empire was really like, from the point of view of the rulers, the administrators who made it possible.

Shadows of Empire: The Anglosphere in British Politics by Michael Kenny, Nick Pearce

battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, colonial rule, corporate governance, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, informal economy, invention of the telegraph, Khartoum Gordon, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Neal Stephenson, Nixon shock, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Steve Bannon, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, Washington Consensus

It was, according to James Belich – the historian whose pioneering work has done most to shape our understanding of it – an English-speaking world that, like the Arab or Iberian worlds, was ‘divided and sub-global, yet transnational, inter-continental, and far flung’, comprising ‘a shifting, varied but interconnected mélange of partners and subjects … lubricated by shared language and culture’ in which people, goods and ideas circulated with relative ease.7 As such, the Anglo-world is best thought of as distinct from, but related to, both the wider British Empire and what has been called the ‘British world system’, the global economic and political system created by the growth and consolidation of the British Empire.8 It includes the white settler societies of ‘Greater Britain’ but also the USA, with which the UK had deep economic and ideological ties in the nineteenth century. As the British Empire declined in the twentieth century, this Anglo-world came to form the core of a new ‘Anglo-America’ – an economic, political, ideological and military constellation through which the USA first assumed, and then exercised, global hegemony (as we shall see, the ‘special relationship’ between the UK and the USA is a central axis upon which debate about the Anglosphere would come to turn).

…

Its origins lie in the late Victorian era, when historians and politicians debated what held the British Empire together, particularly those ‘kith and kin’ colonies where ‘Anglo-Saxons’ had settled, and whether stronger forms of political, economic and military unity were needed to secure the empire against the threats posed by the rise of rival powers, the USA among them. The idea lived on in the early twentieth century through debates in high politics about tariff reform versus free trade and came alive again both in arguments over the future of the British Empire between the world wars and in the soul-searching about Britain's place in the world that accompanied decolonisation, the rise of the ‘New Commonwealth’, and Britain's entry to the European Economic Community (EEC).

…

Anti-imperialist sentiment and support for the underdog Boers ran high, provoking a public backlash against the British Empire. Three hundred Americans volunteered to fight alongside the Boers, among them a contingent of Irish-Americans who seized the opportunity offered by the war to take up armed struggle against the British state. Here was a conflict that bore the hallmarks of the same liberation war that had given birth to the American Republic itself, and which could not be readily filtered through the categories of race. Yet, as the Boer War wore on, anti-British sentiment receded. The USA backed the British Empire, reciprocating the support Britain had offered in the war with Spain.

To the Ends of the Earth: Scotland's Global Diaspora, 1750-2010 by T M Devine

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, full employment, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, housing crisis, invention of the telegraph, invisible hand, it's over 9,000, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, railway mania, Red Clydeside, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, women in the workforce

Mackenzie, ‘Irish, Scottish, Welsh and English Worlds? A Four Nation Approach to the History of the British Empire’, History Compass, 6/5 (2008), pp. 1244–63. 24. Andrew Thompson, ‘Empire and the British State’, in Stockwell, ed., British Empire, p. 51. 25. Ibid. 26. See, for example, Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004); David Fitzpatrick, ‘Ireland and the Empire’, in Andrew Porter, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 3, The Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1999), pp. 495–522; Keith Jeffery, ed., ‘An Irish Empire?’ Aspects of Ireland and the British Empire (Manchester, 1996). 27. Devine, Scotland’s Empire, pp. 94–118, 140–63. 28.

…

Richardson, David, ed., Bristol, Africa and the Eighteenth Century Slave Trade to America, Vol. 3 (Bristol, 1991). Richardson, David, ‘The British Empire and the Atlantic Slave Trade, 1660–1807’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Richter, Daniel K., ‘Native Peoples of North America and the Eighteenth-Century British Empire’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Riddy, John, ‘Warren Hastings: Scotland’s Benefactor?’, in Geoffrey Carnall and Colin Nicholson, eds., The Impeachment of Warren Hastings (Edinburgh, 1989).

…

., A Nation of Peoples. A Sourcebook on America’s Multicultural Heritage (Westport, Conn., 1999). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘ “This famous island set in a Virginian sea”: Ireland in the British Empire, 1690–1801’, in P. J. Marshall, ed., The Oxford History of the British Empire. Vol. 2, The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998). Bartlett, Thomas, ‘Ireland, Empire and Union, 1690–1801’, in Kevin Kenny, ed., Ireland and the British Empire (Oxford, 2004). Basu, Paul, ‘Roots tourism as return movement: semantics and the Scottish diaspora’, in Marjory Harper, ed., Emigrant Homecomings (Manchester, 2005). Basu, Paul, Highland Homecomings (Abingdon, 2007).

Inglorious Empire: What the British Did to India by Shashi Tharoor

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, corporate raider, deindustrialization, European colonialism, global village, informal economy, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, night-watchman state, Parkinson's law, trade route

British interfered with social customs only when it suited them: See, for example, the impassioned appeals by anti-slavery campaigners for the British government to put an end to certain traditional practices of servitude, which were of course completely ignored by Company officialdom: Wilson Anti-Slavery Collection, A Brief View of Slavery in British India, 1841, Manchester: The University of Manchester, John Rylands University Library. URL: www.jstor.org/stable/60228274. ‘Unlike Stalin’s Russia, the British empire’: Lawrence James, The Making and Unmaking of British India, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000; also published as Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India, London: Little, Brown &Co., 1997. For whom was the British empire an open society?: See the essays in Philippa Levine, ed., Gender and Empire, Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, Oxford University Press, 2004. Let’s look at the numbers one last time, widening the lens a little: See https://infogr.am/Share-of-world-GDP-throughout-history.

…

This I have done in each chapter, especially in chapter 2, and in chapters 3 to 7 in which I consider and reject most of the well-worn remaining arguments in favour of the British empire in India. I have supplemented my own years of reading with extensive research both into colonial-era texts and into more recent scholarly work on the British in India, all duly cited in the notes at the end. I hope my arguments have sufficient expert backing, therefore, to be regarded seriously even by those who may disagree with me. Finally, this book makes an argument; it does not tell a story. Readers looking for a chronological narrative account of the rise and fall of the British empire in India will not find it here; the sequence of events is outlined only in the chronology preceding this Preface.

…

It was also intellectual and moral and spiritual: a completely different kind of conquest than had been witnessed before, which left its victims resentful but also envious of their conquerors and, ultimately, eager to be initiated into the mysteries of their seemingly near-magical power. An intriguing example of the successful colonization of the Indian mind is that of the notorious Anglophile Nirad C. Chaudhuri, the Bengali intellectual and author of the bestselling Autobiography of an Unknown Indian (1951), with its cringe-worthy dedication to the British Empire in India: To the memory of the British Empire in India, Which conferred subjecthood on us, but withheld citizenship. To which yet every one of us threw out the challenge: ‘Civis Britannicus sum’ Because all that was good and living within us was made, shaped and quickened by the same British rule.

Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin

Alfred Russel Wallace, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, Corn Laws, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, full employment, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, Kowloon Walled City, land tenure, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, quantitative easing, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Scientific racism, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, union organizing

.), Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2: The Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 1998), p. 30. 9. See R. S. Dunn, Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies 1624–1713 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1972). 10. K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1776–1914’, in S. Stockwell, The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), p. 67. 11. PP 1877 (5), Report and Statistical Tables Relating to Emigration and Immigration, 1876, table X. 12. Ibid., table XIII. 13. Fedorowich, ‘British Empire on the Move’, p. 89. 14. E. Richards, The Highland Clearances: People, Landlords and Rural Turmoil (Edinburgh, 2000), p. 5. 15. J. M. Collison Black, Economic Thought and the Irish Question 1817–1870 (Cambridge, 1960), ch.

…

Porter, Bibliography of Imperial, Colonial and Commonwealth History since 1600 (Oxford, 2002) which has some 24,000 entries, many running to dozens of volumes. S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008) has an excellent – if somewhat shorter – bibliography. A. Jackson and D. Tomkins, Illustrating Empire: A Visual History of British Imperialism (Oxford, 2011) offers an interesting selection of imperial imagery. B. Porter, The Lion’s Share, first published in 1975 but with several later editions, provides an excellent overview of the British Empire since 1850. W. R. Louis (general ed.), Oxford History of the British Empire (5 vols., Oxford, 1998–9) is now the most comprehensive account, beginning with N.

…

When they suffered a string of early defeats, just as the Boxer rebellion and the arrival of foreign armies in Beijing warned that China’s dissolution was at hand, the reaction in London verged on panic. Their dilemma was obvious to Kruger’s closest adviser. The British Empire consisted, wrote Jan Christiaan Smuts in 1899, of ‘great countries inhabited by antagonistic peoples (Cape Colony, India, Egypt &c.) without any adequate military organization in case of disturbance or attack. The dominion that the British Empire exercises … rests more upon prestige and moral intimidation than upon true military strength.’42 Smuts was too optimistic. But the fear of finding themselves in conflict with France and Russia in the Near East and East Asia, while war dragged on in South Africa, galvanized opinion in Britain.

Heaven's Command (Pax Britannica) by Jan Morris

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centralized clearinghouse, Corn Laws, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, gentleman farmer, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, Magellanic Cloud, mass immigration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

: Character and the growth of power. Part Two THE GROWING CONVICTION: 1850–1870 10. GROOVES OF CHANGE: Technology and the British Empire. 11. THE EPIC OF THE RACE: The Indian Mutiny. 12. PAN AND MR GLADSTONE: An Adriatic interlude, 13. THE IMPERIAL STYLE: Taking a Gothic turn. 14. ILLUSTRIOUS FOR THE NILE: Exploration and the death of Speke. 15. GOVERNOR EYRE: ‘Old ’Angsman’ and the Jamaica Rebellion. 16. ‘AIN’T THE PENTATEUCH QUEER: Religion and the British Empire. 17. THE HUMILIATION OF THE METIS: The subjection of an alien culture. 18. IN THE PACIFIC: Sailing safe in the American ocean, Part Three THE IMPERIAL OBSESSION: 1870–1897 19.

…

There were fighting patriots, and speculators of exotic preference, and there were even ornamental visionaries, half a century before their time, who conceived a new British Empire framed in symbolism, and endowed with a grand and mystic meaning. One of these was Robert Martin, who standing back from his immense collection of imperial facts, and contemplating his engravings of colonial seals and charters, concluded that the British Empire of 1837, ramshackle and disregarded though it seemed, would prove to be one of the great accomplishments of history, ‘on whose extension and improvement, so far as human judgement can predict, depends the happiness of the world’.1 Another was J.

…

In particular the issue of an official religion confused both the rulers and the subjects of the British Empire, and even engaged the anxieties of the Queen herself. Nobody was sure whether there was such a thing, whether this was truly a Christian empire, or merely an empire mostly run by Christians. There was certainly a State church at home, but this did not necessarily mean that the Anglican Church was the established religion of the Empire too, and out of the consequent perplexity there swirled a seminal imperial controversy. Not only did the British Empire guarantee religious tolerance, within the limits of humanity, to all its millions of Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, animist or pagan subjects: it was also schismatical at the top.

Rule Britannia: Brexit and the End of Empire by Danny Dorling, Sally Tomlinson

3D printing, Ada Lovelace, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, anti-globalists, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, colonial rule, Corn Laws, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, electricity market, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Etonian, falling living standards, Flynn Effect, gentrification, housing crisis, illegal immigration, imperial preference, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, megacity, New Urbanism, Nick Leeson, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, out of africa, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, University of East Anglia, Wayback Machine, We are the 99%, wealth creators

If it had not been the British, however, it would have been another European state that would have been the centre of the largest empire of the world. It was Britain partly, if not largely, by chance. FIGURE 3.2: A MAP OF THE BRITISH EMPIRE WITH AREA IN PROPORTION TO CURRENT POPULATION The dates when some areas were claimed and rescinded from the British Empire are given in brackets.39 When you looked at what makes up most of the former British Empire today in Figure 3.2 and considered how small Britain is, did you think Britain was more significant, and if so, why? Was it how you were brought up? How you were nurtured? Were you ever shown a map like this at school?

…

However, when you compare prices around major train stations in these cities, and account for the square metres that are inside dwellings, central London is often found to be the most expensive, at least for now – its prices are falling. 57 Macpherson, W. (1999) The Stephen Lawrence Inquiry, Cmnd 4262, London: The Stationery Office. 58 Adams, T. (2013) ‘Doreen Lawrence: “I could have shut myself away, but that is not me”’, The Guardian, 20 April, https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2013/apr/20/doreen-lawrence-stephen-lawrence INDEX Abramovich, Roman 1 abstentions in EU referendum 1, 2, 3 Acheson, Dean 1 Act of Union (1707) 1, 2, 3 Adonis, Andrew 1 age as factor in referendum 1, 2, 3 and views on immigration 1 and support for political parties 1 Al Nahyan, Mansour bin Zayed 1 Aliens Act (1905) 1, 2 Allen, Graham 1 Andrew, Prince 1 Anglo-Saxon myth 1 arms trade 1, 2, 3 Arne, Thomas 1 Arsenal 1 Ashcroft, Lord 1, 2, 3 Attlee, Clement 1, 2 BAE 1 Baker, Herbert 1 Bamford, Lord 1 Bank of England 1, 2 Banks, Arron 1, 2, 3 Barclay, Stephen 1 Barnier, Michel 1 Bartley, Jonathan 1 bell curve 1, 2 Benn, Tony 1 Besant, Annie 1 Bevan, Aneurin 1 Bildt, Carl 1 Blair, Tony 1, 2, 3 Blake, William 1 Bloomberg, Michael 1 Blunkett, David 1 Blunt, Anthony 1 BMG 1 Boer War 1, 2 Bolton, Henry 1 Bonaparte, Napoleon 1 Bone, Peter 1 Booth, Robert 1 Borja, Mario Cortina 1, 2 Bowers, Simon 1 Boyle, Frankie 1 Bradlaugh, Charles 1 Bradley, Karen 1 Bragg, Billy 1 Branson, Richard 1 Bravo, Antonio 1 Bravo, Manuel 1 Brexit Cookbook, The 1 Brexit negotiations Theresa May’s position on 1 free trade deals 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 life after Brexit 1, 2, 3 impact on EU 1 and financial services 1 and impact reports 1 and Brexit War Cabinet 1 and ‘no deal’ Brexit 1, 2 and Greenland example 1 ‘soft’ and ‘hard’ Brexits 1 Labour Party position on 1 costs of Brexit 1 Britain definition of 1, 2 misconception of identity 1 role in modern world 1 post-Empire 1, 2, 3 mythology of 1, 2, 3, 4 creation of 1 ‘Great’ in 1 identity of 1, 2, 3 and natural selection 1 international comparisons 1 rise in inequality in 1 pride in 1 industrial revolution in 1 pollution in 1 arms trade in 1, 2, 3 financial services in 1, 2, 3, 4 arms trade in 1 manufacturing industry in 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7 statistics on trade 1 values of 1 wage levels in 1 life expectancy in 1 possible break-up of 1 Britannia 1 British Brothers’ League 1 British Chamber of Commerce 1 British Empire loss of 1, 2 pride in 1, 2 and immigration 1 creation of 1 and British identity 1 education about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and dependencies 1 as market captive 1, 2, 3, 4 remnants of 1, 2, 3 and public schools 1 racism in 1 fantasy of 1 and Darwinism 1 delusions of grandeur 1 spoils of 1 legacy of 1, 2 Opium Wars 1 and need for food 1 British Empire Union 1 British Medical Journal 1, 2 BRIT(ish): On Race Identity and Belonging (Hirsch) 1 British Union of Fascists 1 Brokenshire, James 1 Brown, Gordon 1, 2, 3 Bullingdon Club 1 Burgess, Guy 1 Buxton, Ronald 1 Cairncross, John 1 Cairns, Alun 1 Cambridge Analytica 1 Cambridge University 1, 2, 3, 4 Cameron, David promises referendum 1, 2 negotiations with EU 1 on ‘Jerusalem’ 1 on trade with the EU 1 at Oxford University 1, 2 family involvement in slavery 1 toughness on immigration 1 at Eton 1 resignation of 1 millionaires in Cabinet 1 wealth of 1 negotiations with EU 1 unauthorised biography of 1 Campbell, Alastair 1 Capital Group 1 Carney, Mark 1 Catholic Herald 1 Cavell, Edith 1 Centre for Social Justice 1 Chagos Islanders 1 Chandler, Christopher 1 Channel Islands 1 Charles, Prince 1, 2, 3, 4 Chelsea football club 1 Child Poverty Action Group 1 Churchill, Winston 1, 2, 3 Clark, Greg 1 Clarke, Kenneth 1, 2 class as factor in referendum 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and the British Empire 1 Clegg, Nick 1 Clinton, Bill 1 Cockburn, Patrick 1 Collingham, Lizzie 1, 2 Commonwealth 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Commonwealth Immigration Act (1968) Conan Doyle, Arthur 1, 2 Confederation of British Industry (BFI) 1 Confession of Faith (Rhodes) 1 Conservative Party donations to 1, 2 issue of EU in 1, 2, 3 wins 2015 general election 1 in European Parliament 1 age of supporters 1 Contemporary Review Journal 1 Corbyn, Jeremy 1 personality of 1, 2 election as Labour Party leader 1 and Windrush scandal 1 and 2017 general election 1 honesty of 1 comparisons with Attlee 1, 2 opposition to austerity 1 and second referendum 1 Corera, Gordon 1 corporal punishment 1 Cox, Geoffrey 1 Cox, Jo 1, 2, 3 Crabb, Stephen 1 Cromwell, Oliver 1 Culloden, Battle of 1 Cumberbatch, Benedict 1 Cummings, Dominic and political repercussions of referendum 1 to be played by Benedict Cumberbatch 1 early life and career 1, 2 belief in natural selection 1, 2, 3 in Vote Leave campaign 1, 2, 3 Cyprus 1 Daily Express 1 Daily Mail 1, 2 Daily Mirror 1 Daily Telegraph 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Dalla Valle, Luciana 1, 2 Dalrymple, William 1 Daly, Paul 1 Darling, Alistair 1 Darwin, Charles 1, 2, 3, 4 Darwinism 1 Davis, David and customs union ‘backstop’ 1 and impact reports 1 made Secretary for Exiting the EU 1 Frankie Boyle on 1 bets on referendum result 1 Demetriades, Panicos 1 Democratic Unionist Party (DUP) 1, 2, 3 Der Spiegel 1 Deripaska, Oleg 1 Duncan Smith, Iain 1 East India Company 1, 2, 3 Economists for Free Trade 1 Edmiston, Lord 1 education as factor in referendum 1 universities 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10 selective 1 and inequality 1, 2, 3 history of in Britain 1 competition in 1 rise in levels of 1 in OECD countries 1 reforms to 1 Education and Race from Empire to Brexit (Tomlinson) 1 Edward, Prince 1 Edward I, King 1 Edwards, David 1 El-Enany, Nadine 1, 2, 3, 4 Elgot, Jessica 1 Elliott, Larry 1 Elliott, Matthew 1 Empire Marketing Board 1, 2 Empire Windrush 1, 2 England, pride in 1, 2 environmental legislation 1 Eton 1 eugenics 1, 2, 3 European Parliament 1 European Research Group (ERG) 1, 2 Evans, Natalie 1 Evans-Gordon, Major 1 Eyres, Harry 1 Falkland Islands 1 Fallon, Michael 1, 2 Farage, Nigel 1 contemplates Northern Ireland seat 1, 2 foiled leadership ambitions 1 and fantasy of British Empire 1 and immigration 1, 2 and Grassroots Out 1 farming industry 1 Festival of Britain 1 Field, Frank 1 financial services 1, 2, 3, 4 Financial Times 1, 2 Fingleton, Eamonn 1 Finnish Lessons (Sahlberg) 1 Fletcher, C. R. L. 1 Flynn Effect 1 Foot, Michael 1 football clubs 1 Foresight reports 1, 2 Fox, Liam and fantasy of British Empire 1 trade deals 1 and arms trade 1 resignation as Secretary of State for Defence 1 and Grassroots Out 1 Frankie Boyle on 1 free trade and British Empire 1, 2, 3 and Brexit negotiations 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8 economists on 1 advantages of 1, 2 and immigration 1 post-Brexit 1 Galbraith, John Kenneth 1 Galton, Francis 1, 2 Gangaidzo, Innocent 1 Garnier, Mark 1 Gauke, David 1, 2 gender as factor in referendum 1 general elections 1945 1 2005 1 2015 1, 2, 3 2017 1 genetics 1 Gentleman, Amelia 1 geography as factor in referendum 1, 2 George V, King 1 Gibraltar 1 Gillray, James 1 Global Justice Now 1 Glorious Revolution 1 Goldsmith, James 1 Goldsmith, Zac 1 Goodfellow, May 1 Goodwin, Matthew 1 Gorard, Stephen 1 Gove, Michael foiled leadership ambitions 1, 2 as Secretary of State for Education 1, 2 at Oxford University 1 belief in natural selection 1 and children of immigrants 1 political views of 1 in Vote Leave campaign 1 as Secretary of State for the Environment 1 grammar schools 1 Grant, Charles 1 Grassroots Out (GO) 1 Grayling, Chris 1 Great British Bake Off, The 1, 2 Green, Damian 1, 2 Green Party 1 Greening, Justine 1 Greenland 1 Grenfell Tower 1, 2 Griffiths, Peter 1 Guardian, The 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 Gugliani, Sam 1 Gummer, Ben 1 Haldane, J.

…

Index About the authors Copyright LIST OF FIGURES AND TABLES FIGURES Figure 0.1: The most generous political donors from the Rich List of 2018 Figure 1.1: Voting by age group in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 1.2: Voting by region in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 1.3: Voting by local authority area in the 2016 EU referendum Figure 2.1: The Britannia 2017 UK five-ounce gold proof coin Figure 2.2: The ‘British nation’ from 55 BC to 1912 – the making of a myth Figure 2.3: EU overseas territories and outermost regions 2018 Figure 2.4: Chris Patten, his daughters and Prince Charles in Hong Kong, 1997 Figure 2.5: Britain’s Royal Navy message to families and children fleeing Syria Figure 3.1: Darwins, Wedgwoods, Galtons and Barclays family tree, 1573–1914 Figure 3.2: A map of the British Empire with area in proportion to current population Figure 3.3: Home locations of UK students at Oxford University in 2012 Figure 3.4: Once a German, always a German – The British Empire Union Figure 4.1: How proud or embarrassed are you about identifying as English? Figure 4.2: ‘John Bull’ locking the door, Daily Express, first published in 1901 Figure 4.3: A cartoon printed in the wake of the 1905 Aliens Act Figure 4.4: William Pitt and Napoleon Bonaparte dissect the plum pudding Figure 4.5: Imports to the UK in billions of US dollars (2017) Figure 4.6: Exports from the UK in billions of US dollars (2017) Figure 5.1: Productivity growth in the UK, 1999–2023, actual and forecasts Figure 5.2: The share of manufacturing in eleven major economies, 1990–2010 Figure 5.3: What do the British manufacture in 2015?

The Deluge: The Great War, America and the Remaking of the Global Order, 1916-1931 by Adam Tooze

anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, credit crunch, failed state, fear of failure, first-past-the-post, floating exchange rates, Ford Model T, German hyperinflation, imperial preference, labour mobility, liberal world order, low interest rates, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, negative equity, price stability, reserve currency, Right to Buy, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the payments system, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, zero-sum game

But internally the British Empire could not escape the force of the point. As Lloyd George put it in July 1921 to the Imperial Conference: ‘We are trying to build up a democratic empire on the basis of the consent of all the races that are inside it . . . It really transfigures . . . the human story. The British Empire will be a Mount of Transfiguration if it succeeds.’59 The Commonwealth was to fall well short of such high aspirations, but it did vote over the furious protests of South Africa to affirm that there was an ‘incongruity between the position of India as an equal member of the British Empire and the existence of disabilities upon British Indians’ domiciled elsewhere in the empire.60 In the event, in 1923 Kenya introduced new exclusions on Indian settlement, but in so doing, along with Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada, and for that matter Britain itself, it put itself at odds with the very principle of equal treatment that was now acknowledged as a requirement of any consistent liberal vision of global empire.

…

No other power had ever wielded such global economic dominance. If we turn to modern-day statistics to plot the development of the world economy since the nineteenth century, the two-part storyline is clear enough (Fig. 1).26 Since the beginning of the nineteenth century the British Empire had been the largest economic unit in the world. Sometime in 1916, the year of Verdun and the Somme, the combined output of the British Empire was overtaken by that of the United States of America. Henceforth, down to the beginning of the twenty-first century, American economic might would be the decisive factor in the shaping of the world order. There has always been a temptation, particularly on the part of British authors, to narrate nineteenth- and twentieth-century history as a story of succession, in which the United States inherited the mantle of British hegemony.27 This is flattering to Britain, but it is misleading in suggesting a continuity in the problems of global order and the means for addressing them.

…

Faced with the rise of major national competitors, some imperial pundits, advocates of a ‘greater Britain’, began to lobby for this heterogeneous conglomerate to be forged into a single, self-enclosed economic bloc.29 But thanks to Britain’s entrenched culture of free trade, a preferential imperial tariff would only be adopted amid the disaster of the Great Depression. The United States was everything that the champions of imperial preference longed for, but the British Empire was not. The United States began as a heterogeneous collection of colonial settlements that in the early nineteenth century had developed into an expansive and highly integrative empire. Unlike the British Empire, the American Republic sought to incorporate its new territories in the West and the South fully into its federal constitution. Given the cleavage in the original founding of the eighteenth-century constitution, between the free-labour North and the slave-labour South, this integrative project was fraught with risks.

The Empire Project: The Rise and Fall of the British World-System, 1830–1970 by John Darwin

anti-communist, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, cognitive bias, colonial rule, Corn Laws, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, labour mobility, land tenure, liberal capitalism, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, Mahatma Gandhi, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, New Urbanism, open economy, railway mania, reserve currency, Right to Buy, rising living standards, scientific management, Scientific racism, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, tacit knowledge, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable

Jones, ‘The Welsh World and the British Empire c.1851–1939: An Exploration’, in Bridge and Fedorowich (eds.), The British World, pp. 57–81. 165. See D. MacKay, The Square Mile: Merchant Princes of Montreal (Vancouver, 1987). 166. K. Fedorowich, ‘The British Empire on the Move, 1760–1914’, in S. Stockwell (ed.), The British Empire: Themes and Perspectives (Oxford, 2008), p. 85. 167. See B. S. Elliott, ‘Emigration from South Leinster to Eastern Upper Canada’, in D. H. Akenson (ed.), Canadian Papers in Rural History, vol. VIII (Gananoque, Ontario, 1992), pp. 277–306. 168. Fedorowich, ‘British Empire on the Move’, p. 83. 169.

…

One of the key themes of this book has been the neglected significance of the settlement colonies/‘white dominions’ for British world power, and the close identification of their ‘British’ populations with the fate of the British Empire. The revival of interest in the socio-cultural connections across this ‘British World’ can be followed in C. Bridge and K. Fedorowich (eds.), The British World: Diaspora, Culture and Identity (2003), and P. Buckner and R. D. Francis (eds.), Rediscovering the British World (Calgary, 2005). Two recent volumes in the Oxford History of the British Empire Companion Series, namely, P. Buckner (ed.), Canada and the British Empire (Oxford, 2008) and D. Schreuder and S. Ward (eds.), Australia's Empire (Oxford, 2008), reflect this new orientation.

…

The Empire Project The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith, ‘has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire’ and John Darwin offers a magisterial global history of the rise and fall of that great imperial project. The British Empire, he argues, was much more than a group of colonies ruled over by a scattering of British expatriates until eventual independence. It was, above all, a global phenomenon. Its power derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of three different kinds of empire: the settler empire of the ‘white dominions’; the commercial empire of the City of London; and ‘Greater India’ which contributed markets, manpower and military muscle.

The Rise and Fall of the British Nation: A Twentieth-Century History by David Edgerton

active measures, Arthur Marwick, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, blue-collar work, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, centre right, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, company town, Corn Laws, corporate governance, deglobalization, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, Donald Davies, double helix, Dr. Strangelove, endogenous growth, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, first-past-the-post, full employment, gentrification, imperial preference, James Dyson, knowledge economy, labour mobility, land reform, land value tax, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, new economy, non-tariff barriers, North Sea oil, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, packet switching, Philip Mirowski, Piper Alpha, plutocrats, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, post-truth, post-war consensus, public intellectual, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, technological determinism, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, trade liberalization, union organizing, very high income, wages for housework, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, working poor

In 1924–5 there was a British Empire Exhibition at Wembley in London, which included a new Empire Stadium. This stadium was known as such at least into the 1960s, though it is now remembered as the old Wembley Stadium.38 But just as for the British there could never be any such thing as British imperialism (as opposed to the British empire), so there could be no such notion as British nationalism (as opposed to the nation). Nationalism was in British understanding an ideology which threatened the empire, and indeed the nation. IRELAND Ireland was the first nation to emerge out of the British empire in the twentieth century.

…

While the implications of the fall of France were immense for the British Empire, it should not in itself be taken as being the consequence of British failure or weakness. It resulted from a highly contingent defeat of the French Army. The Anglo-French alliance had, with very good reason, been confident of their overall superiority in military force in 1939 and early 1940. Even after the fall of France, the British empire fought on, and not without a well-founded confidence in eventual victory. Neither ‘Britain’ nor the British empire, was ever alone. It was allied with many governments in exile, which brought with them small armed forces, sometimes large merchant marines and rich imperial territories, such as the Belgian Congo and the Dutch East Indies.

…

Winston Churchill wrote a semi-official history of the war in its entirety, not just the role of the United Kingdom, or even that of the British empire. If anything, its focus was on the Anglo-American alliance. Historians of the right have followed him in telling stories of the Second World War as a whole rather than specifically writing about the British experience. Histories of the fighting British empire did not appear until the twenty-first century.21 It is indeed worth noting the absence of imperialist (rather than imperial) histories of the twentieth-century United Kingdom, and the few that are supportive of the British empire write from a liberal point of view portraying the empire as diffuser of trade and enlightenment, rather than as a trading bloc or the basis of military power.22 The reason is perhaps obvious – there were bigger fish to fry in the Cold War – and the US alliance was central.

Paris 1919: Six Months That Changed the World by Margaret Macmillan; Richard Holbrooke; Casey Hampton

Albert Einstein, Bolshevik threat, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, facts on the ground, financial independence, Ida Tarbell, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route, traveling salesman, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois

Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 17 (3.4.19. P.M.); House, Intimate Papers, vol. 4, p. 285; Mayer, pp. 378–80. 30. D. Lloyd George, Truth About the Peace Treaties, vol. 1, p. 656. 31. FRUS, vol. 3, pp. 210–15; PWW, vol. 55, pp. 160. 32. Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 27 (21.4.19); Tillman, pp. 280–83. 33. Tillman, pp. 287–94; Hunter Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, pp. 337–38; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 27 (21.4.19). 34. Hunter Miller, Drafting of the Covenant, vol. 1, pp. 442–50; Walworth, Woodrow Wilson, vol. 2, pp. 302–3. 35.

…

Thompson, p. 236; Yale University Library, House diary, 21.2.19. 12. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 31–32; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 13 (13.3.19). 13. Baruch, pp. 5–7. 14. Burnett, vol. 1, p. 34; Hardach, pp. 156–60; Schuker, American “Reparations,” p. 20. 15. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 33, 514; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 33 (1.6.19, A.M.). 16. Burnett, vol. 1, pp. 4–8, 21; B. Kent, p. 69. 17. Bunselmeyer, p. 174, n. 9; Public Record Office, Cabinet Papers, CAB 29/28, British empire delegation minutes, 33 (1.6.19, A.M.). 18. Silverman, p. 39; Burnett, vol. 1, p. 61; House of Lords Record Office, Lloyd George Papers, F/45/9/25, Smuts to Lloyd George, 4.12.18; F45/9/29, Smuts to Lloyd George, 26.3.19; F 45/9/33, Smuts to Lloyd George, 5.5.19; Hancock, pp. 539–41. 19.

…

House took an even longer-term view: separate representation for the dominions and India in the Peace Conference, and in new international bodies such as the League of Nations and the International Labour Organization, could only hurry along “the eventual disintegration of the British Empire.” Britain would end up back where it started, with only its own islands. 25 It was a British empire delegation (and the name was a victory in itself for the fractious dominions) that Lloyd George led to Paris. With well over four hundred officials, special advisers, clerks and typists, it occupied five hotels near the Arc de Triomphe. The largest, and the social center, was the Hôtel Majestic, in prewar days a favorite with rich Brazilian women on clothes-buying trips.

Britain at Bay: The Epic Story of the Second World War: 1938-1941 by Alan Allport

Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, British Empire, centre right, clean water, COVID-19, disinformation, Downton Abbey, hydroponic farming, imperial preference, lone genius, mass incarceration, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, new economy, plutocrats, trade route, éminence grise

Even the Anglican bishop of Jerusalem, Francis Graham Brown, a fierce critic of military excesses in Palestine, thought that the worst incidents were not officially sanctioned by the army authorities, and were privately regretted – though not, he noted, officially condemned.12 All the same, the reality of keeping order in a global empire, even an ‘empire of liberty’ such as Britain’s, meant sometimes doing very ugly things. It is easy to sentimentalise the British Empire’s twilight years – to dwell on the quaint absurdities of late-period imperialism, the sola topees and pukka memsahibs and cold baths and gin-and-tonics on the veranda. But there is no getting away from the fact that the British Empire’s survival, like that of all empires, ultimately rested on the willingness of hard-faced men to commit violence in its name. Someone had to be prepared to do things such as beat a teenage detainee with a tent mallet and a pick-axe handle so viciously that one of his eyes was knocked out of its socket and left hanging by a thin thread of gristle.13 Or smash out the brains of an uncooperative protestor with a rifle butt.14 All the Empire’s liberal intentions and genteel appurtenances could not alter that.

…

Someone had to be prepared to do things such as beat a teenage detainee with a tent mallet and a pick-axe handle so viciously that one of his eyes was knocked out of its socket and left hanging by a thin thread of gristle.13 Or smash out the brains of an uncooperative protestor with a rifle butt.14 All the Empire’s liberal intentions and genteel appurtenances could not alter that. The British Empire in the 1930s was admired, even by its critics, for its progressive achievements. There were lots of things to admire. But, on the brink of world war, its existence greatly complicated Britain’s claim to special moral authority. And to win that war, the imperial motherland would have to make some ruthless compromises with its own values. * It is difficult, now, to remember just what a permanent fixture the British Empire once seemed. It was still one of the great facts of the world in the 1930s: impossible to miss, older than anyone could remember and apparently indestructible.

…

He believed in the essential goodness of the British Empire. He also believed that the Empire was not strong enough to withstand the stresses of another conflict against a power like Germany. ‘I must in any given situation,’ he once said, ‘be sure in my own mind that the cost of war is not greater than the price of peace.’75 In 1938 Herbert von Dirksen, the German ambassador in London, wrote a memorandum to his superiors in Berlin arguing that Chamberlain would never declare war on the Third Reich, no matter what the provocation, because he knew that ‘the social structures of Britain, even the conception of the British Empire, would not survive the chaos of even a victorious war’.76 Dirksen was, as the events of September 1939 proved, wrong.

Brit-Myth: Who Do the British Think They Are? by Chris Rojek

Bob Geldof, British Empire, business climate, colonial rule, deindustrialization, demand response, full employment, Gordon Gekko, Isaac Newton, Khartoum Gordon, Live Aid, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, post-industrial society, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, sceptred isle, Stephen Hawking, the market place, urban planning, Winter of Discontent

The British history of religious dissent and nonconformity provided a cogent pre-configuration of these myths, which perhaps accounts for why the architects of Empire could take them over so readily and transpose them into a secular context. The vehemence of the belief in the absolute individuality, superiority and charm of the Empire is so totally irrational and disproven by history that it can only be of primitive religious origin. To be sure, before the history of the British Empire there was a history of the British Empire of religious ideas that is not often considered in the context of questions of Empire. John Wyclif ’s bible, which appeared in the fourteenth century, was a precursor of Protestant Reformation and emblazoned English style and individualism as thorny issues for Rome and Europe.

…

It brought effective systems of sanitation, health and education to countries in which these public benefits had been curtailed by despotism and dictatorship. Despite the fact that it waged many small wars, Ferguson credits the British Empire with administering a level of global peace that has been unmatched since its demise. In short, there is good reason for British nationalists to be proud of their history of Empire. The diametrically opposite view associates guilt and recrimination with the Empire ‘adventure’. For example, in After Empire (2004) Paul Gilroy argues that the British Empire was founded upon organized racism and maintains that its history was thoroughly ‘bloodstained’ and 178 BRIT-MYTH ‘xenophobic’ (p. 164).

…

It exposes British hypocrisy in continuously dissolving the reality of Empire into misleading, vainglorious illusions that ennoble the imperial nation. 179 EMPIRE AND PHOENIX The achievement and validity of the British Empire then, is a deeply contested issue in British culture. Nearly 60 years after Indian independence, it is clear that Empire still casts a long shadow over British culture and identity. It signifies the enormous loss of British power and prestige, and also the carnal nature of British ambition and hypocrisy. One sees all of this in the pathetic existence of the British National Party (bnp). This marginal influence in British political life wallows in nostalgia for the days when the sun never set on the British Empire. Its current leader, Nick Griffin, believes immigrants should be sent home, capital punishment should be restored for premeditated murder, sex murder, terrorism and child murder and that the English language in British schools is being swamped by ‘dozens’ of alien, migrant tongues.

Britain's Europe: A Thousand Years of Conflict and Cooperation by Brendan Simms

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Corn Laws, credit crunch, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, guns versus butter model, imperial preference, Jeremy Corbyn, land reform, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, oil shock, open economy, plutocrats, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, South Sea Bubble, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, éminence grise

Edmund Burke spoke of a ‘Commonwealth of Europe’ long before the British Commonwealth of Nations was even thought of. The British empire was conquered largely for European reasons. Colonies gave Britain the demographic and financial weight she lacked on the continent; denying them to rival powers was equally important. At the same time, the overseas empire was acquired and maintained through the management of the European balance of power. This was a virtuous cycle, to be sure, but one which began and ended in Europe. When the empire became an embarrassment in Europe and the world after the Second World War, it was mostly wound down. In short: no Europe, no England, no United Kingdom, no British empire and no decolonization.

…

Foreign Affairs and the Making of the Constitution (Baton Rouge, 1773), pp. 3–51. 25. Federalist no. 5, 10.11.1787, in Pole (ed.), Federalist Papers, pp. 17–18. 26. Cited in Hamish Scott, The Emergence of the Eastern Powers, 1756–1775 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 1. 27. See V. T. Harlow, The Founding of the Second British Empire, 2 vols (London, 1952–64) and Christopher A. Bayly, Imperial Meridian. The British Empire and the World, 1780–1830 (London, 1989). On the loyalists as a demographic reserve for empire see: Maya Jasanoff, Liberty’s Exiles. American Loyalists in the Revolutionary World (New York, 2011). 28. Quoted in Jeremy Black, ‘Recovering Lost Years.

…

See Diane Kunz, The Economic Diplomacy of the Suez Crisis (Chapel Hill and London, 1991), especially pp. 113–14, 192–3. 45. Thus Ashley Jackson, ‘Empire and Beyond: The Pursuit of Overseas National Interest in the Late Twentieth Century’, in English Historical Review, CXXII (2007), p. 1361, and W. R. Louis, ‘Public Enemy Number One: The British Empire in the Dock at the United Nations, 1957–1971’, in Martin Lynn (ed.), The British Empire in the 1950s: Retreat or Revival? (Basingstoke, 2006). 46. On this see Anthony Adamthwaite, ‘Suez Revisited’, International Affairs, 69, 3 (1988), pp. 449–64, p. 454. 47. Quoted in Morgan, The People’s Peace, p. 158. 48. Quoted in Morgan, The People’s Peace, pp. 173–4. 49.

Globish: How the English Language Became the World's Language by Robert McCrum

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, AOL-Time Warner, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, call centre, Charles Lindbergh, classic study, colonial rule, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, invention of movable type, invention of writing, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, jimmy wales, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, Martin Wolf, Naomi Klein, Norman Mailer, Parag Khanna, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Steven Pinker, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile

Pitt’s policy would encourage Britain’s European allies to engage the enemy on the Continent while using sea power to defeat the French everywhere else. This strategy was the making of the second British empire and the promotion of the global brand known to cartoonists as ‘Britannia’, the vindication of every nationalist’s hopes. The surge in Britain’s fortunes was palpable. In 1792 there were just 23 British colonies; in 1816 there were 43. Similarly, in 1750 the first British empire amounted to some 12.5 million inhabitants, but by 1820 that figure had soared to 200 million. The scale of the fighting involved is important, too. The Napoleonic Wars bore much the same relation to the Seven Years War as the Second World War bears to the First, and they had the same kind of democratizing effect.

…

Even such a passionate conservative as Edmund Burke could only justify the conduct of empire if it was based on ancient values. ‘The British Empire’, he wrote, ‘must be governed on a plan of freedom, for it will be governed by no other’. This strange clash of English tradition with Victorian ambition resulted in a highly eccentric liberal empire that would be celebrated by its apologists at the old queen’s Diamond Jubilee in 1897 as the work of ‘the greatest governing race the world has ever seen’. From a twenty-first-century perspective, the British empire is now long gone, but its power and influence linger in the national imagination. A surprising number of British families will have at least one distant relative who served as a colonial civil servant, or died serving the Union Jack under a tropical sun.

…

By the late eighteenth century seeds of English and Englishness have become planted successfully across the known world, from Botany Bay to Boston. Finally, a millennium after annihilation by the French, English life, laws and literature become a universal phenomenon dominating the world’s attention for about 150 years. In the past the traditional view was that the waning of the British empire was followed by the rise of American power into the present day. In the words of the Oxford Guide to World English, ‘American English has a global role at the beginning of the twenty-first century comparable to that of British English at the start of the twentieth – but on a scale larger than any previous language or variety of a language in recorded history.’

Grave New World: The End of Globalization, the Return of History by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 9 dash line, Admiral Zheng, air freight, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, bilateral investment treaty, bitcoin, blockchain, Bonfire of the Vanities, borderless world, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, colonial rule, corporate governance, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, falling living standards, floating exchange rates, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global value chain, Global Witness, Great Leap Forward, hydraulic fracturing, Hyman Minsky, imperial preference, income inequality, income per capita, incomplete markets, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, Internet of things, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, middle-income trap, moral hazard, Nixon shock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old age dependency ratio, paradox of thrift, Peace of Westphalia, plutocrats, post-truth, price stability, profit maximization, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, reshoring, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, Scramble for Africa, Second Machine Age, Skype, South China Sea, special drawing rights, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The Market for Lemons, the market place, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, trade liberalization, trade route, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

As regards the self-governing colonies we no longer talk of them as dependencies. The sense of possession has given place to the sense of kinship. We think and speak of them as part of ourselves, as part of the British Empire, united to us, although they may be dispersed throughout the world, by ties of kindred, of religion, of history, and of language, and joined to us by the seas that formerly seemed to divide us. But the British Empire is not confined to the self-governing colonies and the United Kingdom. It includes a much greater area, a much more numerous population in tropical climes, where no considerable European settlement is possible, and where the native population must always outnumber the white inhabitants … Here also the sense of possession has given way to a different sentiment – the sense of obligation.

…

For the most part, nations act in their self-interest – enlightened or otherwise – in an uncertain and sometimes chaotic world, creating temporary alliances that may last weeks, months, years or decades, but which are always in danger of eventually crumbling. Each country’s self-interest, meanwhile, is determined by its own mythology and history – and how that mythology and history is reinterpreted over time. For someone born in the UK at the turn of the twentieth century, the British Empire was a source of wonder and pride. For someone born in the UK at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the British Empire is more likely to be regarded as a source of considerable embarrassment.2 Mythology and history go a long way to explain why the European and US views of the ‘international community’ are not fully aligned, even though the two sides of the North Atlantic are ostensibly close allies.

…

If technology was the only thing that mattered, the Western Roman Empire – among other things, an incredibly sophisticated technological and logistical infrastructure – would never have come to an ignominious end in ad 476; the Chinese, with their superior naval technologies, would have been busily colonizing the Americas in the early sixteenth century, preventing Spain and, by implication, the rest of Western Europe from gaining a foothold; the British Empire would today still be thriving, thanks to the huge advantages it gained from the Industrial Revolution; the Cold War – which ultimately offered two competing versions of globalization associated with an uneasy nuclear stand-off – would never have happened; and today’s ‘failed states’ – suffering from disconnections both internally and with the rest of the world – would be a contradiction in terms.

This Sceptred Isle by Christopher Lee

agricultural Revolution, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, cuban missile crisis, Easter island, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, failed state, financial independence, flying shuttle, glass ceiling, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Johannes Kepler, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, new economy, Northern Rock, Ronald Reagan, sceptred isle, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, urban decay

This trading principle did not always run smoothly but by the death of Victoria and the reign of her son, Edward VII, the British Empire was at its strongest and most profitable. Without the breadth of colonial trading Britain would have been financially embarrassed. Nation-states tumble from historical peaks yet the early years of the twentieth century did not obviously suggest it was right to talk of the Empire sliding away; in fact, there is evidence to suggest that the British Empire was even expanding certainly in terms of its influence in the conduct of the Great War. The 1914–18 conflict was a world war because it was a battle of empires: the British Empire, the German Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the Japanese and to a lesser extent, the Italian colonies.

…

The years between the start of the Stuarts in 1603 and the Hanoverians in 1714 was the founding century of the counting house that was the British Empire. For example, twelve of the thirteen American colonies28 were established in that period. In the West Indies, the British-held islands produced enormous wealth, mainly through sugar plantations. Lancaster’s East India Company overwhelmed anything that the Dutch, and before them the Portuguese, had managed in Asia. By the time the Hanoverians arrived the first British Empire was established and the Treaty of Utrecht (1713–14) that followed the Duke of Marlborough’s victories in Europe would simply consolidate that imperial holding.

…

The Dutch Reform Church would be paramount, the courts and schools and councils would use Dutch as their first language. True, the Boers were very much part of the British Empire, but the way in which they were administered was to be left to a constitutional commission and even the original British objection to the Boers’ treatment of blacks was to be left for further discussion. Little wonder that after the ruthlessness of the conflict there was an impression that it had come to its various conclusions by gentleman’s agreement. This was the final of the wars of the British Empire. There would be further skirmishes, battles, even campaigns that were the result of Britain having had an empire – for example, the war against Mau Mau in Kenya, Communist confrontation in Malaya, indirectly anti-terrorist campaigns in Palestine and Aden and against the separatists in Cyprus.

Persian Gulf Command: A History of the Second World War in Iran and Iraq by Ashley Jackson

Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, fixed income, full employment, it's over 9,000, out of africa, power law, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment

This was a particularly important line of communication in the imperial defence system because it offered an invaluable alternative should the Suez Canal sea route ever be closed. In addition, Iraq’s RAF bases and flying-boat facilities at Basra, Habbaniya and Shaibah were key staging posts on the British Empire’s civil and military air routes.4 During the war, Shaibah served as one of four transit routes feeding the Desert Air Force and also the Soviet Union.5 Iran, meanwhile, was the British Empire’s main source of oil, and its transport network was to gain significance as a junction connecting Anglo-American military supplies to Soviet forces fighting the Germans following the launch of Adolf Hitler’s Barbarossa offensive.

…

Continuing its global panorama, the document noted that Malaya was ‘by no means secure’, and that Iraq and Palestine were threatened and required reinforcement as soon as possible. It was here that the British Empire’s grand strategy began to hit the buffers: The necessity for making provision for our security overseas thus postpones the time when we can hope to undertake major offensive operations . . . While it is obviously desirable to secure every part of the British Empire against enemy aggression, it is clear that, with the forces at our disposal, the allocation of defence resources to different areas must be directly related to the extent that each will contribute to the defeat of Germany.3 This was the real-life game of Risk played by policymakers, planners and regional commanders as they wrestled with the complexity created by the coincidence of global war and global empire.

…

The human traffic in the region remained immense, between April and September 1943, for instance, 700,000 British Empire troops passed through the transit camp at Baghdad. In mid-1944, there were still about 100,000 Indian Army servicemen in the PAIC theatre, along with the 30,000 Americans of Persian Gulf Command (PGC).103 The removal of the German threat meant that PAIC and PGC could focus unhindered on the delivery of millions of tons of military aid to the Soviet Union. It also meant that the oil upon which the British Empire depended would remain secure for the duration of the war. While allied fortunes were improving throughout 1943, the war was very far from being won, and threats to Iran and Iraq remained.

The Anarchy: The Relentless Rise of the East India Company by William Dalrymple

British Empire, colonial rule, company town, crony capitalism, Dava Sobel, deindustrialization, European colonialism, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, global reserve currency, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, land reform, lone genius, megacity, offshore financial centre, reserve currency, spice trade, surveillance capitalism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, upwardly mobile

Even as Haidar was pursuing a terrified Munro back to Madras, British forces in America were already on their way to the final defeat by Washington at Yorktown, and the subsequent final surrender of British forces in America in October the following year. There was a growing sensation that everywhere the British Empire was in the process of falling apart. In Parliament, a year later, one MP noted that ‘in Europe we have lost Minorca, in America 13 provinces, and the two Pensacolas; in the West Indies, Tobago; and some settlements in Africa’.134 ‘The British Empire,’ wrote Edmund Burke, ‘is tottering to its foundation.’135 Soon Parliament was publishing a six-volume report into these failures. ‘The British purchase on India,’ one senior Company military officer told Parliament, ‘is more imaginary than real, to hold that vast territory in subjection with such a disparity of numbers.

…

XIV, 1912, pp. 25–7; Beckles Willson, Ledger and Sword: The Honourable Company of Merchants of England Trading to the East Indies 1599–1874, 2 vols, London, 1903, vol. 1, pp. 19–23. 7Stevens, The Dawn of British Trade, pp. 5–6; P. J. Marshall, ‘The English in Asia to 1700’, in Nicholas Canny, The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 1, The Origins of Empire, Oxford, 1998, pp. 267–9. 8A pauper in comparison to Mughal prosperity, England was not however impoverished by north European Standards, and conducted a large and growing textile trade, largely through the Netherlands. 9Kenneth R. Andrews, Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1430–1630, Cambridge, 1984, pp. 12, 33, 256. 10Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London, 2003, pp. 6, 7, 9; G.

…

., 45r. 57Ashirbadi Lal Srivastava, Shuja ud-Daula, vol. 1, p. 232. 58Sir Penderel Moon, The British Conquest and Dominion of India, London, 1989, p. 111. 59Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 258–9. 60Ibid. 61Madec, Mémoire, p. 74. 62Fakir Khairud-Din Illahabadi, ‘Ibrat Nama, BL Or. 1932, 45v. 63Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, p. 530. 64Ibid. 65The Late Reverend John Entick et al.,The Present State of the British Empire, 4 vols, London, 1774, vol. IV, p. 533. 66Philip J. Stern, The Company State: Corporate Sovereignty & the Early Modern Foundations of the British Empire in India, Cambridge, 2011, p. 3. 67Thomas Twining, Travels in India One Hundred Years Ago, London, 1983, pp. 144–5. 68For the domestic political background at this time, see James Vaughn, The Politics of Empire at the Accession of George III, Princeton, 2009. 69Keay, Farzana, pp. 53, 89. 70Ghulam Hussain Khan, Seir Mutaqherin, vol. 2, pp. 583–4. 71Gentil, Mémoires sur l’Indoustan, p. 259. 72Sadasukh Dihlavi, Munkatab ut-Tawarikh, trans.

Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire by Simon Winchester

borderless world, British Empire, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, illegal immigration, Khyber Pass, laissez-faire capitalism, offshore financial centre, sensible shoes, South China Sea, special economic zone, Suez canal 1869, the market place, three-masted sailing ship

Iffley, Oxford August, 1986 Further Reading For anyone fortunate enough to be able to contemplate a journey to these last specks of the British Empire there are, sad to say, rather few relevant books that are worth taking. I have ploughed through scores of works that linger over the stately decline of the Empire and any number of papers that suggest fates for those islands that, for one reason or another, escaped the great retreat. But most are a little dull; I would be loath to advise any friend bound for Montserrat or Tristan; for instance, to lug along The Cambridge History of the British Empire, or Mr D. J. Morgan’s Guidance Towards Self-Government in British Colonies 1941–1971, invaluable though they were for me.

…

Patrick Leigh Fermor, The Traveller’s Tree, John Murray, 1950 John Brooks, The South American Handbook, Trade and Travel Publications, updated annually THE FALKLAND ISLANDS Michael Mainwaring, From the Falklands to Patagonia, Allison and Busby, 1983 Ian Strange, The Falkland Islands, David and Charles, 1972 Natalie Goodall, Tierra del Fuego, Ushuaia, 1979 John Brooks, The South American Handbook, Trade and Travel Publications, updated annually THE FALKLAND ISLANDS DEPENDENCIES AND BRITISH ANTARCTIC TERRITORY Robert Fox, Antarctica and the South Atlantic, BBC, 1985 THE PITCAIRN ISLANDS Robert Nicolson, The Pitcaimers, Angus and Robertson, 1966 AND IN GENERAL George Woodcock, Who Killed the British Empire? Jonathan Cape, 1974 Colin Cross, The Fall of the British Empire, Hodder and Stoughton, 1968 James Morris, Farewell the Trumpets, Faber, 1978 If there is room for just a single volume, pack the last. About the Author SIMON WINCHESTER was a geologist at Oxford and worked in Africa and on offshore oil rigs before becoming a full-time globe-trotting correspondent and writer.

…

Outposts Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire Simon Winchester For Elaine Contents Map Introduction 1 The Plan 2 British Indian Ocean Territory and Diego Garcia 3 Tristan 4 Gibraltar 5 Ascension Island 6 St Helena 7 Hong Kong 8 Bermuda 9 The British West Indies 10 The Falkland Islands 11 Pitcairn and Other Territories 12 Some Reflections and Conclusions Acknowledgements Further Reading About the Author Praise Other Books by Simon Winchester Copyright About the Publisher Map Introduction The world has changed a very great deal since 1984, the year during which I wrote the following affectionate, in many ways rather poignant, and on occasion sentimental account of my wanderings to and around the British-run relics of the greatest of all modern Empires.

Diamonds, Gold, and War: The British, the Boers, and the Making of South Africa by Martin Meredith

back-to-the-land, banking crisis, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, Great Leap Forward, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, liberation theology, Nelson Mandela, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, trade route

‘Africa is still lying ready for us [and] it is our duty to take it . . . more territory simply means more of the Anglo-Saxon race, more of the best, the most human, most honourable race the world possesses.’ To accomplish this feat of empire-building, Rhodes proposed the formation of a secret society, similar to the Jesuit order, a society with ‘members in every part of the British Empire working with one object and one idea’; in effect, a ‘Church for the extension of the British Empire’. He described the kind of men who would make suitable recruits and outlined how they would work to ‘advocate the closer union of England and her colonies, to crush all disloyalty and every movement for the severance of our Empire’. He also proposed that the society should purchase newspapers, ‘for the press rules the mind of the people’.

…

On a visit to Kimberley in 1877, Joseph Orpen, an Irish-born surveyor, magistrate and politician, recorded remarks Rhodes made at a dinner party he gave at his two-roomed corrugated iron cottage. Sitting at the head of the table, Rhodes began: ‘Gentlemen, I have asked you to dine . . . because I want to tell you what I want to do with the remainder of my life.’ He intended, he said, to devote it to the defence and extension of the British Empire. ‘I think that object a worthy one because the British Empire stands for the protection of all the inhabitants of a country in life, liberty, property, fair play and happiness . . . Everything is now going on happily around us. The Transvaal is much happier [since annexation] and much better off than it was and is quietly settled under government.

…

In his review of the history of British policy at the Cape published in 1853, a former colonial secretary, Earl Grey, concluded that the government’s commitment to British settlement made in 1819 on the grounds of being an economy measure proved to be among the most expensive in the annals of the British empire. What British officials found especially aggravating was that Britain had no vital interest in the Cape other than its naval facilities on the peninsula. ‘Few persons would probably dissent from the opinion that it would be far better for this country if the British territory in South Africa were confined to Cape Town and Simon’s Bay,’ observed Earl Grey.

Two Georges by Richard Dreyfuss, Harry Turtledove

British Empire, citizen journalism, clean water

Meteor Crater did not remind Thomas Bushell of a golfer’s divot. To him, it looked like a gunshot wound on the face of the world. Murders by gunfire, thankfully, were rare in the civilian world, but he’d seen more gunshot wounds than he cared to remember in his days in the Royal North American Army. The British Empire and the Franco-Spanish Holy Alliance were officially at peace, so skirmishes between the North American Union and Nueva España seldom made the newspapers or the wireless, but if you got shot in one, you died just as dead as if it had happened in the full glare of publicity. The waiter returned and went through the lounge with a silver tray.

…

And it would be a pity to waste this lovely wine on my trousers. They haven’t the palate to appreciate it.” He chuckled wheezily. Bushell raised his goblet in salute. “His Majesty, the King-Emperor!” he said. He and his companion both sipped their wine to the traditional toast heard round the world in the British Empire. “I drink to headwinds,” the fat man said, lifting his glass in turn. “If they make us late getting into New Liverpool, we shall be able to enjoy another supper in this splendid establishment.” “I shouldn’t drink to that one,” Bushell said. “I have enough work ahead of me to want to get to it as soon as I can.

…

Bushell got out of his civilian clothes, hung them up, and put on the red-striped black trousers and the red tunic he took out of the closet. The tunic had two rows of seven gilt buttons down the breast, and a high stand collar that was damnably uncomfortable. The shoulderboards showed Bushell’s rank with the crown of the British Empire (differenced from that of the military by the letters RAMP beneath) and two pips each. He belted on his ceremonial sword, pulled his service cap from the shelf above the coat rail, and set it on his desk. The visor had a row of scrambled eggs along the edge, but not by the crown. That and the band of red around the cap also signified his colonelcy.

A Peace to End All Peace: The Fall of the Ottoman Empire and the Creation of the Modern Middle East by David Fromkin

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, Khartoum Gordon, Khyber Pass, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, Suez canal 1869, trade route

With the addition of Palestine and Mesopotamia, the Cape Town to Suez stretch could be linked up with the stretch of territory that ran through British-controlled Persia and the Indian Empire to Burma, Malaya, and the two great Dominions in the Pacific—Australia and New Zealand. As of 1917, Palestine was the key missing link that could join together the parts of the British Empire so that they would form a continuous chain from the Atlantic to the middle of the Pacific. The Prime Minister, of course, saw it the same way. As he wrote later, "For the British Empire, the fight with Turkey had a special importance of its own . .. The Turkish Empire lay right across the track by land or water to our great possessions in the East—India, Burma, Malaya, Borneo, Hong Kong, and the Dominions of Australia and New Zealand."12 Amery, who was about to advise the Cabinet that continued Ottoman (and thus German) control of Palestine was a future danger to the British Empire, believed, with the Prime Minister, that Palestine ought to be invaded immediately—and that Smuts was the general to do it.

…

Just as Britain's Middle Eastern policy had led France to re-evaluate and eventually to repudiate her alliance with Britain, so now France's policy caused the leaders of the British Empire to look at France through new and apprehensive eyes. A short time later the Prime Minister of South Africa wrote to the then Prime Minister of Britain that "France is once more the leader of the Continent with all the bad old instincts fully alive in her . . . The French are out for world power; they have played the most dangerous anti-ally game with Kemal; and inevitably in the course of their ambitions they must come to realise that the British Empire is the only remaining enemy."33 Another unnerving aspect of the crisis was the apparently reckless conduct of the inner group in the Cabinet: Lloyd George, Birkenhead, Churchill, Chancellor of the Exchequer Sir Robert Home, and the Conservative leader Austen Chamberlain.

…

In 1913, for example, the United States produced 140 times more oil than did Persia.5 From the beginning of the Great Game until far into the twentieth century, the most deeply felt concern of British leaders was for the safety of the road to the East. When Queen Victoria assumed the title of Empress of India in 1877 formal recognition was given to the evolution of Britain into a species of dual monarchy—the British Empire and the Empire of India. The line between them was thus a lifeline, but over it, and casting a long shadow, hung the sword of the czars. British leaders seemed not to take into account the possibility that, in expanding southwards and eastwards, the Russians were impelled by internal historical imperatives of their own which had nothing to do with India or Britain.

Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination by Adom Getachew

agricultural Revolution, Bretton Woods, British Empire, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, failed state, financial independence, Gunnar Myrdal, land reform, land tenure, liberal world order, market fundamentalism, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, Peace of Westphalia, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, structural adjustment programs, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

But while these anti-­imperialists formulated the connections between war and empire by drawing attention to the global scramble for colonies fueled by finance capital and led by the British, Smuts refashioned the argument to absolve the British Empire of the aggression and rapaciousness that led to war. In Smuts’s account it was the Ottoman and German Empires, the “old Empires” constituted on the basis of “inequality and the bondage and oppression of the smaller national units” and grounded in theories of centralized sovereignty, that had contributed to the war.75 The British Empire, based on the “principles of national freedom and political decentralization,” was exempt from this destructive imperialism and as a result could be the model for the new League of Nations.

…

Despite the hierarchies between the metropole, the dominions, and dependencies, Smuts argued that the British Empire realized the principles of freedom and equality. He defended this view by transposing equity for equality.76 Equity moderated the absolute and universal claim of equality by indicating that the aim of political institutions was not to secure equal rights and full membership but instead to achieve an appropriate equilibrium attentive to differing capacities and levels of development.77 Like the British Empire, the league would secure development for colonized peoples according to their specific capacities and cultures.

…

From Asia to Africa, European imperial policy sought to “dominate native labor, pay it low wages, give it little political control and small chance for education or even industrial training; in short, to seek to get the largest possible profit out of the laboring class.”163 Writing from London, James experienced a similar conversion toward a more radical critique of imperialism during the Italian invasion and occupation. In a 1933 essay marking the centenary of emancipation in the West Indies, James urged the British Empire to once again take the lead in the international struggle against slavery. While he mentioned that forced labor and slavery were practiced throughout the colonized world including within the British Empire, he named China, Arabia, Ethiopia, and Liberia as places where slavery remained deeply entrenched.164 Despite being in the midst of researching the Haitian Revolution, James argued that the path toward emancipation for the five million slaves lay in appealing to the conscience of the British public and government in order to force the League of Nations to act.165 By 1936, James, now embracing Trotskyism, abandoned his faith in the British Empire and the league.

The Making of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

anti-communist, antiwork, Arthur Marwick, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Bletchley Park, British Empire, business climate, Corn Laws, deep learning, Etonian, garden city movement, guns versus butter model, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Kickstarter, lateral thinking, New Journalism, New Urbanism, plutocrats, public intellectual, Red Clydeside, rent control, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, V2 rocket, wage slave, women in the workforce

Just as the row was hotting up, Churchill wrote to a constituent: It would seem to me a fantastic policy to endeavour to shut the British Empire in a ringed fence. It is very large, and there are a good many things which can be produced in it, but the world is larger & produces some better things than can be found in the British Empire. Why should we deny ourselves the good and varied merchandise which the traffic of the world offers . . . Our planet is not a very big one compared with the other celestial bodies, and I see no particular reason why we should endeavour to make inside our planet a smaller planet called the British Empire, cut off by impassable space from everything else.

…

Index abdication crisis (1936) ref1, ref2 Abyssinia ref1 Addison Act (1919) ref1 Addison, Christopher ref1 adultery ref1 advertising ref1 air races ref1 air travel ref1 arguments over airspace ref1, ref2 early passenger services ref1 establishment of Imperial Airways and routes ref1 and flying boats ref1 air-raid protection (ARP) wardens ref1 aircraft production ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Aitken, Sir Max see Beaverbrook, Lord Alexander, Sir Harold ref1, ref2 Alexandra, Queen ref1, ref2 Allenby, General ref1, ref2 Amritsar massacre (1919) ref1 Anglo-Persian Oil Company ref1 anti-communist organizations ref1 anti-Semitism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Anti-Slavery Society ref1 appeasement ref1, ref2 arguments for ref1 Chamberlain’s meeting with Hitler ref1 and Halifax’s visit to Germany ref1 and Munich ref1 public support for ref1, ref2 Arab revolt (1917) ref1, ref2 architecture ref1, ref2, ref3 aristocracy ref1, ref2 defending of position against House of Lords reform ref1 in economic retreat ref1 and far-right politics ref1 Lloyd George’s attacks on ref1, ref2 post-war ref1 selling of estates ref1, ref2 Armistice Day ref1 Armour, G.D. ref1 Arnim, Elizabeth von ref1 art: Edwardian ref1 inter-war ref1, ref2 Artists’ Rifles ref1 Asquith, Helen (first wife) ref1 Asquith, Herbert ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 downfall ref1, ref2 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Home Rule ref1 and House of Lords reform ref1, ref2 loses seat in 1918 election ref1 and loss of son ref1 marriages ref1, ref2 and press ref1 relationship with Venetia Stanley ref1 succession as prime minister ref1 and tariff reform ref1, ref2 and women’s suffrage ref1, ref2 Asquith, Margot (second wife) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Asquith, Raymond (son) ref1 Asquith, Violet (daughter) ref1 Ataturk, Kemal ref1 Atlantic Charter ref1 Attlee, Clement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Auchinleck, General Claude ref1, ref2 Audemars, Edmond ref1 Australia and First World War ref1 Automobile Association ref1 Automobile Club ref1 Aveling, Edward ref1 back-to-nature movement ref1 Baden-Powell, Sir Robert ref1, ref2 Balcon, Michael ref1 Baldwin, Stanley ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and abdication crisis ref1, ref2, ref3 and broadcasting ref1 characteristics ref1 and Churchill ref1 conflict with Rothermere and Beaverbrook ref1, ref2 and General Strike ref1, ref2 and India ref1 and Lloyd George ref1 and protectionism ref1 resignation ref1 succession as prime minister ref1 Balfour, A.J. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Balfour, Betty ref1 Balfour Declaration (1917) ref1 Bank of England ref1, ref2, ref3 banks ref1 Barnes, Fred ref1 Barry, Sir John Wolfe ref1 Basset Hound Club Rules and Studbook ref1, ref2 Battle of the Atlantic ref1, ref2 Battle of Britain ref1 Battle of the Somme (film) ref1 battleships ref1 see also Dreadnoughts Bauhaus movement ref1 Bax, Arnold ref1 BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 creation ref1 development under Reith ref1, ref2 early announcers and tone of voice ref1 and General Strike (1926) ref1 receives first Royal Charter (1927) ref1 and Second World War ref1 ‘BBC English’ ref1 beach holidays ref1 Beamish, Henry Hamilton ref1 Beatty, Admiral David ref1, ref2, ref3 Beaufort, Duke of ref1 Beaverbrook, Lord (Max Aitken) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Beck, Harry ref1 Beckwith-Smith, Brigadier ref1 BEF (British Expeditionary Force) and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3 Belgian Congo ref1 Bell, Bishop ref1 Belloc, Hilaire ref1 Benn, Tony ref1 Bennett, Arnold ref1 Whom God Hath Joined ref1 Benz, Karl ref1 Beresford, Lord Charles ref1 Besant, Annie ref1 Bethmann-Hollweg, Chancellor ref1, ref2 Bevan, Nye ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Beveridge, William ref1, ref2 Bevin, Ernie ref1, ref2 Billings, Pemberton ref1 ‘bird flu’ ref1 birth control see contraception Bismarck ref1 black Americans arrival in Britain during Second World War ref1 Black and Tans ref1 Blackshirts ref1, ref2, ref3 Blake, Robert ref1 Bland, Hubert ref1, ref2 Bland, Rosamund ref1 Blast (magazine) ref1 Blatchford, Robert ref1, ref2 Bletchley Park ref1 Bluebird Garage ref1 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen ref1, ref2 ‘Bob’s your uncle’ phrase ref1 Boer War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Boggart Hole riot (Manchester) (1906) ref1, ref2 Bolsheviks ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Bomber Command ref1, ref2 ‘Bomber Harris’ see Harris, Sir Arthur Bonar Law, Andrew ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 Booth, Charles ref1, ref2 Boothby, Bob ref1 Bottomley, Horatio ref1 Bowser, Charlie ref1 Boy Scouts see scouting movement Boys Brigade ref1 Bradlaugh, Charles ref1 Braithwaite, W.J. ref1 Brest-Litovsk, Treaty of (1918) ref1 Bristol Hippodrome ref1 British Broadcasting Corporation see BBC British Empire ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 British Empire Exhibition (1924) ref1 British Empire Union ref1 British Eugenics Education Society ref1 British Expeditionary Force see BEF British Gazette ref1, ref1 British Grand Prix ref1 British Legion ref1 British Union of Fascists see BUF Britons, The ref1 Brittain, Vera ref1 Britten, Benjamin ref1 broadcasting ref1 see also BBC Brooke, Sir Alan ref1, ref2, ref3 Brooke, Raymond ref1 Brooke, Rupert ref1 Brown, Gordon ref1 Brownshirts ref1 Buchan, John Prestor John ref1 BUF (British Union of Fascists) ref1, ref2, ref3 Burma ref1 Butler, R.A. ref1, ref2 Cable Street, Battle of (1936) ref1, ref2 Cadogan, Sir Alexander ref1 Cambrai, Battle of (1917) ref1 Campbell, Donald ref1 Campbell, Malcolm ref1 Campbell-Bannerman, Sir Henry ref1, ref2 camping and caravanning ref1 Camping Club of Great Britain and Ireland ref1 Canterbury, Archbishop of ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Carnarvon, Lord ref1 cars ref1, ref2, ref3 benefits of ref1 developments in ref1, ref2 first accident involving a pedestrian and ref1 Fordist mass-production ref1 motorists’ clothing ref1 rise in number of during Edwardian era ref1 Carson, Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 Casement, Sir Roger ref1, ref2 Cat and Mouse Act ref1 cavity magnetron ref1 Cecil, Hugh ref1 CEMA ref1 censorship Second World War ref1, ref2 Chamberlain, Arthur ref1 Chamberlain, Joe ref1 background and early political career ref1 and Boer War ref1 breaks away from Liberals ref1 characteristics ref1 fame of ref1 sets up Liberal Unionist organization ref1 stroke ref1, ref2 and tariff reform debate ref1, ref2, ref3 Chamberlain, Neville ref1, ref2, ref3 and appeasement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 as Chancellor ref1 and Churchill ref1 downfall and resignation ref1, ref2 failure of diplomacy towards Hitler ref1 and Munich ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2 Channel Islands ref1 Channon, Sir Henry (‘Chips’) ref1 Chaplin, Charlie ref1, ref2 Chatsworth ref1 Chequers ref1 Cherwell, Lord (Frederick Lindemann) ref1 Cheshire, Leonard ref1 Chesterton, G.K. ref1, ref2 Childers, Erskine execution of by IRA ref1 The Riddle of the Sands ref1 Chindits ref1 Christie, Agatha ref1, ref2 Churchill, Clementine ref1 Churchill, Randolph ref1, ref2 Churchill, Winston ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 as air minister ref1 anti-aristocracy rhetoric ref1 at Board of Trade ref1 and Boer War ref1 and Bolsheviks ref1 and bombing of German cities during Second World War ref1 and Chamberlain ref1 as Chancellor of the Exchequer under Baldwin ref1 and Empire theatre protest ref1 and eugenics ref1, ref2 as First Lord of the Admiralty and build-up of navy ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Gallipoli campaign ref1 and General Strike ref1, ref2 and George V ref1 and German invasion threat prior to First World War ref1 and Hitler ref1, ref2 and Home Rule ref1, ref2, ref3 and India ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and Lloyd George ref1, ref2, ref3 loses seat in 1922 election ref1 political views and belief in social reform ref1 public calls for return to government ref1 rejoins Tory Party ref1 relationship with Fisher ref1 relationship with United States during Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 resignation over India (1931) ref1 and return to gold standard ref1, ref2 and Rowntree’s book on poverty ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12, ref13 and Sidney Street siege ref1 speeches during Second World War ref1, ref2 steps to becoming Prime Minister ref1 suffragette attack on ref1 and tariff reform ref1, ref2 threatening of European peace by Hitler warning and calls for rearmament ref1, ref2, ref3 and Tonypandy miners’ strike (1910) ref1 cinema ref1 Citizens’ Army ref1 City of London Imperial Volunteers ref1 civil service ref1 Clark, Alan The Donkeys ref1 Clark, Sir Kenneth ref1, ref2 Clarke, Tom ref1 class distinctions in Edwardian Britain ref1 divisions within army during First World War ref1 impact of Second World War on ref1, ref2 and politics in twenties ref1 clothing motorists’ ref1 and Second World War ref1 and status in Edwardian Britain ref1 in twenties ref1 Clydebank, bombing of ref1 Clydeside ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 coal miners strike (1912) ref1 Coliseum (London) ref1 Collins, Michael ref1, ref2, ref3 Colville, Jock ref1, ref2, ref3 Common Wealth ref1, ref2 Communist Party of Great Britain ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 communist revolution, fear of ref1 communists ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Conan Doyle, Arthur ref1, ref2 The Hound of the Baskervilles ref1 Concorde ref1, ref2, ref3 Congo Reform Association ref1 Connolly, James ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Connor, William (‘Cassandra’) ref1 Conrad, Joseph ref1, ref2 Heart of Darkness ref1 The Secret Agent ref1 conscientious objectors First World War ref1 Second World War ref1 Conservatives ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11, ref12 contraception ref1, ref2, ref3 Coolidge, President Calvin ref1, ref2 Cooper, Duff ref1, ref2, ref3 Corrigan, Gordon ref1 Coventry, bombing of ref1, ref2 Coward, Nöel ref1 crash (1929) ref1, ref2 Cripps, Sir Stafford ref1, ref2 Crookes, Sir William ref1 Crooks, Will ref1 Crystal Palace fire (1936) ref1 Curzon, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Czechoslovakia ref1, ref2 Dacre, Harry ref1 Daily Express ref1, ref2, ref3 Daily Mail ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Ideal Home Exhibition ref1 Northcliffe’s article on shells crisis during war ref1 Daily Mirror ref1, ref2 Daimler, Gottfried ref1 ‘Daisy, Daisy, Give Me Your Answer Do’ ref1, ref2 Darwin, Charles ref1 Darwin, Erasmus ref1 Darwin, Major Leonard ref1 Davidson, J.C.C. ref1, ref2 Davison, Emily Wilding ref1 Davos Ski Club ref1 De Havilland ref1 De La Warr Seaside Pavilion (Bexhill) ref1 de Nyevelt, Baron de Zuylen ref1 de Valera, Eamon ref1, ref2, ref3 Debrett’s Peerage ref1 Defence of the Realm Act see DORA Dickens, Charles ref1 Dimond, Phyllis ref1 distributism ref1 Distributist League ref1 ditchers ref1, ref2 divorce ref1 Divorce Law Reform Association ref1 Dock, Wharf, Riverside and General Labourers’ Union ref1 dockers’ strikes ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Doenitz, Admiral ref1 DORA (Defence of the Realm Act) ref1, ref2, ref3 Douglas, Clifford ref1 Dowding, Sir Hugh ‘Stuffy’ ref1, ref2 Dreadnoughts ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Dresden, bombing of (1945) ref1 drug taking, in twenties ref1 Dunkirk ref1, ref2, ref3 Dunlop, John Boyd ref1 Dyer, General ref1 Easter Rising (1916) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Eckersley, Peter ref1, ref2, ref3 economy and gold standard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 impact of crash (1929) ref1 post-First World War ref1, ref2 Eden, Anthony ref1, ref2, ref3 Edinburgh Castle pub (London) ref1 Edmunds, Henry ref1 education Edwardian era ref1 inter-war years ref1, ref2 Education Act (1902) ref1 Edward VII, King ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Edward VIII, King ref1 abdication ref1, ref2 affair with Mrs Dudley Ward ref1 enthusiasm for Nazi Germany ref1 love for Wallis Simpson ref1, ref2 and social reform ref1 Egypt ref1, ref2, ref3 Eighth Army ref1, ref2 Eisenhower, General ref1 El-Alamein, Battle of ref1, ref2 elections (1906) ref1 (1910) ref1, ref2 (1918) ref1 (1922) ref1, ref2 (1923) ref1 (1924) ref1 (1931) ref1 (1935) ref1 Elgar, Sir Edward ref1 Eliot, T.S. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 ‘Burnt Norton’ ref1 The Wasteland ref1 Ellis, Havelock ref1 emigration Edwardian era ref1 inter-war years ref1 Empire Day ref1 Empire theatre (London) ref1 Enigma ref1, ref2 ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) ref1 eugenics ref1 evolution ref1 explorers ref1 Fabian Society ref1, ref2, ref3 Fairey Battle bombers ref1, ref2 fascism ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 see also BUF Fawcett, Millicent Garrett ref1, ref2 Feisal, Emir ref1, ref2 Fenians ref1 film industry see cinema Film Society ref1 finger prints ref1 Finland ref1 First World War (1914) ref1, ref2 aftermath ref1 and alcohol ref1 Balkans campaign ref1 Baltic plan ref1 and Battle of Jutland ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and BEF ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 British blockade of Germany ref1, ref2, ref3 and burial of the Unknown Soldier ref1 class divisions in army ref1 collapse of German army ref1 comparison with Second World War ref1 conscription ref1; criticism of by UDC ref2 Dardanelles campaign ref1, ref2, ref3 death toll and casualties ref1, ref2, ref3 early military failures ref1 and film industry ref1 and Fisher ref1 food shortages and rationing ref1 formation of coalition government ref1, ref2 French campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gallipoli campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 German raids ref1 and Haig ref1 impact of on British people ref1 and Middle East ref1 munitions factories ref1 Orpen’s paintings of ref1 and Passchendaele ref1 post-war attack on military chiefs ref1 post-war impact of ref1 preparations for ref1 and press/journalists ref1 public support for ref1 recruitment ref1, ref2 revisionists and ref1 Sassoon’s protest at ref1 scenario if Germany had won ref1 at sea ref1 seeking alternative strategies to Flanders campaign ref1 shells crisis and Daily Mail article ref1 sinking of German battleships by Germany at end of ref1 sinking of Lusitania ref1 slaughter in ref1 steps leading to and reasons for Britain’s declaration of war on Germany ref1 struggle to comprehend meaning of ref1 surrender of Germany ref1; trench warfare ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 U-boat campaign ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 and United States ref1, ref2, ref3 use of convoys ref1 use of horses ref1 and women ref1, ref2 Fisher, First Sea Lord ‘Jackie’ ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Fleming, Sir Alexander ref1 Fleury ref1 flying boats ref1 flying circuses ref1 folk dancing ref1 food imports ref1 Foot, Michael ref1 Ford, Ford Madox ref1 Ford, Henry ref1, ref2 Forde, Florrie ref1 Formby, George ref1 ref2 43 (nightclub) ref1, ref2 France and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3 franchise ref1 and women ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 free trade ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 French, Sir John ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8 Fyfe, Hamilton ref1, ref2 gaiety, in twenties ref1 Gallacher, William ref1 Gallipoli crisis ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Galsworthy, John ref1 Galton, Francis ref1, ref2 gambling ref1 Gandhi, Mohandas ref1, ref2 garages ref1 garden cities ref1, ref2 Gardiner, Rolf ref1 Garnett, Theresa ref1 Garsington Manor ref1 Gaumont Palaces ref1 Gawthorpe, Nellie ref1 General Strike (1926) ref1, ref2, ref3 and BBC ref1 gentlemen’s clubs ref1 George III, King ref1 George IV, King ref1, ref2 George V, King ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10 George VI, King ref1 German Naval Law (1912) ref1 Germany ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 of (1914) ref1 building of battleships ref1 early state-welfare system ref1 and eugenics ref1 fear of invasion by in Edwardian Britain ref1 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 national welfare system ref1 navy ref1 and planned Irish uprising ref1 and Versailles Treaty ref1 Wandervogel youth groups ref1 see also Second World War ‘GI brides’ ref1 Gibbon, Lewis Grassic ref1, ref2 Gibbs, Philip ref1, ref2, ref3 Gibson, Guy ref1 Gifford, Grace ref1 Gill, Eric ref1 GIs ref1 Gladstone, William ref1, ref2 Glasgow ‘forty hours strike’ (1919) ref1 Goering, Hermann Wilhelm ref1, ref2 gold standard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Gort, Field Marshal ref1 Gough, General Hubert ref1, ref2 Graf Spee ref1 Graves, Robert ref1 Goodbye to All That ref1 Grayson, Victor ref1, ref2 Great Depression ref1, ref2 Great War see First World War Greece and Second World War ref1 Greenshirts (Social Credit) ref1, ref2, ref3 Gregory, Maundy ref1, ref2, ref3 Gresley, Sir Nigel ref1 Grey, Sir Edward ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Grieve, Christopher Murray see McDiarmid, Hugh Grigg, John ref1 Guest, Freddy ref1, ref2 Guilty Men ref1 Gunn, Neil ref1 guns and Edwardian Britain ref1 Haggard, Sir Rider ref1 Haig, Sir Douglas ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Halifax, Lord (Irwin) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Handley Page, Frederick ref1, ref2 Hanfstaengel, Ernst ‘Putzi’ ref1 Hankey, Maurice ref1 Hannington, Wal ref1 Hardie, Keir ref1, ref2, ref3 Hardy, Thomas ref1 Hargrave, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Harmsworth, Alfred see Northcliffe, Lord Harmsworth, Harold see Rothermere, Lord Harris, Sir Arthur (‘Bomber Harris’) ref1, ref2 Harrisson, Tom ref1 Hart, Basil Liddell ref1 Hastings, Max ref1 headwear ref1 hedgers ref1, ref2 Henderson, Arthur ref1 Henderson, Sir Nevile ref1 Hepworth, Cecil ref1 Hindenburg, General ref1 Hipper, Admiral ref1, ref2 Hippodrome (London) ref1 Hitchcock, Alfred ref1 Hitler, Adolf ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 appeasement towards ref1 and Churchill ref1, ref2 and Edward VIII ref1 and Halifax visit ref1 and Lloyd George ref1 and Munich meeting ref1 and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 suicide of ref1 support of by ‘Cliveden set’ ref1 and Unity Mitford ref1, ref2 Ho Chi Minh ref1 Hobhouse, Emily ref1 Hoesch, Leopold von ref1 Holden, Charles ref1 Hollywood ref1 Holtzendorff, Admiral Henning von ref1 Home Guard ref1, ref2, ref3 Home Rule (Ireland) ref1, ref2 honours selling for cash by Lloyd George ref1 Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act (1925) ref1 Hood (battleship) ref1 Hoover Building ref1 Hore-Belisha, Leslie ref1 Houdini, Harry ref1 House of Lords ref1 reform of by Liberals ref1, ref2 housing ref1, ref2, ref3 Housing Manual (1919) ref1 Howard, Ebenezer ref1 Howard, Peter ref1 Hughes, Billy ref1 hunger marches ref1 Hurricanes ref1, ref2 ‘Hymn of Hate’ ref1 Hyndman, Henry ref1 Ibn Saud ref1 illegitimacy ref1 Illustrated London News ref1, ref2, ref3 immigration Edwardian Britain ref1 inter-war years ref1 Immigration Act (1924) (US) ref1 Imperial Airways ref1 income tax ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Independent Labour Party (ILP) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 India ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Indian National Congress ref1 industry Second World War ref1 Victorian Britain ref1 Inskip, Sir Thomas ref1 Instone ref1 International Brigade ref1 International Congress of Eugenics ref1 International Fascist League ref1 ‘ Invasion of 1910, The’ ref1 invasion fear of in Edwardian Britain ref1 IRA (Irish Republican Army) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Iraq ref1, ref2, ref3 Ireland ref1 civil war (1922) ref1 a nd Easter Rising (1916) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 and First World War ref1 formation of independent Da´il in southern ref1 and Home Rule ref1, ref2 and Second World War ref1 war against British and negotiation of peace treaty (1921) ref1 Irish nationalists ref1, ref2, ref3 Irish Republican Army see IRA Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Irish Volunteers ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Ironside, Lord ref1 Irwin, Lord see Halifax, Lord Islam ref1 Ismay, General ref1 Italian futurists ref1 Italians interment of during Second World War ref1 ‘ It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’ ref1 Jackson, Derek ref1 James, Henry ref1, ref2 Japanese and Second World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Jarrow Crusade (1936) ref1 jazz ref1 Jellicoe, John ref1, ref2, ref3 Jerusalem ref1 Jewish People’s Council Against Fascism ref1 Jews ref1, ref2 see also anti-Semitism ‘ jingo’ ref1 Johnston, Edward ref1 Johnston, Tom ref1 journalism ref1 see also press Joyce, James ref1 Joynson-Hicks, Sir William ref1, ref2 Jutland, Battle of ref1, ref2, ref3 Kandahar Ski Club ref1 Karno, Fred ref1 Keating, Sean ref1 Kemal, Mustapha ref1 Kendall, Mary ref1 Kennedy, Joseph ref1 Kenney, Annie ref1 Kent, Duke of ref1 Keppel, Alice ref1 Key, Edith ref1 Keynes, John Maynard ref1, ref2, ref3 Kibbo Kift ref1, ref2, ref3 Kinship in Husbandry ref1 Kipling, Rudyard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Kitchener, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9, ref10, ref11 Knight, John ref1 Krupskaya, Nadezhda ref1 Labour Party ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1, ref1 Labour Representation Committee ref1, ref2 Lancastria, bombing of ref1 Land Army girls ref1 land speed records ref1 Landsdowne House ref1 Landsdowne, Lord ref1, ref2 Lane, Allen ref1 Lansbury, George ref1 Larkin, James ref1 Laszlo, Philip de ref1 Lauder, Harry ref1, ref2, ref3 Lawrence, D.H. ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Lawrence, Katie ref1 Lawrence, T.E. ref1, ref2, ref3 Le Queux, William ref1 League of Isis ref1 League of Nations ref1, ref2 Lebanon ref1 Lee, Arthur ref1 Leeper, Reginald ref1 Leese, Arnold ref1 Left Book Club ref1 Leigh-Mallory, Air Vice Marshal ref1 Lenin, Vladimir ref1, ref2, ref3 Lenton, Lilian ref1 Leopold, King of Belgium ref1 Letchworth ref1, ref2 Lewis, Rosa ref1 Liberal Party ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Liberal Unionist organization ref1 Liddell-Hart, Basil ref1 Lissauer, Ernst ref1 literature ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Little Tich ref1 Liverpool strikes ref1 Liverpool Mersey Tunnel ref1 Llanfrothen Burial Case ref1 Lloyd George, David ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 anti-landlord rhetoric ref1, ref2 and Boer War ref1, ref2 as Chancellor of the Exchequer ref1 in charge of munitions ref1, ref2 and Churchill ref1, ref2, ref3 downfall ref1, ref2 and First World War ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 and Hitler ref1 hostility towards Haig ref1 and Ireland ref1 Orange Book ref1 and People’s Budget ref1, ref2 personal life ref1 political career ref1 as prime minister and wartime regime under ref1, ref2, ref3 rise to power ref1, ref2 and Second World War ref1 selling of honours for cash ref1 share dealing ref1 and tariff reform debate ref1 vision of welfare system ref1 visit to Germany ref1 wins 1918 election ref1, ref2 and women’s vote ref1 Lloyd, Marie ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Lockyer, Sir Norman ref1 London ref1 fog in Edwardian era ref1 music halls ref1 as refuge for revolutionaries abroad in Edwardian era ref1 London Blitz ref1 London Pavilion theatre ref1 London Transport ref1 London Underground map ref1 Loos, Battle of ref1 Lubetkin, Berthold ref1 Ludendorff ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Luftwaffe ref1, ref2, ref3 Lunn, Arnold ref1, ref2 Lunn, Sir Henry ref1 Lusitania ref1 Lynn, Vera ref1 MacColl, Ewan ref1 MacCormick, John ref1, ref2 McDiarmid, Hugh (Grieve) ref1 MacDonagh, Michael ref1 MacDonald, Ramsay ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 background ref1 and formation of National Government ref1, ref2 and Mosley ref1 vilification of ref1, ref2 MacInnes, Colin ref1 McKenna, Reginald ref1 Mackenzie, Compton ref1, ref2 Maclean, John ref1, ref2 Macmillan, Harold ref1 McNabb, Father Vincent ref1 McShane, Harry ref1 Madoff, Bernard ref1 ‘mafficking’ ref1 Major, John ref1 Malins, Geoffrey ref1 Mallard locomotive ref1 ‘Manchester Rambler, The’ ref1 Manners, Lady Diana ref1, ref2 marching ref1 Marconi, Guglielmo ref1 Marconi scandal (1911) ref1 Markiewicz, Countess ref1, ref2 Marlborough, Duke of ref1 Martin, Captain D.L. ref1 Marx, Eleanor ref1 Marx, Karl ref1 Mass Observation system ref1, ref2 Matcham, Frank ref1 Maude, Aylmer ref1 Maurice, Sir Frederick ref1 Maxse, Leo ref1, ref2 Maxton, Jimmy ref1, ref2 May, Phil ref1 medical science ref1 Melba, Dame Nellie ref1 Melbourne, Lord ref1 memorials ref1 Mendelsohn, Erich ref1 metro-land ref1 Meyrick, Kate ref1, ref2, ref3 Middle Classes Union ref1 Middle East ref1, ref2 Mill, John Stuart ref1 Millais, Sir John Everett ref1 Milner, Lord ref1, ref2, ref3 miners dispute (1926) ref1, ref2 Mitchell, Hannah ref1 The Hard Way Up ref1 Mitchell, Reginald ref1, ref2, ref3 Mitford, Deborah ref1 Mitford, Diana see Mosley, Diana Mitford girls ref1 Mitford, Jessica ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 Mitford, Nancy ref1, ref2 Wigs on the Green ref1 Mitford, Pamela ref1 Mitford, Tom ref1 Mitford, Unity ref1, ref2, ref3 modernism ref1, ref2, ref3 Montacute House (Somerset) ref1 Montagu, Edwin ref1, ref2, ref3 Montgomery, General Bernard ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Morel, Edmund ref1, ref2 Morrel, Ottoline ref1, ref2 Morris, William (car maker) ref1, ref2 Morris, William (craftsman) ref1 Morrison, Herbert ref1, ref2 Morton, Desmond ref1 Morton, E.V. ref1 Mosley, Cimmie (first wife) ref1, ref2 Mosley, Diana (née Mitford) (second wife) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6 Mosley, Oswald ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7, ref8, ref9 and anti-Semitism ref1 background and early life ref1 and Battle of Cable Street ref1 and fascism ref1 funding from Mussolini ref1 imprisonment ref1 launching of British Union of Fascists ref1 and MacDonald ref1 marriage to Diana Mitford ref1 and New Party ref1 and Olympia riot (1934) ref1 plans and ideas ref1 resignation from Labour ref1 and Rothermere ref1 Muir, Edwin ref1, ref2 Munich ref1 Munnings, Alfred ref1 Murdoch, Rupert ref1 Murray, Lord ref1 music ref1, ref2 music hall ref1 Mussolini, Benito ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5 national debt, post-war ref1 National Government ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 National Insurance Bill (1911) ref1 National Party of Scotland ref1 National Unemployed Workers Movement (NUWM) ref1 National Union of Women’s Suffrage Societies (NUWSS) ref1 navy see Royal Navy Navy League ref1 Nazi Germany ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4, ref5, ref6, ref7 see also Hitler, Adolf Nehru, Jawaharlal ref1 Nesbit, Edith (Daisy) ref1, ref2, ref3 The Amulet ref1 Five Children and It ref1 The Railway Children ref1 Nevill, Captain ref1 New Party ref1, ref2 newspapers see press Nicholson, William ref1, ref2 nightclubs ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 1922 committee ref1 Nivelle, General ref1, ref2 No-Conscription Fellowship ref1 Nordics ref1 Norman, Sir Montagu ref1, ref2, ref3 Northcliffe, Lord (Alfred Harmsworth) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 background ref1 and Daily Mail ref1 Daily Mail article on shells shortage ref1 and downfall of Asquith ref1 last days and death ref1 Motor Cars and Driving ref1 northern industrial cities, decline of ref1 Northern Ireland ref1 see also Ireland Norway and Second World War ref1, ref2 nostalgia ref1 nuclear bomb ref1, ref2 nudism ref1 O’Connor, General ref1, ref2 Ogilvie-Grant, Mark ref1 Olympia Garage ref1 organic food movement ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Orpen, William ref1, ref2 Orwell, George ref1, ref2, ref3 Homage to Catalonia ref1 The Road to Wigan Pier ref1 Ottoman Empire ref1, ref2, ref3 outdoors ref1 Owen, Frank ref1 Owen, Wilfred ref1, ref2, ref3 Oxford Automobile Company ref1 Oxford Union debate (1933) ref1, ref2 Paget, Lieutenant-General Sir Arthur ref1, ref2 Palace Theatre (London) ref1 Palestine ref1 Panahards ref1, ref2 Pankhurst, Adela ref1 Pankhurst, Christabel ref1, ref2, ref3 Pankhurst, Emmeline ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Pankhurst, Sylvia ref1 paperbacks ref1 Paris peace conference ref1, ref2 Park, Keith ref1 Parliament during Second World War ref1 Passchendaele ref1 Patton, General ref1, ref2 Peace Pledge Union ref1, ref2 Pearl Harbor ref1, ref2, ref3 Pearse, Padraig ref1, ref2 Pearson, George ref1 peerages ref1 selling for cash ref1 peers ref1 Penguin Books ref1 pensions ref1 People’s Budget (1909) ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Pétain, Marshal ref1 pianos ref1 Pick, Frank ref1 Piper, John ref1 Pistols Act (1903) ref1 Plunkett, Joseph ref1, ref2 Plymouth, bombing of ref1 political extremism ref1 Ponzi, Charles ref1 Poor Law Guardians ref1, ref2 poor/poverty ref1, ref2, ref3, ref4 Rowntree’s investigation and book on conditions in York ref1 Pound, Ezra ref1, ref2, ref3 Cantos ref1 Powell, Enoch ref1 Powys, John Cowper ref1, ref2 Preece, Sir W.H. ref1 press ref1, ref2 and abdication crisis ref1 and Daily Mail ref1 destruction of Liberal government by ref1 and First World War ref1 see also Beaverbrook, Lord; Northcliffe, Lord; Rothermere, Lord Price, G.

…

But shrewd observers knew that once a tax on imported corn was announced in spring 1902 to help pay for the Boer War, the argument for a much larger wall around the British Empire was bound to return. Chamberlain had spent much of the past decade worriedly observing Germany, whose industry, prosperity and social welfare had been built up behind high tariff walls; the same was true of France and Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire; America’s tariffs were even higher, and her growth was even faster. So perhaps it was now time to accept that the world was one of rival trade blocks, and build a barrier round the British Empire too? Real wages were stagnating and British industry was growing too slowly.

The Ages of Globalization by Jeffrey D. Sachs

Admiral Zheng, AlphaGo, Big Tech, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, circular economy, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, Commentariolus, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, DeepMind, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, domestication of the camel, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, endogenous growth, European colonialism, general purpose technology, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of agriculture, invention of gunpowder, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, lockdown, Louis Pasteur, low skilled workers, mass immigration, Nikolai Kondratiev, ocean acidification, out of africa, packet switching, Pax Mongolica, precision agriculture, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rewilding, South China Sea, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, systems thinking, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Turing machine, Turing test, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, wikimedia commons, zoonotic diseases

Let’s consider the size of the combined Anglo-American economy as a share of the world (figure 7.6), adding together the British Empire and the United States. For this purpose, I define the British Empire to mean Britain and sixteen colonial possessions for which Maddison provides estimates of GDP during the nineteenth century. The largest of the colonial possessions were Ireland until 1922, Canada and Australia until 1931, and India until 1947. As of 1820, the British Empire accounted for around 6 percent of the world’s output. By 1870, by dint of Britain’s own industrialization and its expanded imperial holdings, the British Empire accounted for around 23 percent of the world economy, of which the United Kingdom itself was around 9 percent.

…

Global populations soared too, as the result of massive increases in food production. While the Ocean Age gave rise to transoceanic empires, the Industrial Age gave rise to the first global hegemon, Great Britain, and later, the United States. These two powers bestrode the entire globe with unprecedented military, technological, and financial power. But, as the end of the British Empire demonstrated, even hegemons can quickly lose their place at the apex of the global competition. We have now entered the Digital Age, from 2000 to the present, the result of the astounding capacities of digital technologies: computers, Internet, mobile telephony, and artificial intelligence, to name a few.

…

The Industrial Age decisively intensified global interconnections—by rail, ocean steamer, automobile, aviation, telegraph, telephone, satellite, and eventually the Internet and the global population soared. For the first time in human history, there were truly hegemonic political powers with sway over much of the globe: first the British Empire and then, after World War II, the United States. With the transition to the Digital Age, global power is shifting again, and the intensity of global interactions continues to rise, this time with pervasive, real-time flows of data across the planet. In this sense, the ages of globalization both explain and are explained by the rising scale of global interactions.

Legacy of Empire by Gardner Thompson

Albert Einstein, British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, facts on the ground, ghettoisation, illegal immigration, lateral thinking, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

At this point the British gave up and admitted defeat. The main factor here was that, seriously weakened financially and economically by the global conflict, a struggling British Empire undertook a review of its strategic needs that was free of romance and wishful thinking. The British were about to withdraw from India, their most treasured possession. Independence for India (and Pakistan) in the summer of 1947 was a huge, substantial and symbolic, statement that the days of the British Empire were numbered. In such a context it made no sense at all for the British to be keeping up to 100,000 troops in an ungovernable Palestine, the strategic significance of which (in relation to the Suez Canal), always questionable, was at last discounted.

…

The British Labour Party has struggled to distinguish anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism. On the shelves of booksellers there is no shortage of works on this subject. But much ignorance remains: of the origins of the modern state of Israel, and of the inter-communal antagonism that marked its birth. There is little knowledge of modern political Zionism, little awareness of the British Empire’s historic responsibility for Palestine, and little appreciation of the legacy for Israel. The modern state of Israel was proclaimed in May 1948, just three years after the end of the Second World War. Many assume a direct link between the two events, and of course there was one. Jewish survivors of the horror of Nazi-occupied Europe wanted to start new lives ‘in the only place likely to welcome them’, and Palestine presented itself as just that.2 Tens of thousands of Jews made their way there.

…

Meanwhile, in London in 1905, Zangwill and some Anglo-Jewish friends had founded the Jewish Territorial Organisation (JTO). Denying the by-now official Zionist line – that the vital interests of the Jewish people lay in Palestine – they continued to look at possibilities elsewhere. It was thought sensible to search, once more, for land within the British Empire. So, regions of Australia and Canada were considered (as well as locations as diverse as Cyrenaica, Mesopotamia and even Angola). But nothing came of any of these enquiries. Foreshadowing a commonplace of later times, no country was disposed to offer any of its own territory for a Jewish homeland.

About Time: A History of Civilization in Twelve Clocks by David Rooney

Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Charles Babbage, classic study, cloud computing, colonial rule, COVID-19, Danny Hillis, Doomsday Clock, European colonialism, Ford Model T, friendly fire, High speed trading, interchangeable parts, Islamic Golden Age, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, Nelson Mandela, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, smart grid, Stewart Brand, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, éminence grise

But it meant far more than that. As the British Empire was rapidly falling apart, Rugby was built as part of a government public-relations campaign to boost Britain’s sense of imperial pride, and it was impossible to miss the GPO in the 1930s. Its film unit made distinctive and innovative programming for cinemas around the country. It developed promotional services like a telephone talking clock. It invited newsreel cameras to the opening of every switchboard, exchange and radio station. But what it was really doing was trying to prop up the very idea of a united British Empire—or, rather, of Britishness itself.

…

FIVE CENTURIES AFTER the government of Chioggia installed a tower clock on their city hall in 1386, overlooking the scene of brutal massacres recently carried out by occupying forces, a new series of violent occupations had reshaped the global map and forcibly changed the lives of hundreds of millions of people. By the 1880s, the British Empire included India, Australia, New Zealand and Canada, and the so-called scramble for Africa was seeing Britain take land and people up and down the African continent—“from Cape Town to Cairo,” as the British imperialist Cecil Rhodes described it in 1892.9 And clock towers accompanied them on their march.

…

Three years after the gold rush began, Melbourne had become home to some thirty-four clockmakers, whereas in the early 1840s there had been just four, and the air of this colonial trading port was filled with the compulsive sound of European time. By the late 1880s, more than thirty public buildings across New South Wales had been fitted with large tower clocks by the Sydney clockmaker Angelo Tornaghi. For invading settlers and indigenous people alike, the time of the British Empire in Australia was rarely far from view or earshot. As the historian Giordano Nanni has said, “If the clock was an avatar of Western time, the bell was its amplifier.”10 But it was in India that the British clock tower project reached its greatest and most zealous heights. Britain’s grip on India tightened hard in the late 1850s following a bloody uprising in 1857 against its rule.

Migrant City: A New History of London by Panikos Panayi

Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, Brixton riot, call centre, Charles Babbage, classic study, discovery of the americas, en.wikipedia.org, financial intermediation, gentrification, ghettoisation, gig economy, glass ceiling, haute cuisine, immigration reform, income inequality, Londongrad, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, mass immigration, multicultural london english, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Shamima Begum, transatlantic slave trade, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, white flight

In July 1917 the League of Londoners came into existence after a meeting at the Canon Street Hotel with a key aim of interning more alien enemies, and it organized a series of meetings in the capital during the summer of 1918.10 The most significant Germanophobic body consisted of the British Empire Union, which may have counted 10,000 members by 1918 and aimed at ‘the Extirpation – Root and Branch and Seed – of German Control and Influence from the British Empire’. It came into existence in April 1915 as the Anti-German Union and received a boost from the Germanophobic peak following the sinking of the Lusitania. Its first large meeting occurred in the Aeolian Hall in London in June 1915 and by the end of 1916 it had published the monthly British Empire Union Monthly Record, having changed its name in the spring of 1916.

…

., (i) Blind, Carl, (i) Bloomsbury, (i) Blyton, Enid, (i) Boateng, Paul, (i) Bolam, Marc, (i) Bolívar, Simón, (i) Bolivia, (i) Bolivians in London, (i), (ii) see also Latin Americans in London Bombay, (i), (ii), (iii) Bombay Emporium, (i) Bonds, Billy, (i) Bookman, Louis, (i) Booth, Charles, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Life and Labour of the People in London, (i) Bootle, (i) Bordeaux, (i) Bosingwa, José, (i) Boudicca, (i) Bournemouth, (i) Bow, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also East End of London; Tower Hamlets boxing, (i) Bozinsky, Reuben, (i) Bradford, (i), (ii), (iii) Bradford Council of Mosques, (i) Brady, Liam, (i) Brady Street Boys Club, (i) Brazilians in London, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) see also Latin Americans in London Bremen, (i), (ii), (iii) Brent, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Brentford, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v) Brentwood, (i) Bridgetown, George Augustus Polgreen, (i) Brieg, (i) Bright, Mark, (i) Bristol, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) British Brothers’ League, (i), (ii) British Council of Churches, (i) British Empire, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi), (xii), (xiii), (xiv), (xv), (xvi), (xvii), (xviii), (xix), (xx), (xxi), (xxii), (xxiii), (xxiv), (xxv), (xxvi), (xxvii), (xxviii), (xxix), (xxx), (xxxi), (xxxii), (xxxiii), (xxxiv), (xxxv), (xxxvi), (xxxvii), (xxxviii), (xxxix), (xl), (xli) British Empire Union, (i) British Empire Union Monthly Record, (i) British Museum, (i), (ii) British National Party, (i), (ii) British Rail, (i), (ii), (iii) British Union of Fascists, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi) Britons, (i) Brixton, (i), (ii), (iii), (iv), (v), (vi), (vii), (viii), (ix), (x), (xi) riots (1980s), (i), (ii), (iii), (iv) Brockley, (i) Brodetsky, Selig, (i), (ii), (iii) Bromley-by-Bow, (i) see also East End of London; Tower Hamlets Brown, Roy, (i) Brown, W.

…

THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE GLOBAL CITY Any understanding of the importance of London as a magnet for migration needs to appreciate its international importance since its development as a city within the Roman Empire and, more importantly, since the rise of the concept of globalization which, in the modern era, became inextricably linked with the expansion of the British Empire. London did not assume its international position as a result of the ‘liberation’ of markets at the end of the twentieth century, because this status had emerged over centuries. Before the arrival of the Romans the area now covered by London ‘was occupied . . . by only a scattered rural population in units no larger than a small village, gaining its living mainly by mixed farming, supplemented to some extent by fishing’.16 Londinium emerged as a Roman city in the first century AD.

The Myth of the Blitz by Angus Calder

anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, collective bargaining, Etonian, first-past-the-post, full employment, Monroe Doctrine, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside

England would live, Britain would live; the Commonwealth of Nations and the Empire would live … Once again in our long island history we should emerge, however mauled or mutilated, safe and victorious. We should not be wiped out. Our history would not come to an end … All the rest was merely the proper application of overwhelming force. The British Empire, the Soviet Union, and now the United States, bound together with every scrap of their life and strength, were, according to my lights, twice or even thrice the force of their antagonists.28 Churchill, in his war memoirs, patriotically listed the British Empire first among the members of the Grand Alliance in the extract just quoted. Yet until more than halfway through the war, the Empire could boast of no great triumph of aggressive arms.

…

It arrives without precedent (Australian forces had never been so committed in large-scale warfare before) and at once attracts to itself the ‘mateship’ mythology evolved over a bare century and a quarter since the arrival of the first convict settlers in New South Wales. It renders war ‘innocent’, and ‘naturalises’ as quintessentially Australian qualities seen at their sharpest (supposedly) in wartime adversity. The Dardanelles defeat was not Australia’s – it was suffered by the British Empire, as a result of a strategy decided by the British government. Britons, not Australians, bungled. Hence the Gallipoli myth also crystallises Australian resentment against British condescension towards colonials, and Australians’ sense of difference from Britons. It is also intrinsically expansionist: the Gallipoli heroes far from home show the world what Australians are made of, and represent, as Bean put it, ‘the kind of force to move the world’.

…

During the war, when officers started to resign, General Robert Howe reminded them that they were ‘actors upon that glorious stage where every incident is to become an historical fact’.23 Compare Churchill in June 1940: ‘Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, “This was their finest hour.”’24 But the ‘if’ was significant. The Thirteen Colonies belonged with a ‘riseing world’. Britain in 1940 was an Old Country. The ‘subjective surplus’ expanded during war went into defending an imperial power which was already in irreversible decline, and national institutions which had tottered into anachronism.

The Economic Weapon by Nicholas Mulder

anti-communist, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, classic study, deglobalization, European colonialism, falling living standards, false flag, foreign exchange controls, global pandemic, guns versus butter model, Monroe Doctrine, power law, reserve currency, rising living standards, Suez crisis 1956, transatlantic slave trade, éminence grise

Merchant firms and banks that wanted to keep trading had to disclose all their extant business dealings and were recruited into the intelligence-gathering network operated by the TCH.37 Under the British Trading with the Enemy Act of August 1914, the WTD also acquired the power to confiscate enemy property and investments across the British Empire.38 By January 1917, it could seize any foreign security—enemy or neutral—held in the City of London.39 The Treasury thereby gained substantial control over a sector of the British economy that before the war had been largely self-regulating and unsupervised except by the Bank of England. The activities of the WTD and the TCH produced a stream of information and recommendations that ended up in front of the Restricting of Enemy Supplies Committee.

…

As early as October 1914, manganese had been added to the British and French lists of goods considered “absolute contraband”—that is, goods that always served a military purpose and were thus readily seizable.71 Prewar commercial statistics clearly conveyed Germany’s dependence on manganese imports from Russia, India, Spain, and Brazil.72 French economic intelligence composed a more detailed, though still imperfect, understanding of German production since the start of the war.73 Tannery’s analysts estimated that the total needs of the Central Powers amounted to roughly one million tons per year by late 1916; deducting their small estimated reserves, they expected the Germans to face a mounting shortfall.74 The war rearranged available routes of access to manganese suppliers. Since India was part of the British Empire and the Central Powers were fighting Russia on the Eastern front, Germany lost access to the two largest suppliers of the mineral ore. It was now wholly dependent on small amounts from neutral Spain and from the Jakobeny mine in Austrian-controlled Bukovina.75 By the end of 1916, 90 percent of global production was controlled by the Reich’s opponents.

…

For some the Brest-Litovsk Treaty changed the entire outcome that could reasonably be expected from the war.32 Winston Churchill wrote that “no one at this time saw any prospect of a speedy end to the war, and there seemed no reason to doubt that the Germans and Austrians would have the time—as they certainly had the power—to draw new life almost indefinitely from the giant Empire prostrated before them.”33 Robertson likewise thought the best outcome that Britain could now secure would be to “gain terms of peace which would render the future position of the British Empire reasonably secure.”34 When the treaty was signed in March, the WTID’s chief German expert, William G. Max-Muller, noted that the enemy was emboldened by “the knowledge that he has burst the barrier that we had built round him, and is no longer dependent on his own resources. . . . It would be a grave mistake to underestimate the effect on Germany’s economic position of her achievements in the East.”

Amritsar 1919: An Empire of Fear and the Making of a Massacre by Kim Wagner

British Empire, colonial rule, European colonialism, Mahatma Gandhi, sparse data, trade route, Wall-E

What happened at Jallianwala Bagh, Churchill proclaimed: is an episode which appears to me to be without precedent or parallel in the modern history of the British Empire. It is an event of an entirely different order from any of those tragical occurrences which take place when troops are brought into collision with the civil population. It is an extraordinary event, a monstrous event, an event which stands in singular and sinister isolation.3 The real point, however, is to be found elsewhere in Churchill’s speech: Governments who have seized upon power by violence and by usurpation have often resorted to keep what they have stolen, but the august and venerable structure of the British Empire, where lawful authority descends from hand to hand and generation after generation, does not need such aid.

…

The crimes of one vicious intelligence officer in Kenya obliterate all the patient and benevolent labour of hundreds of district commissioners throughout Africa.’6 Niall Ferguson, whose name has become virtually synonymous with chest-thumping neo-imperialism, similarly describes British brutality in Kenya as ‘exceptional’.7 This approach is not limited to popular writers pandering to conservative sentiments. When British historian John Darwin was criticised in 2015 for not sufficiently highlighting the role of racialised violence within the British Empire, his response was tellingly dismissive: Exactly how to discuss violence in relation to the British Empire is an interesting question. Plainly there were many brutal episodes in its history. Plainly, its authority depended ultimately (and sometimes immediately) upon the use of violence. But then so has that of almost every state in history, precolonial, colonial and postcolonial (and things are not getting better).

…

For the first time, Dyer seems uncertain of himself. This was how director Richard Attenborough reimagined the Amritsar Massacre and the subsequent Hunter Committee inquiry in the Oscar-winning movie Gandhi from 1982.1 This is also how many people today think of what was arguably the bloodiest massacre in the history of the British Empire. While there is an abundance of visual material informing our understanding of key aspects of the history of British India – the viscerally bleak photographs from both 1857 or 1947, for instance – there are no contemporary images of the violence at Amritsar on 13 April 1919. The photographs taken of the Jallianwala Bagh shortly after the massacre show only an empty space.2 It has thus been left largely for Attenborough’s movie to fill in the canvas of the popular imagination and provide the visual repertoire through which today we approach the events of 13 April 1919.

The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict From 1500 to 2000 by Paul Kennedy

agricultural Revolution, airline deregulation, anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Bretton Woods, British Empire, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, German hyperinflation, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Herman Kahn, imperial preference, industrial robot, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, long peace, means of production, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, night-watchman state, North Sea oil, nuclear winter, oil shock, open economy, Peace of Westphalia, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, stakhanovite, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, University of East Anglia, upwardly mobile, zero-sum game

The Political Divisions of Europe in the Sixteenth Century 3. Charles V’s Inheritance, 15194 4. The Collapse of Spanish Power in Europe 5. Europe in 1721 6. European Colonial Empires, c. 1750 7. Europe at the Height of Napoleon’s Power, 1810 8. The Chief Possessions, Naval Bases, and Submarine Cables of the British Empire, c. 1900 9. The European Powers and Their War Plans in 1914 10. Europe After the First World War 11. Europe at the Height of Hitler’s Power, 1942 12. Worldwide U.S. Force Deployments, 1987 Tables & Charts TABLES 1. Increase in Military Manpower, 1470–1660 2.

…

In the same way, if a state overextends itself strategically—by, say, the conquest of extensive territories or the waging of costly wars—it runs the risk that the potential benefits from external expansion may be outweighed by the great expense of it all—a dilemma which becomes acute if the nation concerned has entered a period of relative economic decline. The history of the rise and later fall of the leading countries in the Great Power system since the advance of western Europe in the sixteenth century—that is, of nations such as Spain, the Netherlands, France, the British Empire, and currently the United States—shows a very significant correlation over the longer term between productive and revenue-raising capacities on the one hand and military strength on the other. The story of “the rise and fall of the Great Powers” which is presented in these chapters may be briefly summarized here.

…

A strategic equilibrium existed, supported by all of the leading Powers in the Concert of Europe, so that no single nation was either able or willing to make a bid for dominance. The prime concerns of government in these post-1815 decades were with domestic instability and (in the case of Russia and the United States) with further expansion across their continental land-masses. This relatively stable international scene allowed the British Empire to rise to its zenith as a global power, in naval and colonial and commercial terms, and also interacted favorably with its virtual monopoly of steam-driven industrial production. By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, industrialization was spreading to certain other regions, and was beginning to tilt the international power balances away from the older leading nations and toward those countries with both the resources and organization to exploit the newer means of production and technology.

The City by Tony Norfield

accounting loophole / creative accounting, air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, capital controls, central bank independence, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, continuation of politics by other means, currency risk, dark matter, Edward Snowden, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, financial intermediation, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, G4S, global value chain, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Irish property bubble, Leo Hollis, linked data, London Interbank Offered Rate, London Whale, Londongrad, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, money market fund, mortgage debt, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, seigniorage, Sharpe ratio, sovereign wealth fund, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, transaction costs, transfer pricing, zero-sum game

There was widespread support for the view that a return to gold at pre-war levels would stabilise business conditions after the turmoil of the First World War and its aftermath. This would help to boost international trade and investment, and hence the British economy.1 More importantly, there was an imperial rationale for the policy on sterling. Churchill made this point clearly: ‘If we had not taken this action, the whole of the rest of the British Empire would have taken it without us, and it would have come to a gold standard, not on the basis of the pound sterling, but a gold standard of the dollar.’2 Britain’s problem was that the First World War was largely a European war. The US had emerged largely unscathed and in a stronger international position.

…

The two greatest manufacturing countries in the world on either side of us, the United States and Germany, are in different ways either on or related to an international gold exchange. Sweden is on the gold exchange. Austria and Hungary are already based on gold, or on sterling, which is now the equivalent of gold. I have reason to know that Holland and the Dutch East Indies – very important factors in world finance – will act simultaneously with us today. As far as the British Empire is concerned – the self-governing Dominions – there will be complete unity of action. The Dominion of Canada is already on the gold standard. The Dominion of South Africa has given notice of her intention to revert to the old standard as from 1st July. I am authorised to inform the Committee that the Commonwealth of Australia, synchronising its action with ours, proposes from today to abolish the existing restrictions on the free export of gold, and that the Dominion of New Zealand will from today adopt the same course as ourselves in freely licensing the export of gold

…

I am authorised to inform the Committee that the Commonwealth of Australia, synchronising its action with ours, proposes from today to abolish the existing restrictions on the free export of gold, and that the Dominion of New Zealand will from today adopt the same course as ourselves in freely licensing the export of gold. … Thus over the wide area of the British Empire and over a very wide and important area of the world there has been established at once one uniform standard of value to which all international transactions are related and can be referred. That standard may, of course, vary in itself from time to time, but the position of all the countries related to it will vary together, like ships in a harbour whose gangways are joined and who rise and fall together with the tide.

The Post-American World: Release 2.0 by Fareed Zakaria

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, airport security, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, conceptual framework, Credit Default Swap, currency manipulation / currency intervention, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial innovation, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, interest rate derivative, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), knowledge economy, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Wolf, mutually assured destruction, National Debt Clock, new economy, no-fly zone, oil shock, open economy, out of africa, Parag Khanna, postindustrial economy, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, Steven Pinker, Suez crisis 1956, The future is already here, The Great Moderation, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, Washington Consensus, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

Of course, it came at a cost. In return for its loans to London, the United States took over dozens of British bases in the Caribbean, Canada, the Indian Ocean, and the Pacific. “The British empire is handed over to the American pawnbroker—our only hope,” said one member of Parliament. The economist John Maynard Keynes was more enraged, describing the Lend-Lease Act as an attempt to “pick out the eyes of the British empire.” Less emotional observers saw that it was inevitable. Arnold Toynbee, by then a distinguished historian, consoled Britons that America’s “hand will be a great deal lighter than Russia’s, Germany’s, or Japan’s, and I suppose these are the alternatives.”

…

Quoted in Karl Meyer, “An Edwardian Warning: The Unraveling of a Colossus,” World Policy Journal 17, no. 4 (Winter 2000/2001): 47–57. 3. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002), 268. 4. Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 212. 5. Paul Kennedy, “Why Did the British Empire Last So Long?,” in Strategy and Diplomacy, 1870–1945: Eight Studies (London: Allen & Unwin, 1984), 197–218. 6. The facts on Britain’s economic situation come largely from Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random House, 1987), 151–200.

…

European institutions, practices, and ideas were introduced and imposed, though always maintaining racial preferences—the British court system was brought to India, for example, but Indian magistrates could not try whites. Over time, the European impact on its colonies was huge. And it then spread well beyond the colonies. Niall Ferguson has argued that the British empire is responsible for the worldwide spread of the English language, banking, the common law, Protestantism, team sports, the limited state, representative government, and the idea of liberty.11 Such an argument might gloss over the hypocrisy and brutality of imperial control—economic looting, mass executions, imprisonments, torture.

A Pipeline Runs Through It by Keith Fisher

accounting loophole / creative accounting, barriers to entry, British Empire, colonial rule, Dmitri Mendeleev, energy security, European colonialism, Ford Model T, full employment, Hernando de Soto, Ida Tarbell, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, Louis Blériot, Malacca Straits, Monroe Doctrine, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, open economy, race to the bottom, Right to Buy, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, vertical integration

Churchill concluded that none of the British oil companies working within the British Empire would be capable, any time soon at least, of reliable, long-term fuel-oil production on a scale that would meet a significant proportion of the navy’s projected requirements. As Foreign Secretary Sir Edward Grey expressed the predicament to Parliament a few weeks later, I would very much rather, I fully admit, that the Admiralty had been able to make the arrangements inside the British Dominions, but they could not do it. The British Empire was never planned, and the importance of oil was never foreseen; so, even if it had been planned, I doubt whether this omission to secure a first-rate supply of oil in the British Empire would have been remedied.292 By contrast, the Anglo-Persian Oil Co. – operating in the southwest of Persia’s ‘neutral’ zone as defined by the 1907 Anglo-Russian Convention (see Fig. 25) – appeared to have much greater potential.

…

Thomas Earle complained in a pamphlet, ‘It is aristocracy and despotism, to have a body of officers, whose decisions are, for a longtime, beyond the control of the people’, while Massachusetts senator David Henshaw declared, ‘Sure I am that, if the American people acquiesce in the principles laid down in this case, the Supreme Court will have effected what the whole power of the British Empire, after eight years of bloody conflict, failed to achieve against our fathers.’75 These protesters would have been disheartened to read Judge Thomas Cooley’s assessment of the significance of this case fifty years later: ‘It is under the protection of the decision of the Dartmouth College case that the most enormous and threatening powers in our country have been created; some of the great and wealthy corporations actually having greater influence in the country at large and upon the legislation of the country than the States to which they owe their corporate existence.’76 The new possibilities for mass trading created by canals and the ever expanding railways were exploited particularly by those businesses that – like the large railroad corporations themselves – strove for aggressive expansion, a process that was facilitated by the large-scale sale of stocks and bonds conducted by the growing and concentrating banking sector.77 Faced with these economic developments, what was to become of the traditional republican values of political egalitarianism, economic individualism, autonomy and self-reliance?

…

As the object of charters is to give to members of companies power which they would not possess in their individual capacity, the very existence of monied corporations is incompatible with equality of rights.’83 To these prevalent concerns were added widespread accusations that corporate charters for private businesses were routinely being awarded on the strength of the applicant’s political connections. Gone were the trade monopolies and other arbitrary regulations that came with the British Empire’s mercantile control and that were designed for the benefit of London’s banking houses. Yet by the midnineteenth century there were signs of newly concentrating economic and political power as the granting of corporate charters once more became the currency of political patronage; indeed, similar developments were generating unease back in Britain itself.

Treasure Islands: Uncovering the Damage of Offshore Banking and Tax Havens by Nicholas Shaxson

Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, bank run, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, export processing zone, failed state, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, Global Witness, Golden arches theory, high net worth, income inequality, Kenneth Rogoff, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, land value tax, light touch regulation, Londongrad, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, Martin Wolf, Money creation, money market fund, New Journalism, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, oil shock, old-boy network, out of africa, passive income, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Suez crisis 1956, The Spirit Level, too big to fail, transfer pricing, vertical integration, Washington Consensus

He takes issue with U.S. economist Bradford DeLong’s accusation that he has fallen under the influence of “a strange and sinister sect of British imperial conservatives.”1 Skidelsky’s work argues that for Britain the Second World War was in fact two wars, one pitting Britain under Winston Churchill against Nazi Germany, the other lying behind the facade of the Western alliance and pitting the British empire, led by Keynes, against the United States. America’s main war aim after the defeat of the Axis powers, he argued, was to destroy the British empire. “Churchill fought to preserve Britain and its empire against Nazi Germany; Keynes fought to preserve Britain as a Great Power against the United States. The war against Germany was won; but in its effort to win it, Britain spent its resources so heavily that it was destined to lose both its Empire and its Great Power status.”2 Keynes himself outlined one of his central aims as he negotiated in Washington: “America must not be allowed to pick out the eyes of the British Empire.”3 The arguments are complex, not least because Keynes’s main negotiating partner in Washington, Harry Dexter White, was almost certainly passing information to the Soviet Union.

…

Many Americans, he soon realized, were rather more hostile to Britain than he had supposed. Roosevelt, for example, despised the British empire, mistrusted England’s aristocracy, and, Skidelsky notes, “suspected the Foreign Office of pro-fascist tendencies.”8 Americans had fairly effectively chained and muzzled Wall Street after the Great Depression, and policymakers in Washington saw the far more lightly regulated City of London—the financial heart of the hated British empire—with deep suspicion. Britain was discriminating against American goods in international trade, and Roosevelt’s Republican opponents were horrified at the prospect of entanglement in another foreign war.

…

A couple of other small European micro-state havens are worth noting, including Monaco and Andorra, with occasional cameo roles from odd places like the Portuguese Islands of Madeira, which was central to a major Nigerian bribery scandal involving the U.S. oil service company Halliburton17 that resulted in the second largest fine ever paid in a prosecution under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. The second offshore group, accounting for about half the world’s secrecy jurisdictions, is the biggest. This is a layered hub-and-spoke array of tax havens, centered on the City of London, which mostly emerged from the ashes of the British empire.18 As I will show, it is no coincidence that the City of London, once the capital of the greatest empire the world has known, is the center of the most important part of the global offshore system. The City’s offshore network has three main layers. Its inner ring consists of Britain’s three Crown Dependencies: the nearby islands of Jersey, Guernsey, and the Isle of Man.

Winds of Change by Peter Hennessy

anti-communist, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, centre right, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, Dr. Strangelove, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, land tenure, liberal capitalism, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Norman Macrae, North Sea oil, oil shock, reserve currency, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Ted Sorensen, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, total factor productivity, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment

For the article’s impact see John Darwin, ‘John Andrew Gallagher, 1919–1980’, Proceedings of the British Academy: Biographical Memoirs of Fellows VI (British Academy/Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 57–78, and Ronald Hyam, ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Imperial History Professoriate, 1919–1981: Robinson and Gallagher and Their Predecessors’, in Ronald Hyam, Understanding the British Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2010), p. 520. 17. Evans, Downing Street Diary, p. 150, diary entry for 16 July 1961. 18. Ibid., p. 111. 19. Ibid., p. 112. 20. Roy Welensky, 4000 Days (Collins, 1964), p. 361. 21. Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, p. 521. 22. Robinson and Gallagher, Africa and the Victorians, esp. chapters 1 and 15. 23. Gallagher, The Decline, Revival and Fall of the British Empire, pp. 73–4, 94–9, 149–53. 24. Hyam, ‘The Oxford and Cambridge Imperial History Professoriate’. 25.

…

I am, I think, quoting him accurately as it is the most memorable opening stanza to a lecture I have ever heard in person: It is very difficult for people of your age to appreciate the British Empire at its zenith. There is no shortage of clichés – a quarter of the earth’s surface on which the sun never set – but they are as banal as they are misleading because they only give you a sense of the territorial expression of British power. A better test is this. If you were a chap almost anywhere in the world around 1904 and you went for a pee, you would point your cock at a piece of porcelain on which was written ‘Shanks of Greenock’. [Pause] Not for nothing was Greenock called ‘the arsehole of the British Empire’. What better way could there be of illustrating the distinction between the ‘formal’ British Empire based on territory and the ‘informal’ empire of free trade?

…

What better way could there be of illustrating the distinction between the ‘formal’ British Empire based on territory and the ‘informal’ empire of free trade? The British Empire has been a begetter of historical debates on a suitably imperial scale. The ‘Cambridge School’, which shaped both Ronald Hyam and later myself, tended to disdain mega, all-embracing theories. As one of its high priests, Jack Gallagher, famously put it in his 1974 Ford Lectures at Oxford: All theories to explain the growth of imperialism have been failures. Here and there on the mountain of truth lie the frozen bodies of theorists, some still clutching their ice-picks, others gripping their hammers and sickles.

New World, Inc. by John Butman

Admiral Zheng, Atahualpa, Bartolomé de las Casas, Blue Ocean Strategy, British Empire, commoditize, Cornelius Vanderbilt, currency manipulation / currency intervention, diversified portfolio, Etonian, Francisco Pizarro, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, market design, Skype, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, wikimedia commons

Allan James Crosby (London: Longman & Co, 1876), #556, 175. 9 “Petition of divers gentlemen of the West parts of England to the Queen,” in CSP-Domestic, 1547–1580, vol. 95, #63, 475. 10 Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 1:102. 11 Geoffrey Parker, The Dutch Revolt (London: Pelican Books, 1979), 178. 12 Jason Eldred, “The Just Will Pay for the Sinners: English Merchants, the Trade with Spain, and Elizabethan Foreign Policy, 1563–1585,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies 10, no. 1 (2010): 5–28; 9. 13 John Dee, General and Rare Memorials Pertayning to the Perfect Arte of Navigation (London: John Daye, 1577; Kessinger Legacy Reprint [facsimile], 2003, 10 (“Victorious British Monarchy,” “marvellous Security,” “wonderfully increase”); 28 (“New Foreign Discoveries,” “Ilandish Empire”). 14 David Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 42–43. 15 Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith, 48. 16 Entry for 28 November 1577 in Halliwell, ed., The Private Diary of Dr John Dee, 4. For the first two reports, see John Dee, The Limits of the British Empire, edited by Ken MacMillan with Jennifer Abeles (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2004), 5, 10–13, 37–41. 17 Joseph H. Peterson, ed., John Dee’s Five Books of Mystery: Original Sourcebook of Enochian Magic (Boston: Weiserbooks, 2003), 8; Suster, John Dee, 55–6; Glynn Parry, “John Dee and the Elizabethan British Empire in Its European Context,” The Historical Journal, Vol. 49, No. 3 (2006), 643–75. 18 Humphrey Gilbert, “A Discourse how Hir Majestie May Annoy the King of Spayne,” in Quinn, Voyages and Colonising Enterprises, 1:170. 19 “A letter written to M.

…

Elizabethan Privateering: English Privateering During the Spanish War, 1585–1603. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1964; paperback edition, 2011. . Trade, Plunder and Settlement: Maritime Enterprise and the Genesis of the British Empire, 1480–1630. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984; repr. 1991. Armitage, David. The Ideological Origins of the British Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Ash, Eric H. Power, Knowledge, and Expertise in Elizabethan England. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Aughton, Peter. Bristol: A People’s History. Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing, 2000.

…

A Fellow of Trinity College Cambridge while still a teenager, he was hired to help Richard Chancellor and Martin Frobisher prepare for their voyages across uncharted waters to Cathay. As Elizabeth I’s favorite astrologer, he approved the date for her coronation. Also, he made the case for her title to lands in the New World, coining the phrase “British Empire.” Humphrey Gilbert gave him the right to all the land north of today’s US-Canada border. He never sought to claim these lands, however. Francis Drake (1540–1596) was an explorer. The first English captain to complete a circumnavigation, he struck a trade deal with the king of Ternate in the Spice Islands; laid claim to the northwest coast of America, which he named Nova Albion; and captured a hoard of Spanish treasure that transformed him into one of the richest men in England.

The Last Kings of Shanghai: The Rival Jewish Dynasties That Helped Create Modern China by Jonathan Kaufman

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Great Leap Forward, Honoré de Balzac, indoor plumbing, joint-stock company, life extension, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, Mikhail Gorbachev, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, plutocrats, rent control, Steve Jobs, trade route

From the moment he and his family arrived in Bombay, David allied himself with the British and the expansion of the British Empire. Though dark skinned and an immigrant, he chose to support imperialism. That wasn’t surprising. David saw himself as part of the elite; the Sassoons in Baghdad had risen in part by advising and serving their Turkish rulers. The defining issue of his life—his flight from Baghdad—had been triggered by his misreading the politics of Baghdad and believing the sultan would side with him against Baghdad’s rulers. He was determined that he and his family would never make that mistake again. David arrived in India at a fortunate time. The expanding British Empire wasn’t opening just trade routes, it was opening the British mind.

…

Reunited with his wife and children, David thought more about the opportunities that lay in Bombay. After a few years, with his wife newly pregnant, David finally decided to make the move, seeking the protection, and opportunity, of British rule. Landing in Bombay, David Sassoon joined the British Empire at the height of its political and economic power. Almost one-third of the world was under British control, including parts of India, Australia, Malaysia, Syria, and Egypt. The British had crushed Napoleon in Europe and commanded the world’s largest navy. Power and money flowed through London, the world’s largest city.

…

Two decades later, when the North blockaded the South in the American Civil War, cutting off the biggest supplier of cotton to Britain, David was perfectly situated to step into the breach—and to make millions. David became a bridge between the traditional trading practices of the Middle East and the new global system developing under the British Empire. Doing business in Asia meant dealing with a hodgepodge of different weights and measures, different currencies, different languages. David imposed standardization. Inside his company, Sassoon employees conducted business in Judeo-Arabic—Arabic words written with Hebrew letters—the language they brought with them from Baghdad.

Fallen Idols: Twelve Statues That Made History by Alex von Tunzelmann

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", anti-communist, Apollo 11, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, colonial rule, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, Donald Trump, double helix, Easter island, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, George Floyd, global pandemic, Google Earth, lockdown, Mahatma Gandhi, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, Suez crisis 1956, the map is not the territory, TikTok, transatlantic slave trade, W. E. B. Du Bois

I am not in love with the “Imperial” spirit.’22 Interest in Rhodes dropped during the First World War, but his myth was revived in the 1920s and 1930s as part of a concerted push to drum up enthusiasm for the British Empire. The then Prince of Wales was sent on a series of long publicity tours of the colonies. A much-trumpeted Empire Exhibition was staged in London from 1924–25. The British Empire Film Institute was established in 1926 to counter criticism of the empire by rewarding positive depictions. Rhodes received his first biopic in 1936: Rhodes of Africa, starring Walter Huston. It began with a voiceover: ‘In 1870, South Africa was a largely unexplored territory of a million square miles, peopled by a handful of white men.’

…

The statue of him that is at the centre of this story, though, was proposed 172 years later by another Bristol businessman and philanthropist: James Arrowsmith. The Bristol of 1893 was very different from the Bristol of Colston’s time. The British Empire had grown into an international behemoth. The Stuart monarchy had been replaced by the House of Orange-Nassau, then the House of Hanover, then the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha. Victoria had become Queen of Great Britain and later Empress of India. The slave trade had been abolished in the British Empire by the Slave Trade Act of 1807 and beyond that by the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833. Indenture had often replaced it. The Industrial Revolution had occurred.

…

‘I contend that we are the finest race in the world and that the more of the world we inhabit the better it is for the human race’, he wrote. ‘Just fancy those parts that are at present inhabited by the most despicable specimens of human beings what an alteration there would be if they were brought under Anglo-Saxon influence.’ Rhodes wanted to form a ‘secret society’ to promote the British Empire. A particular obsession of his was to ‘recover’ the United States of America as a British colony. He contended that the United States had been spoiled by ‘low class Irish and German emigrants’ and that Englishmen would have ‘made a finer country of it’. The will he made the same year bequeathed his wealth to establish this secret society.5 Rhodes was not academically gifted and scraped by at Oxford, where it took him eight years to finish his degree.

Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, Atahualpa, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, conceptual framework, Copley Medal, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Dean Kamen, delayed gratification, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Easter island, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial engineering, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, guns versus butter model, Hans Lippershey, haute couture, Hernando de Soto, income inequality, invention of movable type, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Harrison: Longitude, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land reform, land tenure, liberal capitalism, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, new economy, Pearl River Delta, Pierre-Simon Laplace, power law, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, retail therapy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, total factor productivity, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, undersea cable, upwardly mobile, uranium enrichment, wage slave, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, work culture , World Values Survey

Like so many other Western ideas in the nineteenth century, French-style revolution swiftly became a global phenomenon. Across the British Empire there was unrest – in Ceylon, Guiana, Jamaica, New South Wales, the Orange River Sovereignty, the Punjab and Van Diemen’s Land.27 Even more remarkable were the events in French West Africa. There, unlike in British colonies, radical political change had the backing of a revolutionary government in the metropolis. All this serves to illuminate the most distinctive feature of French imperialism: its enduring revolutionary character. The British Empire was by instinct socially conservative; with every passing year its administrators grew fonder of local elites, more comfortable with indirect rule through tribal chiefs and ornamental maharajahs.

…

Yet while one revolution cemented the democratic rights of property-owners, and brought into being a federal republic that within a hundred years was the world’s wealthiest country, the South American revolutions consigned all of America south of the Rio Grande to two centuries of division, instability and underdevelopment. Why was that? Both the Spanish and the British empires experienced crises in the late eighteenth century. The increased regulation of transatlantic trade by the imperial authorities and the high cost of the Seven Years’ War (1756–63) paved the way for colonial revolts. Those that broke out in Britain’s American colonies in the 1770s had their counterparts in Spain’s: Túpac Amaru II’s Andean Rebellion of 1780–83 and the Comunero Revolt in New Granada (present-day Colombia) in 1781.

…

In the speech with which this chapter began, Churchill – whose own imperial career had started in the Sudan and South Africa – asked a question that was in many ways central to the lives of an entire generation of empire-builders: ‘Why should not the same principles which have shaped the free, ordered, tolerant civilization of the British Isles and British Empire be found serviceable in the organization of this anxious world?’ Civilization as he understood it had successfully taken root in North America – as successfully in those parts that remained under British rule as in the United States. It had flourished in the arid wilderness of Australia. Why not in Africa, too?

Seapower States: Maritime Culture, Continental Empires and the Conflict That Made the Modern World by Andrew Lambert

bread and circuses, British Empire, classic study, different worldview, Donald Trump, joint-stock company, Malacca Straits, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, open economy, rising living standards, South China Sea, spice trade, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, UNCLOS

Attempts to impose Roman-style central control on the diffuse commercially minded British Empire prompted revolts. After 1782 the British avoided antagonising local sensibilities. Britain was a new Carthage, not a new Rome. It lacked the manpower, resources and continuous land mass to be Roman. That identity was seized by the Americans. The British were happy to use the cultural language of Roman imperial might to sustain their self-image, notably with Nelson’s Column and the architecture of Imperial Whitehall, but their deepest concern was to prevent the emergence of a new Roman Empire. Even the exponents of a minimalist British Empire recognised there were some things that had to remain under central control.

…

Sophonisba was given in marriage to an elderly Numidian king at the final crisis of the Second Punic War. R. Miles, Carthage Must Be Destroyed: The Rise and Fall of an Ancient Civilisation, London: Allen Lane, 2010, p. 309. 37. D. Armitage, The Ideological Origins of the British Empire, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000, p. 173. Lord Louis Mountbatten had ‘Rule Britannia’ played when the Japanese surrendered Singapore in 1945. A. Jackson, The British Empire and the Second World War, London: Continuum, 2008, p. 459. 38. Krammick, Bolingbroke and his Circle, pp. 148–9; H. T. Dickinson, Bolingbroke, London: Constable, 1970, pp. 305–6. 39. P. Rahe, Montesquieu and the Logic of Liberty: War, Religion, Commerce, Climate, Terrain, Technology, Uneasiness of Mind, the Spirit of Political Vigilance, and the Foundations of the Modern Republic, New Haven, CT, and London: Yale University Press, 2009, pp. 3–61, esp. p. 59.

…

Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection. Maps The World in the Age of Empire The Mediterranean The Siege of Tyre The Athenian Empire Ancient Athens Rome and Carthage during the Second Punic War Venetian Bases and Caravan Routes The Battle of Lepanto The Dutch Empire Rhodes The Portuguese Empire The British Empire The South China Sea ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS As any manuscript heads for publication authors return to the beginning, to reflect on the debt they owe to others, fellow scholars, students, family and friends, delightfully loose categories reflecting the reality that the first and last are often one and the same.

Liberalism at Large: The World According to the Economist by Alex Zevin

"there is no alternative" (TINA), activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, centre right, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, Columbine, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, debt deflation, desegregation, disinformation, disruptive innovation, do well by doing good, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Snowden, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, imperial preference, income inequality, interest rate derivative, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Julian Assange, junk bonds, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, light touch regulation, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, no-fly zone, Norman Macrae, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, Philip Mirowski, plutocrats, post-war consensus, price stability, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, railway mania, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, Seymour Hersh, Snapchat, Socratic dialogue, Steve Bannon, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, trade liberalization, trade route, unbanked and underbanked, underbanked, unorthodox policies, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, Winter of Discontent, Yom Kippur War, young professional

The rest of the world, he wrote ruefully, ‘could not look with much favour or anticipated comfort on the formation of a new power thus motivated and thus clenched – a power whose two fundamental rules of action and raisons d’être would be, to defy its neighbour, and to annex its neighbour’s land.’139 The British Empire If Bagehot viewed America through the prism of the British Empire and its interests, what did he have to say about the latter? Bagehot’s editorship was less rich in incident than Wilson’s – sitting between bursts of warfare and annexation in the 1850s and 1880s–1890s – and Bagehot showed the same breezy, flexible confidence in imperial destiny as he did in English political economy.

…

Its centenary celebration in wartime London was stuffed to bursting with bankers, politicians, economists, diplomats and foreign dignitaries, eating smoked salmon, puffing cigars. ‘Never has so much been read for so long by so few,’ quipped another editor, riffing on Winston Churchill.18 In the second half of the twentieth century, the Economist reached across the Atlantic: the role it once played in the British Empire, it now undertook in the American. A literal bridge between them, star reporters now passed apprenticeships on Wall Street and in Washington, where they enjoyed special access from the start – collared by John F. Kennedy or Lyndon B. Johnson in the marble corridors of Congress, enjoying personal lines to Ronald Reagan’s White House via George Shultz, Henry Kissinger and other pillars of the foreign-policy establishment.

…

The diplomat Lord Howden paid a visit before setting sail for Argentina and Brazil to negotiate lower sugar duties, promising news of his progress.87 Wilson carried these intimacies into the countryside, first in Wiltshire, then in Somerset, with hunting, ponies for the girls, gentlemanly pursuits – judging sheep contests – rounding out the days. This change in status was accompanied by a shift in interest from industry, where his father had given him his start, to finance – destined in the framework of the British Empire to benefit from free trade to a greater extent than any other branch of commerce. In 1852, during a brief interlude of Tory rule under Lord Derby, Wilson went to work on a new venture, which he must have partially funded from Economist profits: the following year the Banker’s Gazette section of the paper announced the founding of a Chartered Bank of India, Australia and China, initial capital £1 million, prospects ‘unrivalled’, success ‘beyond doubt’.88 Wilson’s pieces for the Economist on the 1847 financial crisis – published as Capital, Currency and Banking the same year – pointed out, in the wake of so many bank failures, a field for profitable investment in the Far East, and lessons on avoiding a similar fate there.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It by Arthur Herman

British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, creative destruction, do-ocracy, Edward Jenner, financial independence, gentleman farmer, global village, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Joan Didion, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, New Urbanism, North Sea oil, oil shale / tar sands, Republic of Letters, Robert Mercer, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, tontine, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

And without the Scots it might never have existed—let alone reached the status of legend it still holds today. In fact, a Scot created the idea of the British Empire. Charles Pasley came from Eskdalemuir in Dumfriesshire, not far from where Thomas Telford had grown up. Like Telford, he had prodigious intellectual gifts (he translated the New Testament from Greek at age eight) that found their main outlet in solving technical problems. He served in the Royal Engineers in the Napoleonic Wars, and became Europe’s leading demolitions expert and siege warfare specialist. In 1810 he published An Essay on the Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire. It completely changed the way Britons thought about their empire in relation to the rest of the world.

…

CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE SUN NEVER SETS— SCOTS AND THE BRITISH EMPIRE I first saw the quotation from Robert Louis Stevenson in Ian MacLeod’s The Scots and have not hesitated to borrow it here. The overseas Scots diaspora is a large and complex subject. The best place to start might be Thomas Devine’s chapter on emigration in The Scottish Nation and the collection of essays in R.A. Cage’s edited volume, The Scots Abroad, 1750–1914 (London, 1985). Also worth reading is Gordon Donaldson’s The Scots Overseas (Westport, CT, 1976). Duncan Bruce’s The Mark of the Scots has a section on Scots and the British Empire; James Morris’s Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1973) is an entertaining survey of the British Empire at its height, even though it says nothing particularly about Scots—except for a wry and witty essay on Charles Napier, which I have quoted in this chapter.

…

Duncan Bruce’s The Mark of the Scots has a section on Scots and the British Empire; James Morris’s Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress (London, 1973) is an entertaining survey of the British Empire at its height, even though it says nothing particularly about Scots—except for a wry and witty essay on Charles Napier, which I have quoted in this chapter. Paul Johnson discusses Charles Pasley in The Birth of the Nation; Pasley’s Military Policy and Institutions of the British Empire went into successive editions: I used the fourth, published in London toward the end of the Napoleonic wars in 1813. There is an abridged edition of Mill’s History of British India from the University of Chicago Press, edited by William Thomas in 1975, which can be found in some used bookstores.

The Taste of War: World War Two and the Battle for Food by Lizzie Collingham

agricultural Revolution, air gap, American ideology, Bletchley Park, British Empire, centre right, clean water, colonial exploitation, distributed generation, European colonialism, fixed income, full employment, global village, guns versus butter model, indoor plumbing, labour mobility, land reform, mass immigration, means of production, profit motive, rising living standards, trade route, V2 rocket, women in the workforce

., p. 139. 75 Costello and Hughes, The Battle of the Atlantic, p. 215. 76 Ibid., p. 216. 77 Rahn, ‘The war at sea’, p. 341. 78 Hammond, Food and Agriculture, p. 185. 79 Ibid., p. 187. 80 Smith, Conflict over Convoys, p. 177. 81 Ibid., p. 154. 7 Mobilizing the British Empire 1 Stephens, Monsoon Morning, p. 180. 2 Jackson, The British Empire, p. 22. 3 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Europe and the Middle East’, p. 9. 4 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 36, 40. 5 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Asia and the Pacific’, p. 47. 6 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 132–3. 7 Kerslake, Time and the Hour, p. 163. 8 Crowder, ‘The 1939–45 war’, pp. 596, 611. 9 Pearce, ‘The colonial economy’, p. 276. 10 Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance’, p. 195; Bayly and Harper, Forgotten Armies, p. 301. 11 Kamtekar, ‘A different war dance’, p. 204. 12 Ibid., pp. 206–7. 13 Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, p. 196. 14 Jackson, Botswana, pp. 138–41. 15 Ibid., pp. 143–4. 16 Sen, Poverty and Famines, pp. 155–6. 17 Wright, The World and a Very Small Place in Africa, p. 195. 18 Jackson, Botswana, p. 156. 19 Killingray, ‘African civilians’, p. 141. 20 28 per cent of land in Mauritius was turned over to food crops.

…

., p. 45. 32 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 89. 33 Cooper, Cairo, p. 162. 34 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 25. 35 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 129. 36 Ibid., p. 88. 37 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 117. 38 Jackson, The British Empire, pp. 120–1; Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. 30. 39 Jackson, The British Empire, pp. 166, 198. 40 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. 55, 58, 65. 41 Milward, War, Economy and Society, p. 280. 42 Wilmington, The Middle East Supply Centre, p. 81. 43 Ibid., p. 121. 44 Ibid., p. 124. 45 Ibid., p. 106. 46 Ibid., p. 112. 47 Ibid., p. 84. 48 50.8 million to 19.4 million net registered tons.

…

., p. 73. 90 Beaumont, ‘Australia’s war: Europe and the Middle East’, pp. 17–18; Jackson, The British Empire, p. 2. 91 The papers of G. R. Page, Department of Documents, IWM, p. 30. 92 Crimp, The Diary of a Desert Rat, pp. 20–21. 93 Bierman and Smith, Alamein, p. 151. 94 Crimp, The Diary of a Desert Rat, pp. 38–9. 95 Bierman and Smith, Alamein, pp. 151–2. 96 Levenstein, Paradox of Plenty, p. 93. 97 Jackson, Botswana, p. 76. 98 The papers of G. R. Page, Department of Documents, IWM, p. 30. 99 Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. 273–7; Bayly, ‘Spunyarns’, p. 33. 100 Jackson, The British Empire, p. 105. 101 Collier, ‘The logistics of the North African campaign’, pp. 202–3. 102 The papers of G.

Owning the Earth: The Transforming History of Land Ownership by Andro Linklater

agricultural Revolution, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bear Stearns, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, British Empire, business cycle, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, crony capitalism, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, electricity market, facts on the ground, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, invisible hand, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John Perry Barlow, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, land tenure, light touch regulation, market clearing, means of production, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, mortgage debt, Northern Rock, Peace of Westphalia, Pearl River Delta, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, refrigerator car, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Chicago School, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, three-masted sailing ship, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, ultimatum game, wage slave, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor

Faced by demands to pay land taxes and to have their properties properly registered, Afrikaaner frustration mounted and finally boiled over in 1833 when slavery was made illegal throughout the British Empire. To escape civilization and find new grazing, they moved north en masse, their long lines of ox-drawn wagons, scrawny sheep and cattle, and sullen slaves forming the central motif in Afrikaaner legends of the Great Trek. In his poem “The Voortrekker,” Rudyard Kipling, the British Empire’s poet laureate, paid tribute to their stubborn refusal to be hemmed in by propertied living: His neighbours’ smoke shall vex his eyes, their voices break his rest.

…

This book was devoted to the magus’s vision of an “incomparable Brytish Impire” that the future would bring. Whatever prompted Dee’s vision, his scrying glass or simply Gilbert’s manic ambition, it was undoubtedly prophetic. According to the Memorials, the empire would be spread across the seas by a mighty navy. Implicitly, as this British Empire expanded, it would carry with it Gilbert’s wild idea that land could be owned as private property around the world. The general, however, was not destined to live long enough to test the accuracy of Dee’s foresight. As night fell, the Squirrel hoisted two lanterns so that the Golden Hind could follow her through the raging seas.

…

What had been measured out was unmistakably a democracy, and quite clearly a republic, but its foundation was undeniably imperial. And the structure that had made it possible was to be the model for the greatest territorial empire the world had ever seen. Chapter Fourteen The Empire of Land The architect responsible for introducing Jefferson’s blueprint to the British Empire was a jailbird. Edward Gibbon Wakefield began to write about land and empire in 1829 while serving three years in Newgate Prison for abducting a wealthy fifteen-year-old girl from school and marrying her in order to gain her fortune. Born into a prominent Quaker family but with a father who lived by his wits, Wakefield’s character faithfully reflected his genetic inheritance.

Posh Boys: How English Public Schools Ruin Britain by Robert Verkaik

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alistair Cooke, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Brixton riot, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, data science, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, Etonian, G4S, gender pay gap, God and Mammon, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, Livingstone, I presume, loadsamoney, mega-rich, Neil Kinnock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, Piers Corbyn, place-making, plutocrats, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, school vouchers, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Suez crisis 1956, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, trade route, traveling salesman, unpaid internship

Although some of the worst kinds of torture were curtailed, efforts by the governors to halt daily cruelties were largely thwarted by senior boys and masters. The argument ran that with so few teachers per pupil a regime of strict discipline was essential to avoid the riots of the past. There was also a widely held notion that this tough upbringing was the best preparation for the tough life ahead, imposing rule over the native majorities of the British Empire. But the greatest criticism of all was that the education they sold was out of step with Britain’s dynamic and rising economy. Their reliance on Greek and Latin to the exclusion of sciences put them at odds with the grammar schools and newly established academies. Charles Darwin, perhaps the most enlightened mind of Victorian Britain, made it quite clear that his public school deserved no credit for his scientific achievements.

…

To achieve this they were more than happy to ensure that their own children benefited from the privilege and advantage that came from a classic public school education. The idea of buying a position among the British aristocracy made absolute business sense. 3 EMPIRE OF THE SONS The Golden Age of the English public school corresponded with the triumph of the British Empire. Generations of diplomats, politicians and civil servants who ruled a quarter of the known world passed through the same school gates. Prime ministers Robert Peel, Lord Palmerston and Winston Churchill attended Harrow, while George Canning, William Gladstone and Arthur Balfour received their education at Eton.

…

As Britain embarked on its colonial adventures, muscular Christianity was the defining virtue wholly embraced by the British Army and the legions of missionaries who sallied forth across the Empire. Winning wars, crushing cultures and converting pagans was the best way a man could flex his Christian muscles. The Victorian figure who best represents the ideal of muscular Christianity made his name in a number of famous military campaigns in defence and expansion of the British Empire. General Charles Gordon was a courageous commander and explorer whose adventures were avidly followed by the British public as he chased and fought Britain’s enemies to the very margins of the known world. Gordon did not attend one of the great English public schools but instead went to a minor private institution in Taunton, Devon, called Fullands House, before being sent on to the military academy in Woolwich, then as important as Sandhurst in training army officers.

Lords of the Desert: The Battle Between the US and Great Britain for Supremacy in the Modern Middle East by James Barr

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, false flag, illegal immigration, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Suez crisis 1956, trade route

Although he readily acknowledged that it was American weapons and equipment that had finally enabled a fight with the Germans at El Alamein on equal terms, he emphasised that the battle had been ‘fought throughout almost entirely by men of British blood’. For a year the British Empire had provided the only resistance to Hitler, he argued, and he had no plans to acquiesce to its break-up now. Britain was not fighting ‘for profit or expansion’, he insisted, rebutting an accusation that was regularly made – and not just by the enemy – and the time had come to make something else very clear. ‘We mean to hold our own,’ he stated, to cheers. ‘I have not become the King’s First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire . . . I am proud to be a member of that vast commonwealth and society of nations and communities gathered in and around the ancient British monarchy, without which the good cause might well have perished from the earth.

…

After Norway and Dunkirk in 1940, and Greece and Crete in 1941, there was no hiding the fact that 1942 had also been calamitous so far. In February the German pocket battleships Gneisenau and Scharnhorst had steamed through the Straits of Dover unopposed. A few days later Singapore surrendered, and the Japanese marched 85,000 British Empire troops into a captivity many of them would not survive. Churchill had depicted the 33,000-strong garrison of the Libyan port of Tobruk as the linchpin of British resistance to Hitler. But in June, while he was in Washington to confer with Franklin D. Roosevelt, it too had capitulated. He would not forget how the president had wordlessly passed him a pink slip of paper bearing the news before solicitously enquiring if there was anything he could do to help.

…

Churchill knew that both concepts had ominous implications for Britain and her empire, but he did not dare annoy the man on whom his hopes of victory depended. He and his advisers hurriedly drafted the declaration, which Roosevelt then significantly rewrote, but Churchill managed to dilute it somewhat by deleting the president’s reference to trade ‘discrimination’ – an attack on the tariff system imposed across the British Empire – known as ‘imperial preference’ – that left American companies trying to sell goods in this enormous market at a significant disadvantage. But he had no choice but to agree to what would become known as the ‘Atlantic Charter’ and it was clear the issues that it broached were not going to go away, particularly once the United States started footing the bill for Britain’s war effort, and then – after Pearl Harbor – joined battle herself.

The Idea of Decline in Western History by Arthur Herman

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alvin Toffler, anti-communist, bread and circuses, British Empire, David Attenborough, Dr. Strangelove, European colonialism, Future Shock, George Santayana, ghettoisation, Great Leap Forward, Gregor Mendel, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Joan Didion, laissez-faire capitalism, late capitalism, lateral thinking, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Murray Bookchin, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, plutocrats, post scarcity, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, Suez canal 1869, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois

Like Spengler, Toynbee took as his symbol of the modern West the British Empire. Like Spengler’s Decline of the West, Toynbee’s Study of History was shaped by the conviction that Great Britain’s role in that history was coming to an end. On a tour of Crete in 1912 Toynbee had come upon an elaborate Baroque palace built by a Venetian merchant prince shortly before the island was overrun by the Turks. As he stood gazing at its ruined shell, Toynbee wrote later, the thought suddenly struck him: “If the Venetian Empire had perished, the British Empire could not be immortal.” That melancholy insight would remain with him all his life: the fragility of human hopes and expectations, including his own, in the face of the larger forces of history and time.

…

By the turn of the century the Liberal and Labour parties often accused each other of stealing the other’s programs. Later they would also compete in their lavish praise of the Soviet Union.19 But one issue split them across the bow: the British Empire. The year that Culture and Anarchy appeared, 1869, also witnessed the opening of the Suez Canal and the expansion of British imperial dominion into a new and unprecedented phase. By 1890 it covered nearly one-quarter of the habitable globe. The old liberal attitude toward imperialism had been ambivalent at best: the British Empire, with its exotic trappings of imperial splendor, durbars and jubilees, and “maps painted red,” was largely the creation of Benjamin’s Disraeli’s Conservatives.

…

* Voltaire summarized the same position more succinctly and prosaically in his Age of Louis XIV (1751): “We may believe that reason and industry will progress more and more; that the useful arts will be improved; that of the evils which have afflicted men, prejudices, which are not their least scourge, will gradually disappear among all those that govern nations.” * Did Rome’s fate await the modern British Empire, as many of his contemporaries predicted? Gibbon himself said no. Material progress, politeness, and refinement—“the system of arts and laws and manners which so advantageously distinguish, above the rest of mankind, the Europeans and their colonies”—made such a repeat performance impossible.

The Power of Geography: Ten Maps That Reveal the Future of Our World by Tim Marshall

Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, David Sedaris, disinformation, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, European colonialism, failed state, glass ceiling, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, Johannes Kepler, low earth orbit, Malacca Straits, means of production, megaproject, Mikhail Gorbachev, mutually assured destruction, Neil Armstrong, new economy, New Urbanism, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, space junk, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, uranium enrichment, urban planning, women in the workforce

Slavery itself, though, continued to be ‘legal’ (although it never had been within Britain itself), but in 1833 was made illegal throughout all parts of the world controlled by the UK. It was said that the sun never set on the British Empire. That actually remains true, given that the remnants of it are the fourteen British Overseas Territories. There is always at least one of them in daylight. It might be dark in the Cayman Islands at midnight, but it’s still daytime in the Pitcairn Islands of the South Pacific. Nevertheless, all good things, and bad things, come to an end. The beginning of the end for the British Empire came as two powers rose to meet it: Germany and the USA. In 1871 the Germanic states finally became tired of fighting each other and unified to become Western Europe’s biggest and most populous country.

…

However, what Reza Shah Pahlavi did not do was take control of the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, and as long as the British controlled that they still had a huge say in Persian affairs. The British had built the world’s biggest refinery at the port of Abadan, and from it flowed cheap oil for the British Empire. In the Second World War Iran again attempted to be neutral, but once more fell victim to outside powers. On a pretext about the shah’s pro-Nazi sentiments the British and Soviets invaded and, after forcing him to abdicate, achieved their aim of securing the oilfields, constructing a supply line to Russia.

…

Whereas beforehand the Scottish and English governments each had to fund a standing army to keep watch on their land borders, now the money could be used to secure Britain against invasion from the Continent, and for expansion in the empire. There was a larger population from which to form the military, and the resources, energy and time spent looking inwards could be focused outwards – and by outwards, the British meant the world. The British Empire grew rapidly, and the more it grew, the harder it was to challenge. Sea power was the key, and only a wealthy power could build a navy capable of either controlling the sea lanes, or challenging the navies that did. Britain made use of its oak forests to build ocean-worthy ships. The trees supplied extremely strong wood of the type required when your enemy might be firing cannonballs at you, or when you risked running aground exploring strange new worlds where no big ship had gone before.

Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap by Graham Allison

9 dash line, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, currency manipulation / currency intervention, Deng Xiaoping, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, escalation ladder, facts on the ground, false flag, Flash crash, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, game design, George Santayana, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Haber-Bosch Process, Herman Kahn, high-speed rail, industrial robot, Internet of things, Kenneth Rogoff, liberal world order, long peace, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nelson Mandela, one-China policy, Paul Samuelson, Peace of Westphalia, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, selection bias, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, South China Sea, special economic zone, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, synthetic biology, TED Talk, the rule of 72, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, UNCLOS, Washington Consensus, zero-sum game

Lawrence James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 66. [back] 54. John Brewer, The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State, 1688–1783 (London: Unwin Hyman, 1989), xvii. [back] 55. Robert Tombs and Isabelle Tombs, That Sweet Enemy: The French and the British from the Sun King to the Present (London: William Heinemann, 2006), 51. [back] 56. James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 58. [back] 57. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 45. [back] 58. James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire, 66. [back] 59. Tombs and Tombs, That Sweet Enemy, 46.

…

He not only built more warships, but applied superior technology to make them more lethal: better armed, with new fifteen-inch guns; faster, powered by oil instead of coal; and supplemented by a new instrument of war, the airplane.3 In the thousand days between his memorandum and the outbreak of World War I, Churchill led a Herculean effort to maintain British naval supremacy, simultaneously making bold diplomatic strokes to broker détente with Germany and seizing every advantage should war come. His urgency sprang from his conviction that the German surge at sea signaled not a national security challenge but an existential threat to Britain’s survival. Churchill knew that on British warships “floated the might, majesty, dominion, and power of the British Empire.” If its navy were destroyed, he wrote later, the empire “would dissolve like a dream.” All of Europe would pass “into the iron grip and rule of the Teuton and of all that the Teutonic system meant.” To avoid that catastrophe, he insisted, the Royal Navy was “all we had.”4 Britain thus faced an excruciating dilemma, one that strategists even today struggle to escape in planning exercises.5 On the one hand, naval superiority was non-negotiable.

…

After a year of research into the king’s question, Crowe delivered a diplomatic gem on New Year’s Day 1907.12 “The healthy activity of a powerful Germany,” Crowe allowed, was good for the world. Instead of fearing Germany’s overseas expansion in principle, he wrote, Britain should applaud German competition for “intellectual and moral leadership” and “join in the race.” But what if Germany’s ultimate goal was “to break up and supplant the British Empire”? Crowe knew that German leaders had indignantly denied “any schemes of so subversive a nature,” and it was possible that Germany did not “consciously cherish” them. At the same time, Britain could ill afford to trust German assurances. Germany might seek “a general political hegemony and maritime ascendancy, threatening the independence of her neighbors and ultimately the existence of England.”

The Making of an Atlantic Ruling Class by Kees Van der Pijl

anti-communist, banking crisis, Berlin Wall, book value, Boycotts of Israel, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, collective bargaining, colonial rule, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, European colonialism, floating exchange rates, full employment, imperial preference, Joseph Schumpeter, liberal capitalism, mass immigration, means of production, military-industrial complex, North Sea oil, plutocrats, profit maximization, RAND corporation, scientific management, strikebreaker, Suez crisis 1956, trade liberalization, trade route, union organizing, uranium enrichment, urban renewal, War on Poverty

When in the context of World War Two, a comparable conjuncture again presented itself to the American ruling class, the Roosevelt forces seized the opportunity to reorient the New Deal from its national–corporatist format to a more liberal-internationalist strategy of expansion, in which domestic working-class demands could be in part evaded, in part compromised, while American economic power was brought to bear on both the British Empire and the Soviet Union in order to force them into compliance with US preferences for an open world. The Lend-Lease policy, then, inaugurated an era in which the two elements in combination–the generalization of Fordism and an offensive diplomacy of Wilsonian inspiration–materialized as a process of class formation on the North Atlantic level, guided by successive formulations of Atlantic unity.

…

From this perspective, the history of Atlanticism, as both ideology and an actual process of class formation, must be related to the three successive strategies of Atlantic unity which corresponded to the different offensive periods of American capitalism. The first was Roosevelt’s concept of Atlantic Universalism, which derived its specific Atlantic dimension from the European focus of World War Two and the key position of the British Empire in the world America wanted to expand into. The second version of Atlantic unity was the Atlantic Union idea which surfaced at the time of the Marshall Plan and combined a status-quo approach to control of the periphery with a high-pitched Cold War unity against the Soviet Union. The third Atlanticist strategy was the Atlantic Partnership scheme promulgated by President Kennedy in an attempt to restore unity of purpose to an Atlantic world in which the establishment of a restrictive EEC demonstrated the degree to which Western European capital had emancipated itself from American tutelage and was intent on carving out a sphere-of-interest of its own.

…

But Wilson’s universalism, explicitly conceived as a bourgeois-reformist alternative to the call of the October Revolution, soon lost its relevance in the interwar years as US economic foreign policy was shaped, first, by Wall Street rentier interests, then, by the state-monopolist pursuit of an American sphere-of-interest. Even at the beginning of US involvement in World War Two, as Roosevelt began his epic wheeling-dealing to pry the economic assets of the British Empire from Churchill, US geopolitical goals continued to be framed within a basically sphere-of-interest concept that took the division of the world market for granted. Thus the Council on Foreign Relations commissioned research to determine the minimal size of the informal empire necessary for the survival of US private capitalism in terms of raw material supplies, domestic employment and export outlets.

The Tyranny of Experts: Economists, Dictators, and the Forgotten Rights of the Poor by William Easterly

air freight, Andrei Shleifer, battle of ideas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business process, business process outsourcing, Carmen Reinhart, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, discovery of the americas, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Ford Model T, Francisco Pizarro, fundamental attribution error, gentrification, germ theory of disease, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, income per capita, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, John Snow's cholera map, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, low interest rates, M-Pesa, microcredit, Monroe Doctrine, oil shock, place-making, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, risk/return, road to serfdom, Robert Solow, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, tacit knowledge, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, urban planning, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks, World Values Survey, young professional

At the conference in San Francisco, Smuts praised the United Kingdom as the “greatest colonial power” in the world. Smuts saw the United Nations as serving “men and women everywhere, including dependent peoples, still unable to look after themselves.”54 The “international machinery” to promote “advancement” of “dependent peoples” included the British Empire. At the time of the UN’s founding, the United Nations and the British Empire were mutually supportive international organizations. W.E.B. DuBois accused Smuts and the other UN founders of “lying about democracy when we mean imperial control of 750 millions of human beings in colonies.”55 Friedrich Hayek had questioned the moral value of any real power given to an international organization in The Road to Serfdom in 1944.

…

One of many examples this book gave was that of Lord Hailey, who during World War II stressed material development as a way to avoid a discussion of racism in the British Empire. He emphasized material development to avoid a discussion of the political rights of colonial subjects under the absolute power of the empire. He focused on material development to avoid a discussion of equal rights of whites and nonwhites. We discussed how Hailey was able to strike an implicit deal with the Americans: he would not embarrass them about their denial of equal rights to African Americans at home if the Americans would not embarrass the British Empire about its denial of equal rights to Africans. Both would agree to talk only about improved material well-being and not talk about rights.

…

Racism and Development The second decision at Versailles—not to endorse racial equality—also had lasting consequences for China and for the formation of development ideas. The Japanese, as the first nonwhite Great Power, wanted respect and proposed a declaration of racial equality at Versailles in 1919. The British and the Americans shot down the equality proposal. The British did not want international attention on racial discrimination within the British Empire. Woodrow Wilson was a segregationist at home who also did not want international interference in white Americans’ treatment of blacks. What is important about this decision is that the idea of development solidified while the West was still unapologetically racist during the interwar period of 1919 to 1939, as we will see with the example of China in this chapter.

Citizens of London: The Americans Who Stood With Britain in Its Darkest, Finest Hour by Lynne Olson

Alistair Cooke, Bletchley Park, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, European colonialism, financial independence, full employment, imperial preference, indoor plumbing, jobless men, old-boy network, Seymour Hersh, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956

Even before the United States entered the war, the president made his position clear, telling his son Elliott: “We’ve got to make clear to the British from the very outset that we don’t intend to be simply a good-time Charlie who can be used to help the British empire out of a tight spot…. I think I speak as America’s President when I say that America won’t help England in this war simply so that she will be able to continue to ride roughshod over colonial peoples.” During Churchill’s first visit to Washington, Roosevelt raised the issue of self-determination for India, the most precious jewel in the British empire’s crown. Churchill reacted so negatively, he later wrote, that the president never brought up the subject again. That was not exactly the case.

…

The prime minister and other British officials repeatedly warned the Roosevelt administration that they were running out of dollars, but the U.S. government refused to believe them. The president, Treasury Secretary Henry Morgenthau, and Secretary of State Cordell Hull were convinced that the riches of the British empire were virtually limitless. If the British needed more cash, they could simply liquidate some of their investments in North and South America. Morgenthau, in particular, pressed the British to sell to American investors such blue-chip companies as Shell Oil, American Viscose, Lever Brothers, and Dunlop Tires.

…

Once Churchill assumed the premiership, Kennedy, who detested him, reinforced Roosevelt’s already unfavorable impression with repeated assertions that Churchill was anti-American and anti-FDR. Another of Kennedy’s claims—that the prime minister was trying to lure the United States into the war solely to preserve the British empire—reinforced the president’s long-held suspicions of British imperialism. To Roosevelt, the ambassador characterized Churchill as a man “always sucking on a whisky bottle,” a view also held by undersecretary of state Sumner Welles, who called Churchill “a drunken sot” and a “third or fourth-rate man.”

How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States by Daniel Immerwahr

Albert Einstein, book scanning, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, citizen journalism, City Beautiful movement, clean water, colonial rule, company town, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, drone strike, European colonialism, fake news, friendly fire, gravity well, Haber-Bosch Process, Howard Zinn, immigration reform, land reform, Mercator projection, military-industrial complex, Neal Stephenson, Neil Armstrong, offshore financial centre, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, pneumatic tube, QWERTY keyboard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, transcontinental railway, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, wikimedia commons

Goodrich tire company Bharat, see India Bierce, Ambrose Bikini Atoll Bill of Rights bin Laden, Abdullah bin Laden, Awadh bin Laden, Mohamed bin Laden, Osama bin Laden, Saad bin Laden, Salem bin Laden construction firm birth control pills; see also contraceptives birther conspiracy theory Birth of a Nation, The (movie) Blackboard Jungle (movie) Black Panthers blacks, see African Americans black sites Blackwell, Blanche Blackwell, Chris Bloody Island Massacre Bollywood Bolsheviks Bonin Islands Boone, Daniel Boone and Crockett Club Boonesborough (Kentucky) Boot, Max Booth, John Wilkes Borneo “Born in the U.S.A.” (Springsteen) Boston Boston Globe Boston Tea Party Boustany, Charles Brazil Brereton, Lewis Breslau, University of Brezhnev, Leonid Bridge on the River Kwai, The (movie) Britain; colonies of, see British Empire; in Desert Storm coalition; industrialization in; U.S. military in British Council British Empire; American independence from; end of; governments of colonies in; holiday celebrating; in International Organization for Standardization; measurement system in; North American colonies of; Oregon claims of; in Paris Peace Conference; Peruvian guano industry monopolized by; telegraph cable system of; uprisings against; in World War I; in World War II; worldwide population of British Guiana Brown, Wenzell Brown v.

…

The 118,933 mainland military service members posted to territories are not listed with each territory’s population, so islands with military outposts but without local residents, such as Wake, are excluded. The Panama Canal Zone was technically Panamanian land leased to the United States, but the census counted it nonetheless. Nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines. Was that a lot? Not compared with the world-girdling British Empire, which boasted at the time a population of more than four hundred million (the great bulk of whom lived in India). But the United States’ empire was nonetheless sizable. Measured by population, it was, at the time of Pearl Harbor, the fifth largest in the world. Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. population.

…

The leftist author Howard Zinn, in his immensely popular A People’s History of the United States, wrote of the “global American empire,” and his graphic-novel spin-off is called A People’s History of American Empire. On the far right, the politician Pat Buchanan has warned that the United States is “traveling the same path that was trod by the British Empire.” In the vast political distance between Zinn and Buchanan, there are millions who would readily agree that the United States is, in at least some sense, imperial. The case can be made in a number of ways. The dispossession of Native Americans and relegation of many to reservations was pretty transparently imperialist.

An Economic History of the Twentieth Century by J. Bradford Delong

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, ASML, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, ending welfare as we know it, endogenous growth, Fairchild Semiconductor, fake news, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial repression, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, general purpose technology, George Gilder, German hyperinflation, global value chain, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Haber-Bosch Process, Hans Rosling, hedonic treadmill, Henry Ford's grandson gave labor union leader Walter Reuther a tour of the company’s new, automated factory…, housing crisis, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, income per capita, industrial research laboratory, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of agriculture, invention of the steam engine, It's morning again in America, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, labor-force participation, land reform, late capitalism, Les Trente Glorieuses, liberal capitalism, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market bubble, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, mortgage debt, mutually assured destruction, Neal Stephenson, occupational segregation, oil shock, open borders, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Phillips curve, plutocrats, price stability, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, public intellectual, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, restrictive zoning, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, rolodex, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, savings glut, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, social intelligence, Stanislav Petrov, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, Suez canal 1869, surveillance capitalism, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Chicago School, The Great Moderation, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, too big to fail, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, TSMC, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, Yom Kippur War

Economist William Stanley Jevons made his reputation in 1865 when he was still a young whippersnapper of thirty-three years old with The Coal Question: arguing that Britain at least would within a generation run out of easily accessible coal, and then the factories would just… stop.7 There was nobody who was a bigger believer in the British Empire than Rudyard Kipling. The British Empire was very good to Rudyard Kipling—until September 27, 1915, when, during World War I, it devoured his son John by killing him in the bloody fields outside the French city of Lille. Yet his reaction to the sixtieth anniversary of Queen-Empress Victoria Hanover’s accession to the throne, in 1897, was a poem about London’s destiny being the same as Nineveh’s, closing: “For frantic boast and foolish word—/ Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!”

…

And as wages in economies that were to become the global periphery diminished, so, too, did the possibility that this periphery would develop a rich enough middle class to provide demand for a strong domestic industrial sector. To understand why, consider the British Empire. Wherever the British went they built a fort, some docks, and a botanical garden—the latter to discover what valuable plants grown elsewhere might flourish under the guns of their fort as well. During the nineteenth century it was the British Empire that brought the rubber plant from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and then to Malaya, and that brought the tea shrub directly from China to Ceylon. Although rubber was not introduced into Malaya, Indonesia, and Indochina until the last quarter of the nineteenth century, by the end of World War I these three regions had become the principal sources of the world’s natural rubber supply.

…

For the politicians of the French Third Republic, a war with Germany needed to be fought someday in order to recover Alsace and Lorraine, which had been stolen by Germany in 1870. And it was, to politicians and populace alike, self-evidently worth killing a lot of people to make sure that the city of Strasbourg was not called “Strassburg,” and that its mayor spoke French, not German. For the politicians of the British Empire in London, risks of war were worth running to show that the British Empire could not be pushed around. What was more, Germany before World War I had built a battle fleet that Britain saw as an existential threat, and Britain found itself forced to spend a fortune to outmatch it. Recall Winston Churchill’s joke about the pace of pre–World War I British dreadnought battleship construction: the Liberal government was willing to budget for four new battleships a year, the navy admirals demanded six, and the press and public opinion, with their fear of imperial Germany coming to the fore, pushed them to compromise at eight.

After Tamerlane: The Global History of Empire Since 1405 by John Darwin

agricultural Revolution, Atahualpa, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, classic study, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, cuban missile crisis, deglobalization, deindustrialization, European colonialism, failed state, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, laissez-faire capitalism, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, open economy, price mechanism, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade

As ever more of the world was partitioned, they acquired fresh sets of potentially troublesome neighbours, newfences to maintain, and a newneed for vigilance. The result was paradoxical. Although the British Empire became larger and larger, the diplomats and strategists charged with protecting it became more and more anxious. Because the British had so much territory scattered round the world, they seemed always at odds with everyone else. The British Empire was like a huge giant, moaned a senior official, ‘with gouty fingers and toes stretching in every direction’. The minute it was approached by anyone else, the giant would scream with fear at the expected pain.48 It was a poor recipe for diplomatic harmony.

…

After Tamerlane BY THE SAME AUTHOR Britain, Egypt and the Middle East: Imperial Policy in the Aftermath of War 1918–1922 Britain and Decolonization: The Retreat from Empire in the Post-War World The End of the British Empire: The Historical Debate JOHN DARWIN After Tamerlane The Global History of Empire since 1405 ALLEN LANE an imprint of PENGUIN BOOKS ALLEN LANE Published by the Penguin Group Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

…

After 1860, with the spread of railways, India developed much more rapidly as a source of raw materials and the greatest market for Britain’s greatest export, cotton textiles. And if the burden of garrisoning India was heavy, it cost the British taxpayer nothing. Indeed, after 1860 two-thirds of the standing army of the British Empire (a total of some 330,000 British and Indian soldiers) was a charge on Indian not British revenues, and the forces in India could be (and were) used everywhere from Malta to Shanghai. As the partition of Afro-Asia speeded up after 1880, India’s geopolitical, as well as its economic, value became an axiom of British policy.

Disrupt and Deny: Spies, Special Forces, and the Secret Pursuit of British Foreign Policy by Rory Cormac

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, currency manipulation / currency intervention, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, Edward Snowden, Etonian, fake news, false flag, illegal immigration, land reform, Malacca Straits, Mikhail Gorbachev, operational security, precautionary principle, private military company, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, union organizing, WikiLeaks, Yom Kippur War

FO371/135642, Ramsbotham, ‘Middle East Policy’, 28/8/58, attached: ‘Points for a Middle East Policy’, PUSD, 27/8/58; Aldrich, The Hidden Hand, p.483; Rawnsley, ‘The Voice of Britain and Black Radio Broadcasting in the Suez Crisis’, pp.511–12; Kyle, Suez, p.151. Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers, pp.438–9. Hashimoto, The Twilight of the British Empire, pp.128–9 OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi not e s321 18. FO1110/1220, Barclay to Wright, 24/10/59. 19. FO1110/1220, Foreign Office minute, 10/12/59. 20. Hashimoto, The Twilight of the British Empire. See also Boyd, ‘Sharq Al-Adna/ The Voice of Britain’, pp.443–55. 21. Bittman, The Deception Game, pp.19–20, 29. 22. CAB301/118, Compton to Lloyd, ‘Secret Vote: Special Operations’, 29/4/57. 23.

…

.), The Churchill-Eisenhower Correspondence, 1953–56 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Braithwaite, R., Afgansty:The Russians in Afghanistan 1979–89 (London: Profile, 2014). Brandon, P., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781–1997 (London: Vintage, 2008). Braun, L.F., ‘Suez Reconsidered: Anthony Eden’s Orientalism and the Suez Crisis’, Historian, 65/3 (2003): 535–61. Brendon, P., The Decline and Fall of the British Empire 1781–1997 (London: Vintage, 2008). Brogi, A., Confronting America: The Cold War between the United States and the Communists in France and Italy (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).

…

OUP CORRECTED PROOF – FINAL, 06/02/18, SPi 8 Decolonization and Drift The Battle for Influence after Empire From my point of view there is no doctrinal objection to the use of clandestine and covert activities. Alan Lennox-Boyd, 1955 1 B ritain’s colonial rule was built on information management and it is no exaggeration to describe the British Empire as an ‘empire of intelligence.’2 Swathes of information, gathered as part of the process of colonial governance, were vital to allow a few administrators to govern vast territories such as India. Intelligence in the colonies had developed differently from intelligence in Whitehall: it remained more informal, less glamorous, part of the quotidian administration.

The Perfect Mile: Three Athletes, One Goal, and Less Than Four Minutes to Achieve It by Neal Bascomb, Kingfisher Editors

British Empire, discovery of penicillin, first-past-the-post, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, two and twenty

Less than forty-eight hours after the closing ceremonies in Helsinki, another competition was held, this time in London’s White City Stadium, pitting a British Empire team against the United States. The stadium had staged an Olympic Games itself in 1908 and was infamous for setting the official marathon distance at 26 miles, 385 yards—instead of simply 26 miles —so that the race would finish in front of Queen Alexandra’s royal box. The stadium was now used for greyhound racing and an assortment of other events, including track and field. The Americans beat the British Empire team, as they had beaten the world a few short days before. In the 4 x 1 mile relays, where four runners from each team ran a mile, Roger Bannister earned the Empire team an early lead.

…

“Hello, John”: “Rivals Happy to See Each Other,” Melbourne Age, June 26, 1954; “Mile Stars in Guarded Meeting,” Melbourne Herald, June 27, 1954; Dick Bed-does, “Mile Aces Avoid Talk of Records,” Vancouver Sun, June 26, 1954. 228 On October 30, 1891: “Australia at the British Empire and Commonwealth Games, Vancouver, Canada 1954,” British Empire Games Official Program, July 30, 1954; John Blanch and Paul Jenes, Australia’s Complete History at the Commonwealth Games (John Blanch Publishing, 1982). 229 Henry Luce, the famed publisher: Norris McWhirter, personal interview. To televise the event: “TV Mile Thriller Seen by 40,,,” New York Times, August 8, 1954.

…

He had an announcement to make: Wes Santee was going to be the first to run the four-minute mile. For years he had known he was capable. Now his intention was a matter of public record. John Landy had a different announcement to make when he landed in Melbourne, but one equally telling. Directly after the British Empire versus the United States match, he boarded a flight to Australia. He had declined to join Macmillan and Perry, who, accompanied by Cerutty, were running in a series of competitions in Scandinavia. Landy needed to get back to his agricultural science studies, which had fallen by the wayside as he strove to make the Olympic team.

A History of the World in 6 Glasses by Tom Standage

Berlin Wall, British Empire, Colonization of Mars, Copley Medal, Edmond Halley, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, gentleman farmer, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, Lao Tzu, multiplanetary species, Neal Stephenson, out of africa, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

Coffee's association with innovation, reason, and networking—plus a dash of revolutionary fervor—has a long pedigree. A coffeehouse in late-eighteenth-century Paris TEA and the BRITISH EMPIRE 9 Empires of Tea Better to be deprived of food for three days than of tea for one. —Chinese proverb Thank God for tea! What would the world do without tea? How did it exist? —Sydney Smith, British writer (1771-1845) The Drink That Conquered the World w WITH FAR-FLUNG TERRITORIES stretched around the world, the British Empire was famously described in 1773 by Sir George Macartney, an imperial administrator, as "this vast empire on which the sun never sets."

…

A Stone-Age Brew 2. Civilized Beer Wine in Greece and Rome 3. The Delight of Wine 4. The Imperial Vine Spirits in the Colonial Period 5. High Spirits, High Seas 6. The Drinks That Built America Coffee in the Age of Reason 7. The Great Soberer 8. The Coffeehouse Internet Tea and the British Empire 9. Empires of Tea 10. Tea Power Coca-Cola and the Rise of America 11. From Soda to Cola 12. Globalization in a Bottle Epilogue. Back to the Source Acknowledgments Appendix. In Search of Ancient Drinks Notes Sources Introduction Vital Fluids There is no history of mankind, there are only many histories of all kinds of aspects of human life.

…

Profits from its trade helped to fund the advance into India of the British East India Company, the commercial organization that became Britain's de facto colonial government in the East. Having started as a luxury drink, tea trickled down to become the beverage of the working man, the fuel for the workers who operated the new machine-powered factories. If the sun never set on the British Empire, it was perpetually teatime, somewhere at least. With its associated drinking rituals of genteel afternoon tea and the worker's tea break, tea perfectly matched Britain's self-image as a civilizing, industrious power. How odd, then, that this quintessentially English drink initially had to be imported at great cost and effort from China, that vast and mysterious dominion on the other side of the world, and that the cultivation and processing of tea were utter mysteries to its European drinkers.

How We Got Here: A Slightly Irreverent History of Technology and Markets by Andy Kessler

Albert Einstein, Andy Kessler, animal electricity, automated trading system, bank run, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Bletchley Park, Bob Noyce, Bretton Woods, British Empire, buttonwood tree, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, Corn Laws, cotton gin, Dennis Ritchie, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Fairchild Semiconductor, fiat currency, fixed income, floating exchange rates, flying shuttle, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, GPS: selective availability, Grace Hopper, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, Kickstarter, Leonard Kleinrock, Marc Andreessen, Mary Meeker, Maui Hawaii, Menlo Park, Metcalfe's law, Metcalfe’s law, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Multics, packet switching, pneumatic tube, price mechanism, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, proprietary trading, railway mania, RAND corporation, Robert Metcalfe, Silicon Valley, Small Order Execution System, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, systems thinking, three-martini lunch, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, tulip mania, Turing machine, Turing test, undersea cable, UUNET, Wayback Machine, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

We’ll see it again with semiconductors and integrated circuits in another couple of hundred years. Transportation Elasticity, Sea and Rail Even in the early 1800’s, the British Empire got off to a slow start. The transatlantic slave trade was abolished in 1807, but it wasn’t until another 20 years later that the British would declare the slave trade a form of piracy, punishable by death. In 1833, slavery was abolished in the entire British Empire, after a 5-year trial period, leading to the more commonly known date of abolishment in 1838. The delay didn’t hurt the engine. The plantations in the American South still had slaves, until 1865, and were cranking out cotton for the British textile mills.

…

This set up the incredible simplification of computers in the 20th century, which only had to deal with 2 digits, 1’s and 0’s, true and false, on and off, instead of 10 numbers. This is a major inflection point in harnessing Logic and Memory for computers. Dealing with two instead of ten states lowered the complexity of computing devices by at least a factor of 10. *** Meanwhile, the Industrial Revolution kept cranking. Amazing as it sounds, the British Empire really began with the invention of affordable, comfortable clothing. Silk was comfortable but painfully expensive, since there was no way to push productivity out of worms. Wool was cheaper, and warm, but way too itchy. We all know that. It was the act of substitution that fired the economic engine.

…

The “protection under law” of ideas prompted individualism, self-interested folks who could work hard knowing they could reap the benefit of their own work. Adam Smith would note this much later, but for now, it set off a wave of invention. A strong and liquid capital market became an important component to enable the British Empire. They almost didn’t have one. Capital Markets and Bubbles Today, money sloshes around the globe quite easily, from Zanzibar to Berkeley Square in milliseconds. But back in the 18th century, money was a local instrument. Almost by necessity, precious metals such as gold and silver were the de facto currency for trade - no one trusted much else.

The Craft: How Freemasons Made the Modern World by John Dickie

anti-communist, bank run, barriers to entry, Boris Johnson, British Empire, classic study, cuban missile crisis, General Motors Futurama, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Jeremy Corbyn, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Mahatma Gandhi, offshore financial centre, Picturephone, Republic of Letters, Rosa Parks, South Sea Bubble, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, white flight, women in the workforce

Henley, History of Lodge Australian Social Mother no. 1, 1820–1920, Sydney, 1920. R. Holland, ‘The British Empire and the Great War, 1914–1918’, in J. Brown and W.R. Louis (eds), The Oxford History of the British Empire–Volume IV: The Twentieth Century, Oxford, 1999. T. Hunt, Ten Cities that Made an Empire, London, 2014. See the chapter on Bridgetown for its colonial economy and society. B.L. Huskins, Public Celebrations in Victorian Saint John and Halifax, PhD thesis, Dalhousie University, Halifax, NS, 1991. A. Jackson, The British Empire: A Very Short History, Oxford, 2013. For figures on the extent of the British Empire, p. 5. R. Jaffa, Man and Mason: Rudyard Kipling, Milton Keynes, 2011.

…

When the opportunity arose, to round out his income, he would republish one or other of the books from his anticlerical days, like The Secret Loves of Pius IX (1900) and The Bible for Laughs (1901). He died in provincial obscurity in March 1907. 10 Allahabad: Mother Lodges of the Empire Imperial Brethren From near to home (Ireland), to the other side of the planet (New Zealand), the British Empire extended over one-quarter of the earth’s land surface at its peak, and included more than a fifth of the global population. Its makers were many and diverse: traders and conquerors, freebooters and missionaries, scholars and capitalists, warriors and settlers, bureaucrats and explorers, monarchs and democrats, doctors and drug traffickers.

…

Here, where the winter snows overtopped the sill of his study window, Kipling’s whole sensorium reached out to the India of his mind: to the taste of chillies and mangoes; to the whisper of the breeze in the banana leaves; to the smell of turmeric and cheroots; to the feel of the heat–unending, enfeebling–and of the opium he smoked to counter its effects. The Jungle Book, Kipling’s timeless collection of children’s stories set in India, was written in Vermont. Freemasonry’s most loved poem was also written in Vermont, the fruit of an encounter between Kipling and Arthur Conan Doyle who, like his friend, was a passionate believer in the British Empire. In the autumn of 1894, having recently killed off Sherlock Holmes at the Reichenbach Falls, Conan Doyle took a break from a speaking tour of the United States to spend a couple of days in Vermont teaching Kipling to play golf–despite the lack of a local course. Conan Doyle and Kipling deepened their friendship as they swished and hacked their way around the open country.

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First by Frank Trentmann

Abraham Maslow, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, Anton Chekhov, Ayatollah Khomeini, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bread and circuses, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, car-free, carbon footprint, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, classic study, clean water, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, company town, critique of consumerism, cross-subsidies, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equity premium, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial exclusion, fixed income, food miles, Ford Model T, full employment, gentrification, germ theory of disease, global village, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, income inequality, index card, informal economy, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, it's over 9,000, James Watt: steam engine, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kitchen Debate, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Les Trente Glorieuses, libertarian paternalism, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, mass immigration, McMansion, mega-rich, Michael Shellenberger, moral panic, mortgage debt, Murano, Venice glass, Naomi Klein, New Urbanism, Paradox of Choice, Pier Paolo Pasolini, planned obsolescence, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, post-materialism, postnationalism / post nation state, profit motive, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, Ralph Nader, rent control, retail therapy, Richard Thaler, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, school vouchers, scientific management, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, seminal paper, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, stakhanovite, Ted Nordhaus, the built environment, the market place, The Spirit Level, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban sprawl, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, zero-sum game

For example, in the Gujarati city of Surat, just north of Mumbai, the main textile industries shrank, but artisans who made the famous gold thread jari managed to hang on.48 Notables, meanwhile, tried to keep up their former lifestyles as best they could, even as their pensions were being cut back by the British. While undermining old elites, the British empire simultaneously promoted new ones, such as the Parsis. Still, with all these nuances and qualifications, it is clear that, overall, the British empire was bad for luxury consumption in India. This was fully intentional. India was ‘backward’, one English observer argued in 1837, because ‘princes and nobles were engrossing all the wealth of the country,’ while its people were ‘groaning’ under the burden.

…

E. 238–9 Duala 132–3, 252 dualism, Cartesian 95, 230–31 Dubai 618 Duchamp, Marcel 636 Dufayel (department store) 200, 410 Duhamel, Georges: Scenes de la vie future 283 durable goods see consumer durables dustbins 629–30, 633, 648 dusting 222, 226 dustyards 628 Dutch East Indies 26, 90, 164, 172 Dutch National Bank 563 Dutch people see Netherlands/the Dutch Dutch Republic 4, 10, 54–8 DVDs 387, 533 Dynamo Dresden 526 e-bay 654, 658 e-commerce 481–2, 654, 658 earning power 309 see also spending power earthenware 57, 60, 61, 62, 88, 89, 623 East India Company, Dutch (VOC) 25–6, 57, 69, 70 East India Company, English (EIC) 25–6, 64, 65, 70, 85, 89, 92, 120, 139 Easterlin, Richard 452 eating see also food: in China 357; and class 587–8, 604–5; and control of one’s life 324; family meals 14, 461; with friends 467; gender and eating roles 14; at home 14, 353, 376, 461; Irish 599–600; meat 2, 588, 598–9, 604, 675, 684; in migrant food cultures 596–602, 603–5; and the misery U-index 454; national eating habits 166; out 353, 448, 602, 605, 685 see also restaurants; overeating 106–7, 339; power of eating habits 9; rituals 14; slaves eating English food 170; and sociability 14, 155; time spent on 454 Eaton’s (department store) 203 Eco, Umberto 315 economics 2, 91, 140, 151–2; affluent budgets 338–9; budget studies 147–50, 283; consumption and the German national/historical school of 116, 153, 154; and the discovery of the consumer 147–54; economists’ approach to consumption 119, 147–54; and ethics 151; extension of economic theory into daily life matters 427; GDP see gross domestic product; home economists 256; Keynesianism 427–8; spending power see spending power Economist 611 economy: depression 273, 274, 278–88, 405, 413, 414; of East Germany 335; economic growth 11, 273, 278, 303, 324, 325, 364, 368, 394, 411, 415, 540, 639, 677; emotional 685; European economic expansion 28; foreign luxuries and local economy 41; GDP see gross domestic product; inflation 274, 275, 343, 415, 614, 619; Japan’s economic crisis and ‘lost decade’ of the 1990s 371, 384, 498, 534; moral economy 278, 563, 571, 578, 581; recession 287, 403, 405, 420, 426, 428, 521, 668, 683; scarcity economy 332; shadow economy 330; sharing/leasing economy 687–8; and sustained growth of affluence 301, 302; Total Material Requirement 665, 668 Ecuador 80, 162, 476 Eden, Ashley 143 Eden, Frederic 75 Edo 176, 181, 358, 472 see also Tokyo education 3, 12, 142, 288; and advertising 485, 489; in Asia 372, 407; benefits from fair trade 579; company-based 523; consumer education 393–4; ‘consumer’s view of adult education’ 285; educational films 215; English education in British empire 142; home science 256; learning through play 488; and leisure 448–9, 451, 465–9, 467; schools see schools; Soviet 330, 331–2; spending on 148, 304, 326, 537; and taste 214, 548 efficiency 140, 150, 237, 246, 247, 398, 412, 667, 672–5, 686, 688; campaigns 634; energy efficiency 671–3; and the internet 687; rational 270, 360; and socialism 644–5 Egypt, ancient 68 Egypt, modern 202, 299–300, 593; remittances 590, 593 Eisenhower, Dwight D. 307 El Puente foundation 575 elderly people 429–30, 498–519; abuse/neglect of 516; in Asian societies 508, 509, 516–19; as consumers 429–30, 498–519; day centres for 503; facilitating forces of active ageing 501–4; German 200, 332, 499, 507–9, 512, 513; golden age club movement 503–4, 505; leisure and holidays 450, 498–519; pensions see pensions; post-war 506–7; retirement see retirement; Scandinavian 507, 508, 509, 510, 557; and sport 515 electric cookers 240, 248, 249, 253, 364–5, 554 electric labour-saving devices in the home see domestic appliances and technologies electric lights 192, 208, 367 electric switches 248–9 electricity 4, 175, 181, 248–9, 253, 672; in Asia 367–8, 391–2; in Brazil 527; providers 248, 392 electronic waste 622, 652, 653, 664; recycling 662–4 electroplating 225–6 elevators 192–3 Elias, Norbert 294 elite 29, 52, 84, 92, 169–70, 180, 228, 283–4, 340, 345, 436–7, 605, 680; Asian 52, 139, 140, 141, 142, 146, 381; British 59, 397; colonial 80; communist 294–5; French 340, 345, 346; women 74 Elizabeth I 39 Elmtown, America 497–8 email 464, 465, 470, 471 embroidery 25, 35, 36, 48, 252, 293 Emin Pasha (born Isaak Eduard Schnitzer) 171 emotions: and comfort 270; emotional economy 685; emotional needs 321; growing interest in 682; mass culture diffusing ready-made emotions 315; separated from reason 274; tied to goods 104–5, 315–16, 320–21, 337, 686 empire/empires: African consumption and empire 124–36; America as a ‘market empire’ 307; Atlantic empire 92; Bat’a empire 525; British empire see British empire; British Raj 137–46, 296–8; and capitalism 160; colonial protection and the tug of war between empires 120; colonialism see colonialism; consumption and the stain of empire 357; costs and benefits of empire debate 91, 160–61; as engines of expansion 90; Hobson’s attack on empire 119, 158, 161; and the housewife 300; impact on taste and ritual 78–93, 119, 170–71; imperialism see imperialism; and the imperium of things 119–73; Indian switch from Mughal to British rule 137–8; interplay of consumption, flow of goods and imperial power 120; liberal empire of free trade 91, 120–21, 122, 140, 141, 146, 161, 163–4, 167, 572 see also British empire; mercantilist empire 91, 92, 161, 163, 164; Mughal empire 137, 138, 142; national identity defined in opposition to empire 379; and popularization of exotic drug foods 78–93; Russian empire 204; schizophrenic 135–6; Spanish empire see Spanish empire; and the value of origin 169–71; writing out the colonial producer 173 empiricism 96 employment see labour and work empowerment: through choice 288, 557, 559, 560, 567; of the consumer 6, 203, 260, 287, 288, 295, 557, 559, 560, 567; through domestic appliances 260; through shopping 6, 203; of women 6, 260 emulation 13, 14, 90, 165, 328, 677 see also conspicuous consumption; imitation; status and social positioning; discomfort with 143; equality and emulative consumption 438; as parent of demand 14, 73; in spending, ‘keeping up with the Joneses’ 8, 316, 325, 340, 374, 383, 438 Endrigo, Sergio 352 energy: American sources, demands and consumption 325, 671–3; British domestic consumption 672, 674; cheap energy and high wages 72; companies 367; efficiency 671–3; embedded/embodied 629, 670, 671, 673; EU government expenditure on 538; growth in use 672, 674, 678; and material flow 670; waste-to-energy plants 632 Engel, Ernst 148 Engel’s law 148, 149 Engels, Friedrich 113, 114, 115 England: bankruptcy in 432; Beer Act (1830) 476; and the ‘birth’ of the consumer society 10, 73; Black Death 58; comfort trade-offs 61; Community Health Councils 556; consumer culture 58–63, 61, 62, 65–6, 71–2, 76–7; ‘consumer revolution’ in 17th century 22; debt in 1700 407; early modern 4, 537; elderly people 506, 509–11; Elizabethan 59–60; English as controllers of most ‘good things’ 132; excesses as a drain on wealth 97; farmers’ markets 582; middle classes 117; as missionary nation 126; Parliamentary Committee on Illicit Practices 65; people with holiday homes 655; Poor Law 537; prudence 116; rent 243–4, 555; Shops Act (1911) 476; Stuart England 59; sumptuary laws for clothes 39, 40; Sunday trading 476, 478–9; Sunday Trading Act (1994) 478; trade 26–7, 582; Tudor 60; urban density 93; Victorians see Victorians; wages 58; wealth increase 103 Enlightenment 95–110, 158, 231, 413; and battle against slavery 123–4; and religion 606 Ensslin, Gudrun 322 entertainment see also leisure: affluence and cheap entertainment 455; cinema see cinema; film; colonial planters 161; and conspicuous consumption 228; and the emotional economy 685; equipment 14; and generational bonds 521; growing islands of 281; home entertainment 15 see also DVDs; gramophones; radio; television; and mass culture 315; positive role of play the pursuit of pleasure 218–19; salotto, room for 30; street entertainment 191; Sunday 475, 476–7; as therapy for the elderly 505; urban entertaining spaces 210–21; and wealthy youth 216 environment: climate change 560, 666; ecological footprint 15, 675, 686, 687, 689; environmental justice campaigns 669; Green movement 639, 644; greenhouse gases see greenhouse gas emissions; and material flow 664–75; mining damage 15, 683–4; ‘NIMBY’ 669; outsourcing environmental burden 669–70; past damage to 676; pollution see pollution; recycling and environmental awareness 652 see also recycling of waste; and the shedding of possessions 685–6; sustainability see sustainability; and waste see waste equality and inequality see inequalities; social equality Equipment Installment Plans (EIP) 658 Erhard, Ludwig 308, 309 escapism 305 Esselunga (Italian supermarket) 350 Este, Isabella d’, Marchesa of Mantua 31 Estonia 547 ethics see also morality: and economics 151; ethical consumerism 128, 155–7, 565–80 see also fair trade; fairness see fair trade; fairness; global ethic of care 573, 584; Golden Rule 572; Puritan work ethic 450, 455; and shopping 155, 390, 567, 569 see also fair trade; and wise consumption 289 Euclid Beach Park 218 Europe: annual growth rates in affluence and consumption, 1950s to early 1970s 273; ‘cashing out’ on the home 428; credit 409, 415; domestic appliance adoption 247; early modern 8, 38–43, 53–63, 65–6, 70–77, 398, 678; Eastern 123, 301, 313, 326–37, 427, 461, 463, 535, 598, 600, 607, 644–6 see also Soviet Union; economic expansion 28; EU see European Union; export of plastic waste 652; and the fall of Nazism 300–301; fitness wave 544; GDP 24; and the Iron Curtain 301, 327 see also Cold War; and leisure 449–52, 456, 458–9; merchants 25; and remittances 590; secularization and decline in church-going 479, 606, 607; silver mines 25; smartphones 464; spending on recycling 648; spread of consumer goods from 1950s to 1980s 301; sumptuary laws see sumptuary laws; trade/traders 23, 64, 124, 129; waste and recycling regions 644, 645; waste generation lowering 640–41; and the World Wars see First World War; Second World War; youth spending power 312 European Court of Justice 559, 560 European Social Survey (2004/5) 426–7 European Union 245, 439, 559, 560; European Economic and Social Committee 560; Landfill Directive 640; recycling 640, 652, 653; Single European Act 559; social spending 537, 537, 538, 541; and waste 640, 648, 652 Eurovision Song Contest 352 evangelicalism 128, 608–9 see also Pentecostalism; Calvinist 57, 58, 614; Methodist/Wesleyan 133, 612; Presbyterian 384; prosperity gospel 610–11, 615; Puritan see Puritanism; televangelism 610–11 Everyday Life Reform League (Japan) 250, 256–7 Ewha, Seoul 384 Ewing, Oscar 504 excess, extravagance and opulence 15, 36–7, 49, 55, 97, 100, 103, 106, 294, 302, 382, 405, 407, 434–9, 610; in Asia 48–9, 374, 384–5, 390, 407; and corruption 35–6, 51; and debt 406–7, 428, 431; effects on public 8, 15, 35–6, 302; fears of 41; in funerals 39, 48, 382, 399; imperial spectacle 140–41; sumptuary laws see sumptuary laws; of uncultured nouveau riche (Sombart) 416; wealth as mother of 57; in weddings 8, 37, 39, 41, 48, 596; women’s ‘senseless extravagance’ (Gilman) 228 exotic goods 4, 10, 32, 96, 162, 167–71, 602–3, 678 see also silk; spices; Turkish carpets; beverages 166, 603, 678 see also coffee; tea; foods/drug foods 58, 78–93, 120, 165, 168, 579, 601; and nationalism 168–9 expenditure surveys 319 Exposition Universelle (Paris 1867) 193 extravagance see excess, extravagance and opulence Fabri, Friedrich 134 Facebook 465, 470 factories 89, 153, 293, 525, 528, 638; directors 336; factory homes 457; factory labour/labourers 79, 166, 210, 214, 239, 260, 294, 337; factory production 146; factory textiles 139; owners 177, 195; Soviet 330 Faentino, Andrea 31–2 fair trade 562–71, 564, 681; activism 567, 570–71; advertising 567; branding/labelling 565–6, 570, 577; and choice 563, 566–70; and the co-operative movement 578, 579; education benefits 579; Fairtrade Fortnight 562; global sales of fair trade products 562, 564, 564; health benefits 579; ‘lifestyle’ presentation 567; versus localism 584; origins of 571–80; and responses to globalization 568–9; scale problem of 570; and security 579; shops/world shops 564, 565, 566, 574–5, 576; as a social movement 565, 566, 567, 570–71; and supermarkets 562, 565, 568, 579; towns 562, 568 fairness 343–4, 549, 565–6; fair trade see fair trade; in public services 549, 561; unfairness 276, 335, 336 fairs 203 family: 4–2–1 phenomenon 372; activities 14, 309, 340–41; aristocratic European family networks 84; Asian 363, 364, 365, 367, 382–3, 384, 385, 517–18, 520; choice and rebuilding of post-war family 308; conspicuous consumption as moral threat to 380; extended 145, 260, 382; familycentred happiness 256; family-oriented consumption/consumerism 260, 324, 340–41, 382–3; and generational bonds 520–21; income 147–50, 409, 425, 519; meals 14, 461; planning 365; possessions and family memory 104, 686; privatizing effect of gifted consumer goods on 596; recreational spending 148, 339; time spent with children 461 farmers 44, 47, 54, 55, 73, 75, 203, 634, 649; farmers’ markets 580, 581, 582, 583, 584 fascism 11, 16, 273, 289, 533; and ‘consumerism’ as totalitarian 5, 7; Nazi see Nazism fashion 4, 21, 678 see also clothes; African craze for 135; in Burgundy 69; centres of fashion network 204; children’s 485, 486–7; Chinese 21–2, 44, 46, 47, 49, 69; and the cinema 281–2; codes of dress 40; and the conservative order 41; customization 138; disposable 636; dolls 71; as driver of demand or innovation 22, 67; exotic fashion and antiestablishment politics 323; as heart of Western capitalism 22; and imperialist subjugation 379; magazines 70–71, 200; male 200–201, 315; merchants as ambassadors of 38; as product of East–West exchange 88; radical use of 323; sapping effect on nation 109; shows 528; Soviet cravings for style and 302; and subcultures 6; and sumptuary laws 39–40; teenage 498; women’s 21, 42, 46, 48, 52, 60, 65, 67, 69, 149, 150, 282, 498, 528 Fashion magazine 200 Fazal, Anwar 552 Federal Housing Administration 286, 341, 413 Fedorova, E.

…

With the rapid growth of China, and material advances in India, Brazil and other so-called emerging nations, it is hard to treat consumption as a uniquely Anglo-American export. Though a billion and a half people continue to live at the edge of starvation, it is clear that the bulk of the world’s population is living with more. They have not, however, simply followed in American footsteps. Of course, the British empire and its twentieth-century successor, the United States, were active in spreading their material civilization across the globe. But other societies were not empty vessels: they had their own cultures of consumption. African kingdoms that succumbed to European colonizers in the nineteenth century brought pre-existing tastes and habits to the imperial encounter.

The English by Jeremy Paxman

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Babbage, colonial rule, Corn Laws, Etonian, game design, George Santayana, global village, high-speed rail, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, Khartoum Gordon, mass immigration, Neil Kinnock, Own Your Own Home, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Right to Buy, sensible shoes, Stephen Fry, Suez canal 1869, urban sprawl, women in the workforce

The vast retail chains which will within a few decades have driven the small tradesmen out of business are there, but if you dropped into the chain of Boots chemists, it might as easily have been to change your books at the library. In the evening, maybe a visit to the cinema. There is a strong case for agreeing with Churchill that the Second World War had been his country’s ‘finest hour’. He was talking about Britain and the British Empire, but the values of that empire were the values which the English liked to think were something which they had invented. Certainly, the war and its immediate aftermath are the last time in living memory when the English had a clear and positive sense of themselves. They saw it reflected back in films like In Which We Serve, Noël Coward’s fictionalized account of the sinking of HMS Kelly.

…

One political party after another has made promises to restore the integrity and standing of the country, which have turned out to be outrageous lies. It would not matter in Italy, where they don’t believe in the state anyway and where the institutions which do matter to them – family, village, and town – remain demonstrably alive. The English put their faith in institutions, and of these, the British Empire has evaporated, the Church of England has withered away and Parliament is increasingly irrelevant. And it is not merely that the external sureties have gone, so, it seems, have internal certitudes. I once asked the author Simon Raven what he thought being English meant and he replied with a disconsolate caveat, ‘I’d always hoped it meant gentle manners, cricket, civility between the classes, lack of malice towards others, fair dealing with women, and fair dealing with enemies.

…

Huxley, the philosopher Herbert Spencer, 5 dukes, 10 earls, 26 MPs, 17 admirals, 59 generals, 200 clergymen and 600 other worthies.12 This insularity gave the English a great self-confidence, but it did nothing for their sophistication. It is hard to escape the conclusion that, deep down, the English don’t really care for foreigners. Before it was necessary for foreign visitors to reverence the British Empire, one visitor after another commented on the remarkable vanity of the English. In 1497, a Venetian noticed that ‘the English are great lovers of themselves, and of everything belonging to them; they think that there are no other men than themselves and no other world but England; and whenever they see a handsome foreigner they say “he looks like an Englishman” and that “it is a great pity that he should not be an Englishman” ’.13 In describing a visit to England by Frederick, Duke of Württemberg in 1592, a German author commented upon the fact that ‘the inhabitants … are extremely proud and overbearing … they care little for foreigners, but scoff and laugh at them’.14 Another visitor, the Dutch merchant Emmanuel van Meteren, noticed the same arrogance when he listed the qualities of the English character.

The scramble for Africa, 1876-1912 by Thomas Pakenham

active measures, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, centre right, clean water, colonial rule, Etonian, European colonialism, God and Mammon, imperial preference, Khartoum Gordon, land reform, out of africa, Scramble for Africa, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, trade route, transatlantic slave trade

The first step was to forge individual federations in Australia and South Africa, cast in the mould of the great Canadian federation already set up at Ottawa. In Australia, Canberra would soon take its place as capital of the new federation. But in South Africa everything was confused by the differences of race. For one thing, the region straddled both British Empires – white and black-and-brown. For another, two of the states, the Transvaal and the Orange Free State, were Boer republics – outside the British Empire. Already the attempt to annex and federate the Transvaal had stirred up a hornet’s nest among the Boers, as Frere and Carnarvon had discovered to their cost in the 1870s. It would be a brave Colonial Secretary who would wish to re-open that question in a hurry.

…

The seven British officials breathed a sigh of relief and prepared to return to the small house and garden where they had laagered with their horses. There were no flags, no bunting, not even a solitary Union Jack, or a note of ‘God Save the Queen’. All that would come in a month or so, when the first British battalion arrived from Natal and marched into Pretoria. The Transvaal had been formally, if provisionally, united to the British Empire. And it had proved, the British Treasury would be delighted to hear, a quiet wedding, costing almost nothing. Meanwhile a second ceremony, more like a funeral, took place at the side of Church Square, facing the government offices. A small group of Boers – townspeople and bearded takhars (from the back-veld), some with rifles slung over their shoulders – listened as one of the Executive Council read out a solemn protest signed by Thomas Burgers, the Transvaal’s mercurial state President.

…

According to the terms of his commission, he must win the agreement of the Volksraad (the Transvaal Parliament) or the majority of the white inhabitants – or at least ‘a sufficient number’. It was vital that no blood was shed. For this was the first step in the British government’s master plan for South Africa to persuade the Transvaal and the other Boer republic, the Orange Free State, to join the British Empire and federate with the two British colonies, the Cape and Natal. With his twenty-five mounted policemen, Shepstone had come and seen and conquered. The political and financial crisis in the Transvaal was real enough. The white minority were split into three factions: Boers favouring the President, Thomas Burgers; Boers favouring the Vice-President, Paul Kruger; and newly arrived British, favouring imperial intervention.

The Battle of Bretton Woods: John Maynard Keynes, Harry Dexter White, and the Making of a New World Order by Benn Steil

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, Asian financial crisis, banks create money, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Charles Lindbergh, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, deindustrialization, European colonialism, facts on the ground, fiat currency, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, global reserve currency, imperial preference, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, lateral thinking, low interest rates, margin call, means of production, Michael Milken, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, Monroe Doctrine, New Journalism, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, open economy, Paul Samuelson, Potemkin village, price mechanism, price stability, psychological pricing, public intellectual, reserve currency, road to serfdom, seigniorage, South China Sea, special drawing rights, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, The Great Moderation, the market place, trade liberalization, Works Progress Administration

.… No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory.” Churchill, when informed by the president of the horrendous casualties, responded “What a holocaust!”95 But in private he called the Japanese assault “a blessing.… Greater good fortune has never happened to the British Empire.” He had finally gotten what he had so desperately sought. America was in the war. “I went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and thankful.”96 Over in Moscow, sentiments were similar. “We sighed a deep sigh of relief,” recalled the head of the American desk of the NKVD Intelligence Directorate, Vitali Pavlov.97 Yet this was not merely cheerleading from the sidelines.

…

Churchill did not, and never would, have a sophisticated grasp of monetary issues, but he was ultimately swayed by the widely held view that a renunciation of the prewar parity would have been a “repudiation” of Britain’s solemn obligation to maintain the convertibility of the pound.48 This would, in his mind, have had serious geopolitical ramifications. “If we had not taken this action,” he said in announcing it, “the whole of the rest of the British Empire would have taken it without us, and it would have come to a gold standard, not on the basis of the pound sterling, but a gold standard of the dollar.” As it turned out, a “gold standard of the dollar” would result anyway, but with Britain bearing great economic costs in maintaining what was clearly an overvalued exchange rate from 1925 until 1931, when the country was ignominiously driven off gold again.

…

Britain could not once again be forced to bear “the dishonour and the reproaches of default” while allowing the United States to sell at its convenience to foreign markets supplied by the British, thereby cutting off British means of repayment. The government had to guard “against the present emergency being used as an opportunity for picking the eyes out of the British Empire.”110 The underlying assumption of the memo was that the United States was an ally in the war, though one that needed to be trained to behave like one. Such an assumption suffered from two key weaknesses: the United States was not yet at war with anyone, and was not about to be lectured as to what it was allowed to do in playing the role Keynes assigned to it.

Culture and Imperialism by Edward W. Said

Ayatollah Khomeini, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bretton Woods, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Zinn, Joseph Schumpeter, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, lone genius, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, public intellectual, sceptred isle, Scramble for Africa, Seymour Hersh, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, traveling salesman, W. E. B. Du Bois, work culture

Mayer’s book, which deals with the reproduction of the old order from the nineteenth to the early twentieth century, should be supplemented by a work that details the passing on of the old colonial system, and trusteeship, from the British empire to the United States, during World War Two: William Roger Louis, Imperialism at Bay: The United States and the Decolonization of the British Empire, 1941–1945 (London: Oxford University Press, 1977). 3. North-South: A Program for Survival (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1980). For a bleaker, and perhaps truer, version of the same reality, see A. Sivananden, “New Circuits of Imperialism,” Race and Class 30, No. 4 (April–June 1989), 1–19. 4.

…

But I must say that having studied and indeed lived within the modern empires, I am struck by how constantly expanding, how inexorably integrative they were. Whether in Marx, or in conservative works like those by J. R. Seeley, or in modern analyses like those by D. K. Fieldhouse and C. C. Eldridge (whose England’s Mission is a central work),3 one is made to see that the British empire integrated and fused things within it, and taken together it and other empires made the world one. Yet no individual, and certainly not I, can see or fully grasp this whole imperial world. When we read the debate between contemporary historians Patrick O’Brien4 and Davis and Huttenback (whose important book Mammon and the Pursuit of Empire tries to quantify the actual profitability of imperial activities),5 or when we look at earlier debates such as the Robinson-Gallagher controversy,6 or at the work of the dependency and world-accumulation economists André Gunder Frank and Samir Amin,7 as literary and cultural historians, we are compelled to ask what all this means for interpretations of the Victorian novel, say, or of French historiography, of Italian grand opera, of German metaphysics of the same period.

…

Novels therefore end either with the death of a hero or heroine (Julien Sorel, Emma Bovary, Bazarov, Jude the Obscure) who by virtue of overflowing energy does not fit into the orderly scheme of things, or with the protagonists’ accession to stability (usually in the form of marriage or confirmed identity, as is the case with novels of Austen, Dickens, Thackeray, and George Eliot). But, one might ask, why give so much emphasis to novels, and to England? And how can we bridge the distance separating this solitary aesthetic form from large topics and undertakings like “culture” or “imperialism”? For one thing, by the time of World War One the British empire had become unquestionably dominant, the result of a process that had started in the late sixteenth century; so powerful was the process and so definitive its result that, as Seeley and Hobson argued toward the end of the nineteenth century, it was the central fact in British history, and one that included many disparate activities.14 It is not entirely coincidental that Britain also produced and sustained a novelistic institution with no real European competitor or equivalent.

The Second World Wars: How the First Global Conflict Was Fought and Won by Victor Davis Hanson

British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, friendly fire, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, Kwajalein Atoll, means of production, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, plutocrats, RAND corporation, South China Sea, technological determinism, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Upon becoming prime minister, he did not punish the appeasers such as Chamberlain, Attlee, and to an extent Halifax, but instead, to the degree he could during the war, sought to tap—or to appear to tap—their talents. As prime minister, Churchill focused on the absolute defeat of the Axis powers and the preservation of the British Empire through the ordeal of war. He was aware of the limitations on his own power well apart from the nature of parliamentary government, arising in part from the lasting effects on the British psyche of the prior disasters of fighting in France in World War I, the eroding stature of the British Empire, and the dilemma that Britain had to fight a three-front war against the Germans, Italians, and Japanese, but without the resources of its partner-in-arms, the United States.

…

Such efforts were also couched in irony, given that Churchill, the colonialist, knew best that his Soviet and American allies would increasingly nose Britain out, as their powers grew and the Axis threat waned. Yet for all his genius, Churchill never quite came to accept that the logic of the Atlantic Charter, the United Nations, and the alliance with Joseph Stalin in various ways would shortly dismantle the British Empire. The war had unleashed enormous pent-up populist passions and transnational ideological movements, and in its aftermath there would be little likelihood of the British Empire making an argument to retain at least some of its colonies on the basis of its supposed prewar civilizing mission.51 Britain’s strategic and operational mistakes, in which Churchill played a leading role, were many.

…

But the Mediterranean world connected three continents and had remained even more crucial after the completion of the Suez Canal for European transit to Asia and the Pacific. The Axis “spine” was predicated on a north-south corridor of fascist-controlled rail lines connecting ports on the Baltic with those on the Mediterranean. Without the Mediterranean, the British Empire could not easily coordinate its global commerce and communications. It was no wonder, then, that North Africa, Italy, and Greece became early battlegrounds, as did the age-old strategic stepping-stones across the Mediterranean at Crete, Malta, and Sicily that suffered either constant bombing or invasions.

Operation Chaos: The Vietnam Deserters Who Fought the CIA, the Brainwashers, and Themselves by Matthew Sweet

Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, computer age, disinformation, Donald Trump, energy security, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, game design, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Howard Zinn, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, planetary scale, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seymour Hersh, Skype, South China Sea, Stanford prison experiment, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas Malthus, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, WikiLeaks, Yogi Berra, éminence grise

There were three large scabs on his forehead, as though he had recently recovered from walking into a door. In patrician, New England tones, he was giving a speech on one of his favorite subjects. “The British Empire,” he declared, “is our enemy. It’s the enemy of all decent people on this planet. The British monarchy is an obscene satanic force. And I do not exaggerate when I say satanic. Because Zeus, who is the author of the Roman Empire, and also author of the British Empire, is otherwise known as Satan. Her policy is what? To reduce the population of the planet. Cause mass deaths. Starvation. Killing. Destroy crops. This woman is satanic!”

…

“Stop Carl Bildt’s war against Putin.” Nobody was paying much attention, so I decided to cheer them up by accepting a free copy of their newspaper. It contained one English-language article, which argued that the financial crisis of 2008 was a manufactured catastrophe. “Call it Tonkin Gulf Syndrome,” it said. “It’s what the British Empire did to suck the U.S. into the Vietnam quagmire.” The author of the article was Lyndon LaRouche. Issues that unite all commentators across the political spectrum are rare. But for the past five decades, the European Workers Party has provided one for Sweden. Everybody from SÄPO to the Communists to the Social Democrats to the libertarian Right has a long-held and consistent view on the EAP—it is profoundly, mystifyingly weird.

…

(“Clacking busybodies in this Soviet jellyfish front … oozing out their funny little propaganda and making nuisances of themselves.”) But he required a more prominent enemy. His pick was both astute and insane. He chose Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II, then commissioned a book contending that the British Empire had never fallen but had reinvented itself as a covert body of power and influence. Dope Inc. argued that the queen controlled the world’s illegal drug markets and was fighting a secret opium war against the United States. It had been a long campaign: the British had drawn the United States into the Vietnam War and had also encouraged the development of the student anti-war movement.

An Empire of Wealth: Rise of American Economy Power 1607-2000 by John Steele Gordon

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, bank run, banking crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buttonwood tree, California gold rush, Charles Babbage, clean water, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, corporate governance, cotton gin, cuban missile crisis, disintermediation, double entry bookkeeping, failed state, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Ida Tarbell, imperial preference, industrial research laboratory, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, junk bonds, lone genius, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, margin call, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megaproject, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, new economy, New Urbanism, postindustrial economy, price mechanism, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

In the forty years between 1674 and 1714, Boston alone averaged forty ships a year, producing more than the rest of the North American colonies combined. Indeed, it was, after London, the greatest center of shipbuilding in the British Empire, with fifteen shipyards in operation by 1700. And New Englanders were not just shipbuilders, they were soon major ship owners as well. By 1700 only the ports of London and Bristol within the British Empire outstripped Boston in shipping. The carrying trade that New England developed extended throughout the North Atlantic, the Mediterranean, the Caribbean, and beyond. And it carried far more than just New England products and imports.

…

Indeed, one has to look to the apogee of the Roman Empire, almost two millennia ago, to find even a remotely comparable situation. Rome conquered the known world by force of arms. Its power arose from its military machine, epitomized by the legions. And every Great Power since has exercised formal political hegemony over alien peoples to advance its own interests. A century ago, the British Empire covered a quarter of the globe’s land area, while a third of the world’s people were subjects of King Edward VII. But only a small minority of those people spoke English or regarded themselves as British. The United States, however, has always been, at most, a reluctant imperialist. In the twentieth century it was the only Great Power that did not add to its sovereign territory as a result of war, although it was also the only one to emerge stronger than ever from each of that century’s three Great Power conflicts.

…

English has ever increasingly become the world’s unifying language, as Latin was Europe’s for centuries. Sixty percent of the students who are studying foreign languages in the world today are studying English, which is increasingly a required subject in school systems everywhere. Partly this is because, thanks to the British Empire, so many countries use English as a first or second language, but equally it is because the United States dominates the world in communications and entertainment. The Internet, the most powerful means of communication ever devised, is largely an American invention, and English is the language of more than 80 percent of the four billion Web sites now in existence.

Sugar: A Bittersweet History by Elizabeth Abbott

addicted to oil, agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, company town, cotton gin, death from overwork, flex fuel, Ford Model T, land tenure, liberation theology, Mason jar, Ralph Waldo Emerson, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, trade liberalization, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working poor

Also ye Trade Winds and ye several Tracts made by the Galeons and Flota from place to place. From Atlas Minor, London, 1736, by influential Tory cartographer Herman Moll. This map, his masterpiece, portrayed the West Indies as a region with enormous commercial potential at the core of the developing British Empire. The map also assisted British buccaneers who preyed on Spanish shipping. In Barbados, planter William Dickson recalled, the indentured servants were “stinted in their diet, and otherwise ill treated.”49 In a petition to Parliament in 1659, begging for relief, white servants indentured in Barbados described lives spent “grinding at the mills and attending the furnaces, or digging in this scorching island; having nothing to feed on (notwithstanding their hard labour) but potato roots, nor to drink, but water with such roots washed in it … being bought and sold still from one planter to another, or attached as horses and beasts for the debts of their masters, being whipt at the whipping post (as rogues) for their masters’ pleasure, and sleeping in sties worse than hogs in England.”

…

Chapter 5 Sugar Stirs the Universe THE SUGAR INDUSTRY AT WORK IN EUROPE Across the Atlantic, at the other end of the bridge that carried the Old World to the New, the metropolises were bound up in their colonies’ fortunes. Britain in particular had its sugar colonies and its people’s voracious sweet tooth to thank for its expanding empire. Together with the tea and coffee it sweetened, sugar was one of the most important founding blocks of the British Empire. The eighteenth-century Abbé Raynal went further, exclaiming that the “scorned [sugar] islands … double perhaps triple the activity of the whole of Europe. They can be regarded as the principal cause of the rapid movement which stirs the Universe.”280 The slave-sugar complex was all-pervasive.

…

In his passionate and groundbreaking Capitalism and Slavery, Trinidadian historian Eric Williams argued that the triangular trade contributed so heavily to British industrial development that its profits “fertilized the entire productive system of the country” and “made an enormous contribution to Britain’s industrial development.”282 By the eighteenth century, the West Indies had become the hub of the British Empire. Sugar slaves had a direct connection to English workers; Williams cites one claim that calculates the combined needs of one planter or manager and ten of his black workers, including their foodstuffs, clothing and tools, as providing jobs for four Englishmen. Other sources provide more extravagant ratios: that one white West Indian created £10 net profit for England, 2,000 percent more than an Englishman; that every sugar worker outproduced every English worker in a ratio of 130 to 1; and that the combined worth of the sugar plantations was anywhere from £50 million to £70 million.283 To support his hypothesis, Williams noted Pitt the Younger’s 1798 estimate that the annual income from the West Indian plantations was £4 million, and that all other sources together totaled only £1 million.

War of Shadows: Codebreakers, Spies, and the Secret Struggle to Drive the Nazis From the Middle East by Gershom Gorenberg

anti-communist, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, colonial rule, computer age, defense in depth, European colonialism, illegal immigration, Internet Archive, plutocrats, Scientific racism, undersea cable

Daniel, to my great sorrow, is no longer here to read this. Still I thank him for sending me on the journey. CURTAIN RISING: LAST TRAIN FROM CAIRO Early Summer, 1942. Cairo. THE WORLD AS everyone knew it was coming to an end. In the vast desert west of the Nile, the Eighth Army of the British Empire was in full flight from the German and Italian forces commanded by Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. SMOKE ROSE FROM the grand British embassy facing the Nile. Smoke rose a few hundred yards down the river from the mansions of Garden City that war had transformed into British General Headquarters Middle East.

…

The embassy gave them passports, visas, and tickets, and they boarded yet another train—this time across the southern rim of Europe, through Yugoslavia and Italy to France.38 Poland was doomed, but its secret weapon had escaped with his life. 2 THE SEDUCTIVE CURVES OF THE DUNES September 1939. London–Cairo–Gilf Kebir. THE TROOPSHIP HAD been a luxury liner till war broke out. Ralph Bagnold had been a civilian. Now Bagnold was back in the Royal Engineers uniform he’d worn nearly half his life, with the major’s insignia on his shoulders, heading out yet again for a corner of the British Empire. By the imperturbable unreason of the military, though, his destination was East Africa, rather than Egypt.1 Bagnold knew the empty stretches of Egypt as well as any man alive, with the possible competition of Laszlo Almasy, the ambiguous Hungarian explorer. Bagnold had followed his father into the Royal Engineers.

…

The real native language of the royal clan was mutual resentment, since all the princes thought that “at one point or the other they or their fathers should have reigned” if the succession had proceeded properly.7 WHILE PRINCES BICKERED, a different succession took place: in 1933 a new high commissioner, Sir Miles Lampson, moved into the British Residency. Lampson was a career diplomat, fresh from seven years in Peking, and a recent widower. The word “imperious” could have been invented for Lampson, and not just because of his dedication to the British Empire. He stood six feet, five inches and weighed 250 pounds. Two motorcycle outriders, blasting their whistles, escorted his car on Cairo streets. He did not carry money, or his own cigarette case or fly whisk; lesser beings handled those things. He had a secretary whose job was to take down the diary entries that he dictated to record his meetings, dinner guests, and the precise number of birds he and his guests had killed in his frequent excursions to the British Residency’s private hunting grounds.8 In Cairo, Lampson met a high-society visitor, Jacqueline Castellani, daughter of a famous Italian physician and his English wife.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

But British colonies were not administrative outposts, they were British soil, and their residents were British. Until 1948, nationals of British colonies were called ‘British subjects’, meaning they had de facto citizenship of the United Kingdom and the British Empire. Until 1949, everyone born or naturalised in the United Kingdom or the British empire, including independent dominions such as Canada and Australia, enjoyed that right. But British history is still confined to the isles, and the lack of acknowledgement of the rights of offshore British subjects became eroded over the years. This culminated in the 2018 Windrush scandal, where Caribbean British subjects with the right to British nationality were treated like illegal migrants, persecuted, harassed and deported.

…

In the 2011 film, English pensioners who decamp to India for relief from their financially pressured conditions back home end up rescuing the hapless Indian protagonist, his hotel, and sorting out his love life. It is essentially a modern-day story of colonialism, one that is paternalistic and self-deprecating, while at the same time servicing the warm nostalgia for British empire. To this genre was added the 2017 TV series The Good Karma Hospital, which finds a junior doctor beginning a new chapter of her life in southern India following heartbreak in the United Kingdom. Both titles poke fun at the setting as a sort of passive lower life form location in which the protagonist can go through their journey.

…

In 2017, Oxford moral and pastoral theology professor Nigel Biggar created a useful illustration of how this tool works. He said that the British should have ‘pride’ in their past and, that if they were taught to believe what the ‘strident anticolonialists’ said, that could lead to a feeling of guilt which makes the public ‘vulnerable to wilful manipulation’. The British empire, according to Biggar, was ‘morally mixed’; he asserted that ‘just like that of any nation state, pride can temper shame’. He continued: ‘Pride at the Royal Navy’s century-long suppression of the Atlantic slave trade, for example, will not be entirely obscured by shame at the slaughter of innocents at Amritsar in 1919.

The Human Tide: How Population Shaped the Modern World by Paul Morland

active measures, agricultural Revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, British Empire, clean water, Corn Laws, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Donald Trump, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, global pandemic, Great Leap Forward, mass immigration, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mohammed Bouazizi, Nelson Mandela, open immigration, Ponzi scheme, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, sceptred isle, stakhanovite, Thomas Malthus, transatlantic slave trade, women in the workforce, working-age population

Back in the eighteenth century there were not a billion people on the face of the earth. Today there are more than 7 billion. Just as the politics, the economics and the sociology of societies today are radically different from those of the past, so is the demography. This process, which started in the British Isles and among sister peoples in the United States and the British Empire around the year 1800, spread first across Europe and then to the whole world. Much of Africa has not yet completed the transition, but most of it is well on its way. Outside sub-Saharan Africa there are barely half a dozen countries today where women have on average more than four children, the global norm as recently as the 1970s.

…

Although England had led the way in population growth, Scotland was in close step. Wales was often included in the English data, but Ireland was different. Whilst aware of these differences and similarities, it is possible to talk of a population explosion which was not just English but which encompassed Britain as a whole. This was important in terms of the British Empire, because both Scotland and Ireland played a disproportionate role in providing immigrants for the lands beyond Europe. Britain’s rise to global pre-eminence was based not just on the population explosion at home but also on its people coming to dominate vast continental spaces abroad. If, as historian Timothy Snyder has argued, speaking of late 1940 and early 1941, the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany had remade Europe ‘but Great Britain had made the world’, they did so by exporting people.28 It is worth distinguishing between three different areas in which the British had an impact.

…

Equally, without mass settlement these lands could not have become the great granaries and providers of meat and other essentials to a global trading system of which a newly industrialised Britain was the heart. Just as Ireland was the exception within an exception in the British Isles, so South Africa was the exception that proved the rule within the British Empire. Whereas most of Africa was judged unsuitable for European settlement, its climate unhealthy, malaria rampant and transport to its interior untenable, South Africa was seen by the British as a land of emigration thanks to its more amenable climate. People were also drawn by the lure of diamonds and gold.

On the Grand Trunk Road: A Journey Into South Asia by Steve Coll

affirmative action, airport security, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, back-to-the-land, Berlin Wall, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, global village, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, market bubble, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, New Urbanism, Ponzi scheme, Ronald Reagan, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, yellow journalism

Vehicles lay strewn in mangled heaps. One of the smashed cars bore a windshield sticker that said, “Unite to Fight Terrorism.” The Sri Lankan government promoted Wijeratne posthumously to the rank of general and put on a state funeral at Independence Square, a Colombo memorial to the end of the British Empire in South Asia. Army officers drew the minister’s body through the streets on a gun carriage. Sri Lankan honor guards surrounded the square. Buddhist priests eulogized Wijeratne’s accomplishments in service to the state. Soldiers fired a twenty-one-gun salute. One day after the funeral, the weekly security briefing went on as usual in the appointed Colombo conference room.

…

In Mahmudabad a series of bejeweled Muslim rajas administered great tracts of land from a gold and silver throne. They financed idealistic politicians such as the Mahatma Gandhi and Pakistan founder Mohammed Ali Jinnah. They doled out gifts to their subjects, paid stipends to renowned poets and intellectuals, plotted against the British Empire, and finally witnessed the birth of independent India and Pakistan in a bloody spasm of post-Partition riots. Abedi and nearly all of BCCI’s senior executives migrated as young adults from what is now India to newly independent Islamic Pakistan in 1947 and 1948, when the kingdoms that the British had employed to rule South Asia fell.

…

In 1922, when Abedi was born, Mahmudabad was the second or third largest princely state in northern India, encompassing 530 villages and thousands of hamlets and generating half a million pounds sterling in annual income. Its line of Shia Muslim rajas dated to the seventeenth century and commanded respect from the British colonial officers they served, as well as from Indians struggling for liberation from the British Empire. The Mahmudabad rajas lived in exorbitant luxury and owned several palaces in the countryside and the city of Lucknow. But they were also deeply involved in anticolonial politics and Shiite religious movements. As far back as the mid-nineteenth century, Abedi’s family served the rajas as revenue officers, administrators, and private secretaries.

The First American: The Life and Times of Benjamin Franklin by H. W. Brands

always be closing, British Empire, business intelligence, colonial rule, complexity theory, Copley Medal, disinformation, experimental subject, Fellow of the Royal Society, Hacker News, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, music of the spheres, Republic of Letters, scientific mainstream, South Sea Bubble, Thomas Malthus, trade route

There are supposed to be now upwards of one million English souls in North America (though ’tis thought scarce 80,000 have been brought over sea), and yet there is perhaps not the one fewer in Britain, but rather many more, on account of the employment the colonies afford to manufacturers at home. This million doubling, suppose but once in 25 years, will in another century be more than the people of England, and the greatest number of Englishmen will be on this side the water. What an accession of power to the British Empire by sea as well as land! What increase of trade and navigation! That the future of America, and with it of the British empire, depended on the availability of land was what made the contest with France so important. The defeat incurred by George Washington in 1754 inspired the British government to action; early the following year it dispatched an expedition of regular army officers and men to America to smite the French intruders and regain Britain’s rightful hold on the Ohio.

…

The mask concealed not mortification but anger. Who did these people—this bought solicitor, these smug lords, the corrupt ministers that made the proceeding possible—who did they think they were? Who did they think he was? It was the question of the hour; generalized, it was the question on which hung the fate of the British empire. Who were these Americans? To the British they were Britons, albeit of a turbulent sort. The Americans might live across the ocean, but the colonies they inhabited had been planted by Britain and were defended by Britain; therefore to the government of Britain—preeminently, to the British Parliament—the Americans must submit, like any other Britons.

…

In doing so he did not deny his American birth, for he conceived Americans to be as fully Britons as the English, Scots, and Welsh. He delineated for all who would listen the glorious future of Britain in North America, a future joining American energy to the English tradition of self-government. As a measure of his faith in the future of America within the British empire, he employed his influence to help his son William win appointment as royal governor of New Jersey. But then things began to go wrong. A foolish ministry ignored that tradition of self-government and started treating the Americans as subjects—not subjects simply of King George but of Parliament.

The Splendid and the Vile: A Saga of Churchill, Family, and Defiance During the Blitz by Erik Larson

Albert Einstein, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Cornelius Vanderbilt, plutocrats, traveling salesman, union organizing, Works Progress Administration

Congress had previously codified this antipathy with the passage, starting in 1935, of a series of laws, the Neutrality Acts, that closely regulated the export of weapons and munitions and barred their transport on American ships to any nation at war. Americans were sympathetic toward England, but now came questions as to just how stable the British Empire was, having thrown out its government on the same day that Hitler invaded Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. On Saturday morning, May 11, President Roosevelt convened a cabinet meeting at the White House at which England’s new prime minister became a topic of discussion. The central question was whether he could possibly prevail in this newly expanded war.

…

He reminded his audience that Britain had a navy. “Some people seem to forget that,” he said. He made no attempt, however, to skirt the true meaning of the French collapse. The “Battle of France” was over, he said, adding, “I expect that the Battle of Britain is about to begin.” At stake was not only the British Empire but all of Christian civilization. “The whole fury and might of the enemy must very soon be turned on us. Hitler knows that he will have to break us in this island or lose the war.” He marched toward his climax: “If we can stand up to him, all Europe may be free, and the life of the world may move forward into broad, sunlit uplands; but if we fail then the whole world, including the United States, and all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister, and perhaps more prolonged, by the lights of a perverted science.”

…

On one occasion, crews from the nearby base at Watton “gave us the most superb aerial beating up that anyone could possibly conceive,” Mary wrote in her diary. “A flight of Blenheims appeared & one after another swooped down to within 25 or 30 feet of the ground. We all nearly passed out with excitement.” Every day these same pilots took part in life-or-death sorties that, as far as Churchill was concerned, would determine the fate of the British Empire. Civilians watched air battles unfold from the safety of their gardens or while strolling village streets and picnicking in bucolic meadows, as circular contrails filled the sky above. At dusk these caught the last of the day’s sunlight and turned a luminescent amber; at dawn, they became mother-of-pearl spirals.

Butler to the World: How Britain Became the Servant of Tycoons, Tax Dodgers, Kleptocrats and Criminals by Oliver Bullough

Alan Greenspan, Bellingcat, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, capital controls, coronavirus, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, Downton Abbey, Etonian, financial deregulation, financial innovation, full employment, Global Witness, John Bercow, Julian Assange, light touch regulation, lockdown, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, offshore financial centre, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, surveillance capitalism, the High Line, WikiLeaks

That’s how the empire became so very large. At its height, the British empire controlled almost a quarter of the world’s land mass, and a similar proportion of its people. The ‘white dominions’ of Australia, New Zealand and Canada, with their substantial settler populations, were self-governing but deeply loyal to the mother country and ready to help out when needed. India, ruled dictatorially, was the single most significant colony because it provided an army and a huge market for British goods. Smaller colonies were spread across every continent: Kenya, Guyana, Malaya, Cyprus. Somewhere in the British empire it was always teatime. And even this understates the extent of Britain’s dominance of the globe.

…

From the start, the soldiers in the canal zone were under no illusions that anyone at home much cared about them. The newsletters contain very little discussion of politics – whether the British should have been in Egypt in the first place – but the constant misery of the low-level insurgency is sign enough that the situation was unsatisfactory. The British empire in its pomp would not have tolerated such indignities as his articles describe – constant theft from the stores, Egyptian civilians throwing bricks at patrols as they passed by, collapsing infrastructure. The end of the empire was coming, and the soldiers’ job was to try and make that end as dignified as possible.

…

The merchant banks, the overseas banks, the specialised finance houses and the larger stockbrokers are so swamped with business that a bright newcomer may well get his hand onto real decision-making at a very early age,’ Fry wrote. ‘Enterprise and inventiveness flourish.’ What happened between the Suez Crisis and the end of the 1960s was a rebirth: the City of London was back in the game. If Westminster was the head of the British empire, and the Royal Navy its muscles, the City was its heart, pumping money out into financial arteries that stretched to every continent and every city on earth. This blood supply – the sterling system – was, more than anything, what held the empire together. Pounds carried the oxygen of capital to any business that needed it.

The Ascent of Money: A Financial History of the World by Niall Ferguson

Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, An Inconvenient Truth, Andrei Shleifer, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, asset-backed security, Atahualpa, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Bear Stearns, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, Black Swan, Black-Scholes formula, Bonfire of the Vanities, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, commoditize, Corn Laws, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deglobalization, diversification, diversified portfolio, double entry bookkeeping, Edmond Halley, Edward Glaeser, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, equity risk premium, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, Future Shock, German hyperinflation, Greenspan put, Herman Kahn, Hernando de Soto, high net worth, hindsight bias, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, information asymmetry, interest rate swap, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, iterative process, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Meriwether, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, labour mobility, Landlord’s Game, liberal capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, market bubble, market fundamentalism, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Myron Scholes, Naomi Klein, National Debt Clock, negative equity, Nelson Mandela, Nick Bostrom, Nick Leeson, Northern Rock, Parag Khanna, pension reform, price anchoring, price stability, principal–agent problem, probability theory / Blaise Pascal / Pierre de Fermat, profit motive, quantitative hedge fund, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, risk free rate, Robert Shiller, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, short selling, Silicon Valley, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, stocks for the long run, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, tail risk, technology bubble, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, too big to fail, transaction costs, two and twenty, undersea cable, value at risk, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, Yom Kippur War

housing policies 251-3 inflation 108 institutional investors and 196-8 and insurance 4 mortgage interest relief 252 national debt 80 pensions see welfare state below poverty in 13 savings glut 293 Spanish Empire and 26 stock market 125 and sub-prime mortgages 8 voting rights 234 welfare state 199 and First World War 101-2 see also British Empire; English-speaking countries; Scotland British Empire: and bond market 101 control of colonies 294-6 corporate finance as foundation of 3 and investment 98-9 as narco-state 290 nationalist and independence movements 295 see also Britain broad money 62 brokers 153-4 Bronowski, Jacob 2 bronze 24 Bruegel, Pieter the Elder 70 Bruges 47 Bubble Act 156 bubbles: asset-price 163 five stages of 8; displacement 143-4 history of 121-2 international pressures and 167 Kaffir (gold mine) 297 Mississippi 126-7 monetary policy and 166-7 property price 233 reflexivity of 316 South Sea 154 super 342 technology (dot.com) 6 see also financial crises Büchi, Hernán 216 Buckingham, Dukes of 236-40 Buenos Aires 98 Buffett, Warren 228 building societies 247. see also mutual associations Bulgaria 101 bulls (stock market) 121 Bunn, Matthew 223 bureaucracy 275 burial societies 184 Bush, President George W. 117-18.

…

The evolution of credit and debt was as important as any technological innovation in the rise of civilization, from ancient Babylon to present-day Hong Kong. Banks and the bond market provided the material basis for the splendours of the Italian Renaissance. Corporate finance was the indispensable foundation of both the Dutch and British empires, just as the triumph of the United States in the twentieth century was inseparable from advances in insurance, mortgage finance and consumer credit. Perhaps, too, it will be a financial crisis that signals the twilight of American global primacy. Behind each great historical phenomenon there lies a financial secret, and this book sets out to illuminate the most important of these.

…

This was not an especially well-timed investment. April that year saw the first victory at Montenotte of a French army led by a young Corsican commander named Napoleon Bonaparte. He won again at Lodi in May. For the next two decades, this man would pose a greater threat to the security and financial stability of the British Empire, not to mention the peace of Europe, than all the Habsburgs and Bourbons put together. Defeating him would lead to the rise of yet another mountain of debt. And as the mountain rose, so the price of individual consols declined - by as much as 30 per cent at the lowest point in Britain’s fortunes.

The Rough Guide to Toronto by Helen Lovekin, Phil Lee

airport security, British Empire, car-free, glass ceiling, global village, Haight Ashbury, haute couture, haute cuisine, indoor plumbing, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, Kickstarter, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, place-making, urban renewal, urban sprawl

By the 1860s the distillery was producing two and a half million gallons of whisky from a quarter of a million bushels of grain. In 1869, a fire destroyed most of the original works, but its replacement – a series of tidy brown–brick buildings – survives to this day, on Mill Street, just east of the foot of Parliament Street. The distillery, which at one time was the largest in the British Empire, closed in 1990, but the old works remains the best-preserved Victorian industrial complex in Canada. The complex has recently been revamped as the Distillery District (see p.61), which now holds, amongst much else, art galleries, independent designers, bakeries, shops, a microbrewery and no less than three performance venues – all without a multinational chain in sight, for which blessing the developers are due (at least) three hearty cheers

…

Hour-long tours of the Air Canada Centre ($12) are available, and include a visit to a dressing room and the Maple Leafs Memories and Dreams Suite, which looks at the team’s history. The Royal York hotel Directly opposite the west end of the railway station, the Royal York hotel, 100 Front St W, was the largest and tallest building in the British Empire when it opened in 1929. The architects, Montreal’s Ross and Macdonald, opted for the Beaux Arts style, so as to match the hotel with Union Station, but in lieu of the formal symmetries of its neighbour, the Royal York has a cascading, irregular facade with stylistic flourishes reminiscent of a French chateau.

…

Moving on, Building No.6 started out as a magazine but ended up as a storehouse. Its ground floor now holds a modest display on the role of black soldiers and settlers in the early history of Ontario. The Upper Canada legislature actually banned the importation of slaves in 1793, forty years before it was abolished right across the British Empire. Up above, an archeological section displays the various bits and pieces unearthed at the fort – buckles, brooches, plates, clay pipes, tunic buttons and so forth. The most interesting piece is a “Sacred to Love” stick pin, an example of the mourning jewellery that was popular amongst Victorians.

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonialism and Resistance, 1917–2017 by Rashid Khalidi

Bernie Sanders, British Empire, colonial rule, disinformation, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Kickstarter, mass immigration, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, Suez crisis 1956, WikiLeaks

This falling-out between erstwhile allies (to help them fight the Palestinians in the late 1930s, Britain had armed and trained the Jewish settlers it allowed to enter the country) encouraged the outlandish idea that the Zionist movement was itself anticolonial. There was no escaping the fact that Zionism initially had clung tightly to the British Empire for support, and had only successfully implanted itself in Palestine thanks to the unceasing efforts of British imperialism. It could not be otherwise, for as Jabotinsky stressed, only the British had the means to wage the colonial war that was necessary to suppress Palestinian resistance to the takeover of their country.

…

The British government’s intentions and objectives at the time have been amply analyzed over the past century.22 Among its many motivations were both a romantic, religiously derived philo-Semitic desire to “return” the Hebrews to the land of the Bible, and an anti-Semitic wish to reduce Jewish immigration to Britain, linked to a conviction that “world Jewry” had the power to keep newly revolutionary Russia fighting in the war and bring the United States into it. Beyond those impulses, Britain primarily desired control over Palestine for geopolitical strategic reasons that antedated World War I and that had only been reinforced by wartime events.23 However important the other motivations may have been, this was the central one: the British Empire was never motivated by altruism. Britain’s strategic interests were perfectly served by its sponsorship of the Zionist project, just as they were served by a range of regional wartime undertakings. Among them were commitments made in 1915 and 1916 promising independence to the Arabs led by Sharif Husayn of Mecca (enshrined in the Husayn-McMahon correspondence) and a secret 1916 deal with France—the Sykes-Picot Agreement—in which the two powers agreed to a colonial partition of the eastern Arab countries.24 More important than British motivations for issuing the Balfour Declaration is what this undertaking meant in practice for the crystal-clear aims of the Zionist movement—sovereignty and complete control of Palestine.

…

Nor did it.25 For Zionists, their enterprise was now backed by an indispensable “iron wall” of British military might, in the words of Ze’ev Jabotinksy. For the inhabitants of Palestine, whose future it ultimately decided, Balfour’s careful, calibrated prose was in effect a gun pointed directly at their heads, a declaration of war by the British Empire on the indigenous population. The majority now faced the prospect of being outnumbered by unlimited Jewish immigration to a country then almost completely Arab in its population and culture. Whether intended this way or not, the declaration launched a full-blown colonial conflict, a century-long assault on the Palestinian people, aimed at fostering an exclusivist “national home” at their expense

In Pursuit of Privilege: A History of New York City's Upper Class and the Making of a Metropolis by Clifton Hood

affirmative action, British Empire, Carl Icahn, coherent worldview, Cornelius Vanderbilt, David Brooks, death of newspapers, deindustrialization, family office, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, Google Earth, jitney, mass immigration, new economy, New Urbanism, P = NP, plutocrats, Ray Oldenburg, ride hailing / ride sharing, Scientific racism, selection bias, Steven Levy, streetcar suburb, The Great Good Place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, tontine, trade route, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, urban planning, We are the 99%, white flight

New York was merely a bargaining chip for these great powers, and the account of the treaty signing that ran in the London Gazette did not mention the restoration of New York City.33 New York continued to benefit by way of its “Dutch connection” with places in the West Indies like Curaçao, where the Dutch trade remained important, but England was a rising power that was beginning to exercise economic and political authority abroad and to organize an empire, and the city prospered as part of the British Empire. Its merchants thus became avid participants in a cultural and economic system called “gentlemanly capitalism.”34 British historians such as P. J. Cain and A. G. Hopkins attribute the origins of the British Empire to the effects of this gentlemanly capitalism, which they identify as a set of cultural, political, and economic forces that was propelled by a group of merchants and financiers who used overseas trade as a means to acquire the wealth, prestige, and connections they needed to reach a higher social level.

…

I follow Bourdieu in viewing cultural tastes and social measures as tools that people wield in their efforts to possess these goods, with the definition and boundary marking of high-status categories (such as “upper class”) among the most precious stakes up for grabs.9 We start in the 1750s, when New York City was a lesser seaport and provincial capital in the British Empire and when its upper class consisted of royal officials, merchants, planters, and leading professionals. 1 “THE BEST MART ON THE CONTINENT” The 1750s and 1760s AN APPRAISAL OF NEW YORK CITY IN 1753 In 1753 William Livingston wrote a pamphlet entitled A Brief Consideration of New York that proclaimed the superiority of his native province and its major city over other colonies.

…

The incompatibility of gentility with overly aggressive moneymaking and the privileged status of royal administrators relegated merchants to a secondary position in that upper class. In the end, what did not change in the 1750s and 1760s proved more important than what did change. Despite New York’s newfound centrality in the British Empire, the Seven Years’ War represents a false dawn in the history of the city. The war did not expand New York’s economy or its population, alter the social composition or the status hierarchy of the upper class, or stimulate new ways of acting and thinking on the part of its merchants. Those transformations would begin later, during the nation-building efforts of the 1780s and 1790s, and would accelerate with the economic growth of the nineteenth century.

A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle for the Mastery of the Middle East by James Barr

bank run, British Empire, facts on the ground, friendly fire, illegal immigration, Khartoum Gordon, operational security, Scramble for Africa, short selling, éminence grise

After the sultan’s government went bankrupt in 1876 the British government abandoned a fifty-year-old policy of supporting the Ottomans’ integrity and independence as a bulwark against other powers’ ambitions. In 1878 Britain seized Cyprus and, four years later, Egypt and the Suez Canal in order to secure the route to India. As the canal turned into the major artery for Britain’s growing eastern commerce, Egypt became the fulcrum of the British Empire. While British investors took what was left of their money and ran, following the Ottoman default, the French moved in to replace them. The French already enjoyed significant prestige within the Ottoman Empire through their religious institutions, which ran dozens of schools that were better and more popular than their Ottoman equivalents.

…

Kitchener, the minister for war, whose face and finger were now emblazoned on recruiting posters on streets across the land, had previously run Egypt. Lloyd George, the quicksilver minister for munitions, was violently anti-Turkish and liked the idea of further imperial expansion at the Ottomans’ expense. Balfour, the former Conservative prime minister, now at the Admiralty, felt the British Empire had reached its limits, and did not. ‘I feel we ought to settle with France as soon as possible, and get a definite understanding about Syria,’ Sykes proposed.¹⁷ ‘What sort of an arrangement would you like to have with the French?’ asked Balfour. ‘I should like to retain for ourselves such country south of Haifa,’ replied Sykes, gesturing to his map.

…

He began to argue that, by supporting the creation of a Jewish colony immediately east of Suez, Britain could deny that territory to rival foreign powers who might then threaten its control of the Suez Canal. ‘We cannot proceed on the supposition that our present happy relations with France will continue always,’ he warned his colleagues. ‘A common frontier with a European neighbour in the Lebanon is a far smaller risk to the vital interests of the British Empire than a common frontier at El Arish.’ Samuel also argued that such a move would generate goodwill for Britain within the Jewish diaspora. Large numbers of Jews, who faced repression in Eastern Europe and especially in Russia, had migrated westwards in the years before the war. Yet, although the Jewish population in Britain quadrupled in the thirty years before the war, many Jews regarded their new home as tainted by its alliance with the oppressive Tsarist regime from which many of them had fled.

Horizons: The Global Origins of Modern Science by James Poskett

Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, butterfly effect, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, clockwork universe, colonial rule, Columbian Exchange, complexity theory, coronavirus, COVID-19, CRISPR, Dmitri Mendeleev, Donald Trump, double helix, Drosophila, Edmond Halley, Ernest Rutherford, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, German hyperinflation, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, laissez-faire capitalism, lone genius, mass immigration, megacity, Mount Scopus, On the Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres, personalized medicine, polynesian navigation, Republic of Letters, Silicon Valley, social distancing, South Sea Bubble, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, Virgin Galactic

Roxburgh ensured that the Indian artists carefully separated out the sexual organs of the plants, as well as the seeds, as these were crucial for identifying different species under the Linnaean system.34 In the Calcutta Botanical Garden we can ultimately see Enlightenment science in microcosm. It was an institution, established by the expanding British Empire, for the purpose of economic gain. And it was built on land that the British had seized, by military force, from local Indian rulers. At the same time, the Calcutta Botanical Garden was also a place in which a diversity of cultures and scientific traditions came together, from Scottish surgeons to Indian artists.

…

By 1900, Calcutta had been transformed into an industrial metropolis, with steamships going up and down the Hooghly River and jute mills supplying the world market for cloth and cordage. As elsewhere, electricity was widely considered a marker of industrial modernity. Telegraph lines criss-crossed the country, connecting India to the wider British Empire, whilst various private companies began manufacturing and installing electric lights in Indian cities. In fact, Bose himself advised on the introduction of the first electric streetlights in Calcutta in 1891.63 Despite the growth of science and industry under colonial rule, opportunities for Indians to conduct original research were still relatively rare.

…

Born into a poor Hindu family in Bengal, Saha had only recently been admitted to the prestigious Government Collegiate School in Dacca, in modern-day Bangladesh. He was getting on well, studying mathematics, physics, and chemistry. But in the summer of 1905, Saha took part in a protest which would define the rest of his life. At the time, Bengal was still under colonial rule, part of the British Empire in India. Since the late nineteenth century, many Indians had campaigned against the injustices of empire. However, the fight against colonialism was about to enter a new stage. In July 1905, the Viceroy of India announced his intention to divide Bengal into two new provinces: Hindu-majority West Bengal, and Muslim-majority East Bengal.

Racing With Death by Beau Riffenburgh

British Empire, David Attenborough, Ernest Rutherford, Fellow of the Royal Society, scientific management

They did buck up temporarily on the morning of 17 October when they reached Cape Bernacchi, a low, rocky promontory dominated by pure white crystalline marble. Here, with a flag that motor-car driver Bernard Day had made out of a jumble of fabrics, they took possession of Victoria Land for the British Empire. Almost a week later, they were still crawling at a snail’s pace over slowly decaying sea ice while the Sound gradually broke up to their one side and the mountains loomed over them on their other. Frustrated, Mawson proposed that they forsake the Magnetic Pole altogether and concentrate on ‘what I had understood was to be the work of the expedition provided the Mag Pole were not reasonably obtainable … the coast geographic and magnetic survey with detailed geological reconnaissances at picked spots, the whole allowing us to return to Dry Valley.’

…

Mawson determined that if they waited where they were for twenty-four hours, the Pole would likely come to them, but rather than do this, they decided to push on thirteen miles to where he calculated the mean position to lie. The next day, they continued until lunch, after which, leaving behind all gear other than a flag and a camera, they trudged the final five miles to Mawson’s ‘mean position’ at 72°15'S, 155°16'E. There, at a height of 7,260 feet, they hoisted the flag made by Day, claimed the area for the British Empire, and gave three cheers. David pulled a string attached to the camera to snap a picture of them. This done, there was no reason to linger, so they did an immediate about-turn. Their major task now was to reach the coast in time for the ship to collect them. Only a week before, 1,114 statute miles farther south, Shackleton, Wild, Marshall, and Adams had held a similar ceremony.

…

Speaking to the Australasian Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), he explained how multiple bases spread along the Antarctic coast would engage in meteorological, magnetic, geological, and geographical work to open up the mysteries of what he called ‘the Australian Quadrant’ of the Antarctic. In addition, he claimed other benefits would accrue: a ship-based oceanographic programme, the expansion of Australian whaling and sealing, the establishment of meteorological stations for weather forecasting, and the verification of Australia as a key component of the British Empire. Within days, with the backing of David Orme Masson, professor of chemistry at the University of Melbourne and president of the AAAS, Mawson was voted £1,000, one-third of the Association’s liquid assets. In addition, a special committee for the expedition was organised to arrange the details of the scientific work and officially to appoint expedition members.

Why Orwell Matters by Christopher Hitchens

anti-communist, British Empire, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Etonian, hiring and firing, land reform, Louis Pasteur, Mahatma Gandhi, military-industrial complex, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, nuclear winter, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes

That this is a strong prefiguration of the mentality of Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four will be obvious; that it is no exaggeration is confirmed by the memoir of Orwell’s friend and contemporary Christopher Hollis, who visited him in Burma in 1925 and discovered him mouthing the platitudes of law-and-order: ‘He was at pains to be the imperial policeman, explaining that these theories of punishment and no beating were all very well at public schools, but that they did not work with the Burmese... ’ Four years later, in the pages of Le Progrès Civique in Paris, a certain ‘E. A. Blair’ contributed an essay in French entitled ‘Comment on exploite un peuple: L’Empire britannique en Birmanie’ (‘How a Nation is Exploited: The British Empire in Burm’). The article could justly be described as workman-like; it commences with a careful account of the country’s topography and demography and proceeds to a meticulous examination of the way the colonial power fleeces the Burmese of their natural resources and the fruits of their labour.

…

., it is worth trying to translate the most sensational Russian event of the past two years, the Trotskyist trials, into English terms. Make the necessary adjustments, let Left be Right and Right be Left, and you get something like this:Mr. Winston Churchill, now in exile in Portugal, is plotting to overthrow the British Empire and establish Communism in England. By the use of unlimited Russian money he has succeeded in building up a huge Churchillite organisation which includes members of Parliament, factory managers, Roman Catholic bishops and practically the whole of the Primrose League. Almost every day some dastardly act of sabotage is laid bare — sometimes a plot to blow up the House of Lords, sometimes an outbreak of foot and mouth disease in the Royal racing-stables.

…

I know people who automatically switch off the radio as soon as any American news comes on, and the most banal English film will always get middle-class support because ‘it’s such a relief to get away from those American voices.’ Americans are supposed to be boastful, bad-mannered and worshippers of money, and are also suspected of plotting to inherit the British Empire. (Orwell forgot that last bit when he muttered, shortly after the war, about the new American empire that was ‘advancing behind a smoke-screen of novelists’.) In other words, he could reprobate simplistic anti-Americanism in others even when not completely eliminating it in himself. This ambiguity, as I’ve already tried to point out, occurs in almost all his discussions of prejudice.

American Secession: The Looming Threat of a National Breakup by F. H. Buckley

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, belling the cat, Bernie Sanders, British Empire, Cass Sunstein, colonial rule, crony capitalism, desegregation, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, guns versus butter model, hindsight bias, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, low interest rates, Michael Milken, military-industrial complex, old-boy network, Paris climate accords, race to the bottom, Republic of Letters, reserve currency, Ronald Coase, Stephen Fry, Suez crisis 1956, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, wealth creators

14 There is a sense that the glorious deserve their renown, and that glory bears a badge of honor. And of all the different kinds of glory—celluloid, mathematical, culinary—none shines brighter than military glory. Even the humblest citizens sense that they share in it. The East Ender in Kipling’s day might think that, poor as he was, at least he partook of membership in the British Empire. It is the same for Americans today who bask in the glory of their country. Nietzsche thought it natural that we should seek power and that the weak should serve the strong.15 Realist students of international relations, such as Hans J. Morgenthau, agreed and identified a Nietzschean desire for dominance as the principal cause of rivalry and conflict between nations.16 Once a country finds itself able to become top dog, it will have difficulty resisting the temptation to do so.

…

The establishment of a Northern Ireland parliament for the six majoritarian Protestant counties failed to pacify the country, and the law was superseded by the 1921 Anglo-Irish Treaty, which created the Irish Free State. The treaty’s first article stated that “Ireland shall have the same constitutional status in the Community of Nations known as the British Empire as the Dominion of Canada,” which by then was an independent country. The treaty’s “Canada clause” further provided that the relation of Great Britain to Ireland would be as that of Britain to Canada, “and the law, practice and constitutional usage” of Canada would govern Britain’s relation to the Irish Free State.6 By 1921, what the Canadian model offered was full independence.

…

Finland will defend its borders but has no wish to extend them. It’s only larger countries that to seek to dominate their region, or the world, and having done so they find it very painful to retreat into smallness. Churchill said he did not become prime minister to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire, and he didn’t. That task he passed on to his successors, who presided over Indian independence in 1947 and the Suez debacle in 1956. After Britain gave up its empire, America became the world’s policeman. In a widely praised address at the American Enterprise Institute in 2004, Charles Krauthammer explained what this entailed: “If someone invades your house, you call the cops.

The Finance Curse: How Global Finance Is Making Us All Poorer by Nicholas Shaxson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, Bear Stearns, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Blythe Masters, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, carried interest, Cass Sunstein, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, centre right, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cross-subsidies, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, Etonian, export processing zone, failed state, fake news, falling living standards, family office, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial innovation, forensic accounting, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Global Witness, high net worth, Ida Tarbell, income inequality, index fund, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, junk bonds, Kickstarter, land value tax, late capitalism, light touch regulation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, megaproject, Michael Milken, Money creation, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, out of africa, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, proprietary trading, purchasing power parity, pushing on a string, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, seminal paper, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart grid, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Suez crisis 1956, The Chicago School, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, transfer pricing, two and twenty, vertical integration, Wayback Machine, wealth creators, white picket fence, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

He urged robust military action to defend British oil interests and the empire, so as to restore confidence in sterling and return it to its glorious place at the forefront of world affairs. ‘This is the choice,’ Macmillan wrote: ‘to slide into a shoddy and slushy socialism, or the march to the third British Empire.’5 Macmillan didn’t seem to grasp that Britain’s imperial magnificence had already, inexorably, begun to crumble. India had gained its independence in 1947, and others would soon follow. The trigger for the near-total collapse of the British empire was the decision by Egypt’s feisty president, Gamal Abdel Nasser, to take over the Suez Canal in 1956. Britain and France joined Israel in an invasion of the canal zone, but the United States, which had lost patience with European imperialism and fretted that the escapade would inflame pro-Soviet passions in the Arab world, forced the invaders to withdraw.

…

This contrast between apparently clean officials and dirty money is no coincidence; it is the heart of the offshore model. With the collapse of the British empire in the second half of the twentieth century, the City temporarily lost its ability to use gunboats and government officials to extract riches from foreign countries, but the overseas territories tax havens, plugged into the Euromarkets, enabled the City to regain its wealth-extracting mojo. Professor Ronen Palan of City University, one of the first academics to take tax havens seriously, describes this spider’s web as ‘a second British empire which is at the very core of global financial markets today’. This second financial empire, with London at the centre of a globe-spanning web of loose money, has many characteristics in common with Britain’s lost territorial empire.

…

The results include lower economic growth, steeper inequality, inefficient markets, damage to public services, worse corruption, the hollowing-out of alternative economic sectors, and widespread damage to democracy and to society. To unpack the idea of the finance curse we’ll go on a century-long journey that spans the globe; from the era of American robber barons in the early twentieth century, through the 1950s to explore the rebirth of the City of London as a global financial centre after the fall of the British empire, to the birth of modern British tax havens in the Caribbean in the 1960s, then to explore the early roots of Ireland’s Celtic Tiger economy in the 1970s and 80s, and then on to uncover some surprising truths about London’s outsized role in generating the global financial crisis. After the crisis, we enter the peculiar world of wealth managers, examine the billionaire-friendly subterfuges and immense powers of the accounting giants, and follow the twisting corporate trails leading from care workers in northern England up to the glittering offices of private equity moguls in Mayfair.

A History of Modern Britain by Andrew Marr

air freight, Albert Einstein, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bletchley Park, Bob Geldof, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Brixton riot, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, congestion charging, cuban missile crisis, deindustrialization, Etonian, falling living standards, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, financial independence, floating exchange rates, full employment, gentleman farmer, Herbert Marcuse, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, Live Aid, loadsamoney, market design, mass immigration, means of production, Mikhail Gorbachev, millennium bug, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, new economy, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, open borders, out of africa, Parkinson's law, Piper Alpha, post-war consensus, Red Clydeside, reserve currency, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, upwardly mobile, Winter of Discontent, working poor, Yom Kippur War

These ships were, in the words of one naval historian, ‘symbols of the men and nation that had dominated the sea lanes of the Pacific since the days of Anson and Cook’.22 The fall of Singapore, the psychological death-blow to the British Empire and the single worst defeat in the war for British forces, followed swiftly. But Lt Iki’s gallant action was not simply a tribute to the sunken ships, the Royal Navy generally, or even to that expiring British Empire the Japanese had long admired. It was also a tribute to an Aberdeenshire aristocrat, William Francis Forbes, the Master of Semphill. Semphill is one of those Britons forgotten here, remembered over there.

…

This was the moment when Britain was on the edge and her modern story begins. From that decision on that day, everything follows. First, there was the war, from the Battle of Britain, through Pearl Harbor to the final defeat of Germany and Japan. So, second, the world was differently shaped. The end of the British Empire, once the world’s greatest, and the rise of the United States as ruler of the free world occurred for complicated reasons. But they can be plausibly traced back to what Winston, Clem and Arthur agreed was the right thing to do on that difficult day in May. That decision made contemporary Britain, with her weaknesses and strengths, which are the subject of this book.

…

Deference and respect for the Royal Family, belief in the superiority of the white man, a complacent assumption that British manufacturing was still best . . . all that survived seemingly unaltered through the years of danger. Britain still believed herself to be in her imperial heyday, mistress of the seas. Though we think of it as essentially Victorian, the British Empire, declaring itself the first ‘world state’ had continued to grow right up until the mid-thirties. At the beginning of the Second World War there were some 200 colonies, dominions and possessions connected to London, covering more than 11 million square miles. The Empire embraced Pacific tribesmen and Eskimos, ancient African kingdoms and the rubble of the great Mughal empire, Australian farmers and the gold-miners of South Africa.

Blood, Iron, and Gold: How the Railways Transformed the World by Christian Wolmar

banking crisis, Beeching cuts, book value, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, company town, high-speed rail, invention of the wheel, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, precautionary principle, railway mania, refrigerator car, side project, South China Sea, Suez canal 1869, transcontinental railway, tulip mania, urban sprawl

Although this had been rather unsuccessful, the company established itself as a pioneering manufacturer and Beyer spent nearly twenty years there before founding his own firm, Beyer Peacock & Company, which would later build locomotives for the early London Underground lines and ultimately construct 8,000 locomotives, many for the British Empire, till the firm’s demise in 1966. As with the early railways in Britain and France, the train service on the completed stub of a line between Leipzig and Althen was an immediate success. Within a couple of months, there were six daily trains each capable of carrying 150 people in each direction every Sunday, more than on any other day, suggesting not only that the tourist market was dominant, but also that, unlike in the UK, there were no concerns about religious objections to Sunday running.

…

Consequently, as Michael Robbins puts it, ‘Until about 1870… Britain was the heart and centre of railway activity throughout the world’, 1 and while Britain’s own network suffered from unnecessary duplication and a proliferation of lines that could never be viable because the government deliberately eschewed planning or any attempts to control the private companies building the network, its lead was such that its technology, expertise and finance were exported to many countries, including very unlikely ones such as several in Latin America and Asia with little previous connection with the British Empire. British technology, therefore, was widely imitated and its finance in the last quarter of the century became vitally important for many systems, but the British style of laissez-faire planning for the railways, characterized by lack of interest from the state, was rarely imitated. Ireland, then part of the United Kingdom, was the most obvious country to be influenced by British technology, but oddly this did not extend to the choice of gauge.

…

Both these railways were clearly intended to be the start of a network, linking Bombay with Pune and eventually Madras, and Calcutta with Delhi and later through the newly conquered Punjab right through to Lahore in what is now Pakistan. Dalhousie had been pressing for the creation of a strategic rail network since his appointment as Governor General. He was the sort of dynamic modernizer which the British Empire occasionally threw up and he later claimed he had unleashed in India the ‘great engines of social improvement, which the sagacity and science of recent times had previously given to Western nations – I mean railways, uniform postage and the electric telegraph’. 11 Indeed, he had a past interest in the railways, having chaired a Parliamentary Committee in 1844–5 which attempted to put some order into the chaotic situation when at the height of the railway mania Parliament had been literally inundated with bills petitioning to build lines.

Land: How the Hunger for Ownership Shaped the Modern World by Simon Winchester

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, Cape to Cairo, climate change refugee, colonial rule, Donald Trump, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Garrett Hardin, glass ceiling, Haight Ashbury, invention of the steam engine, Isaac Newton, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jones Act, Khyber Pass, land reform, land tenure, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, oil shale / tar sands, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Right to Buy, Ronald Reagan, Scramble for Africa, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, Tragedy of the Commons, white flight, white picket fence

Most biographical mentions of him minimize mention of his work in the subcontinent, even though it remains the Radcliffe Line—This Bloody Line, he called it—for which he is best known. It may be easy to blame the outrage over the drawing of the Radcliffe Line on the plain fact that it was British inspired, its twists and turns drawn with a British fountain pen by one of the British empire’s architects. But that would be too simplistic. Over at the Khyber Pass the Durand Line, also a relic of the empire, drawn half a century before, confirms a natural division between empires and civilizations that is in most places marked organically, by ranges of mountains. It is notable that the Durand line had been formally surveyed and marked by a succession of joint Afghan-British teams, working under the superintendence of the British civil servant after which the line is named, Sir Mortimer Durand.

…

“It was during the Enlightenment that maps acquired their associations with political liberty and egalitarianism, and it was during the Romantic period that this was supplemented by a deeply felt love for nature and solitary wandering. Proponents of both movements projected these ideas onto the great ‘national undertaking’, the Ordnance Survey.” It is these days, and surely rightly so, deeply unfashionable to speak sympathetically or with anything other than contempt and scorn about the British empire. The reasons are obvious, and legion, and millions around the world have good reason for remembering the British with disfavor. “When the missionaries came to Africa,” Desmond Tutu famously (though not originally: that honor belongs to Jomo Kenyatta) remarked, “they had the Bible and we had the land.

…

So, what would eventually happen in Oklahoma, and which was centered most profoundly around the distribution of land, was now firmly on the horizon. What would be particularly egregious examples of land grabbing now simply required the passage of time—a century and a half of further colonial rule, then the creation of the United States out of the divided remains of the gigantic American fiefdom of the British empire, and a century more of Washington’s independent governance, briefly fractured though it was during Abraham Lincoln’s presidency. During all of these periods of North American history, native lands were being thinned and culled and native people were being slain and pinioned into remote reservations, tracts that were often waterless or infertile or both, impenetrable laagers that no white man would ever wish for.

To the Edges of the Earth: 1909, the Race for the Three Poles, and the Climax of the Age of Exploration by Edward J. Larson

back-to-the-land, British Empire, Charles Lindbergh, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, Fellow of the Royal Society, Livingstone, I presume, Scientific racism, the scientific method, trade route, yellow journalism

During the second half of the nineteenth century, Sydney, Melbourne, and Adelaide had expanded from obscure British outposts to brash commercial centers through mining. By the first decade of the twentieth century, the six Anglo-Australian colonies had federated into an independent dominion within the British Empire. With new mineral discoveries slowing, Australians were beginning to look offshore for further growth. Antarctica might provide that opportunity, Shackleton offered. Surely, it promised the prestige of discovery and the possibility of adventure. These arguments had been made before in Australia, most notably by the Australian Antarctic Exploring Committee, a group of Melbourne-based scientists interested in establishing research stations on the southern continent, but few Australians had listened.

…

“We might with equal chance of success try to sail through the cliffs of Dover, as to penetrate such a mass,” Ross declared.20 The magnetic pole, he determined, lay to the west, behind Victoria Land’s so-called Western Mountains; the geographic pole lay south beyond the ice barrier. Ross could not reach either by ship. Indeed, sailing in wind-powered ships, he could only effect one brief landing, and it was on a rocky islet off the Victoria Land coast, which he presumptuously named Possession Island because on it he claimed possession of the entire region for the British Empire. After cruising twice along the barrier, Ross returned home to report on what he had seen. He could not gauge the ice shelf’s southern extent or say if Victoria Land was part of a continent or merely a large island. No one went back for nearly six decades to settle these points. By then, popular interest in polar exploration had increased, and the Australians were positioned to play a role.

…

“Twed would eat ship biscuit if I were not here, and would eat that standing over his drill,” his adventuresome wife, Cara, noted in her travel diary, using an acronym for David made from his four initials.47 By jury-rigging the equipment as he went, David managed to drill down over 500 feet by the time he had to depart, with the core still showing coral. While this did not strictly prove Darwin’s subsidence theory, it disproved every alternative hypothesis and won David election to the British Empire’s premier scientific association, the Royal Society. After returning from Funafuti, David resumed his work in glacial geology, leading to a breakthrough that cinched his place on the Nimrod Expedition. Building on the work of University of Adelaide geologist Walter Howchin, he developed and publicized evidence from South Australia of a third global ice age that had occurred eons before the two previously known ones.

Losing Control: The Emerging Threats to Western Prosperity by Stephen D. King

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Admiral Zheng, Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Celtic Tiger, central bank independence, collateralized debt obligation, corporate governance, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demographic dividend, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, fixed income, foreign exchange controls, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, George Akerlof, German hyperinflation, Gini coefficient, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hiring and firing, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, knowledge economy, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, Meghnad Desai, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Naomi Klein, new economy, old age dependency ratio, Paul Samuelson, Ponzi scheme, price mechanism, price stability, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, sovereign wealth fund, spice trade, statistical model, technology bubble, The Great Moderation, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, trade route, transaction costs, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, women in the workforce, working-age population, Y2K, Yom Kippur War

How else can we hope to understand the re-emergence of China and India, the growing influence of Russia and the closer integration into the world economy of nations in Latin America, the Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe? Through much of the twentieth century, political systems prevented economies from becoming more integrated: indeed, they pushed economies further apart. The collapse of the British Empire, the destruction associated with the First World War, the rise of nationalism, fascism and communism, the horrors of the Second World War and the stalemate of the Cold War all contributed to the destruction of economic relationships. These relationships are now rapidly being rebuilt. Changing patterns of trade and investment opportunities around the world provide compelling evidence of this shift.

…

As its ventures in India became more complex, so it built up a large private army to protect its interests (matching the earlier behaviour of the Dutch East India Company). It wasn’t long before a commercial operation turned into political ambition, thereby providing an early example of today’s state capitalism, a theme I explore in greater detail in Chapter 7. The mercenaries of the private army became regular soldiers, and India was absorbed into the British Empire. The Opium Wars of the nineteenth century provide a similar example. Again, the East India Company was involved, increasingly exporting opium to a lucrative Chinese market. Again, the British government supported Britain’s commercial interests. The rising demand in Britain for Chinese luxuries such as porcelain and silk had to be paid for somehow.

…

This was a world of empires and imperfect suffrage. Under the influence of self-determination, sponsored by an increasingly powerful US hostile to colonial influence, the empires of the nineteenth century collapsed in the wars and economic crises that followed. The biggest casualty, most obviously, was the British Empire. The Ottoman Empire went the same way and, with the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, so did the Soviet Union’s twentieth-century empire. The result was a huge proliferation of nation states. According to Freedom House, there were only fifty-five sovereign countries in 1900, alongside thirteen empires.

The Marches: A Borderland Journey Between England and Scotland by Rory Stewart

agricultural Revolution, British Empire, connected car, Etonian, glass ceiling, Isaac Newton, Khyber Pass, land reform, Neil Armstrong, RAND corporation, rewilding, Silicon Valley

Today, at this point, the wall no longer even marked the edge of the farmer’s field, let alone a nation. On the ridge line, I could see an old farmer calling his dog, the straight line of his crook extended beneath his still hands. A dozen sheep broke loose, and jumped the wall again. * At lunch on the third day, I asked my father, ‘Do you think that you felt proud of the British Empire in the way in which Romans felt proud of the Roman Empire?’ ‘Well, it is very difficult to answer that kind of question,’ he said. ‘We were imperialists, no doubt. I was very proud of the Empire. Even my aunties in Kirriemuir liked the idea of “the Empire on which the sun never sets”.’ ‘And was it a Scottish empire?’

…

Our heroes were Scots connected to Empire: that chieftain, for example, not Lord Lovat – the other one – Maclean. Fitzroy Maclean. We Scots dominated almost half the Diplomatic List – and we were the best soldiers in the army. And so on. But we didn’t want to be a separate Scotland – we’d have thought it was boring – we wanted to be part of a British Empire.’ He talked about humming bagpipe tunes to keep his spirits up under bombardment in Hanoi. (His windows were blown out and his neighbours were killed.) He had poured whisky into the soup at every lunch in Vietnam to keep other ambassadors onside. And everywhere he was the Scot. ‘Ah yes,’ a Malay said once, ‘you were the Scottish Chinese Affairs officer.’

…

It was not much, but enough perhaps to question whether the Romans were really as unsentimental about their children as the stern, unbending marble statues of imperial heroes might suggest. * Although I was born in Hong Kong and brought up in Malaysia, I did not feel I had been brought up as a child of the British Empire. My father’s time in the Malayan Colonial Service was over before I was born. The pictures of him in his white uniform, with his pith helmet and ceremonial sword, seemed to resemble to the last detail the Sargent portrait of Sir Frank Swettenham in 1904, which was also on the dust jacket of a book in our house.

Greater: Britain After the Storm by Penny Mordaunt, Chris Lewis

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, accelerated depreciation, Ada Lovelace, Airbnb, banking crisis, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Bernie Madoff, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Bob Geldof, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, carbon footprint, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, credit crunch, crowdsourcing, data is not the new oil, data is the new oil, David Attenborough, death from overwork, Deng Xiaoping, Diane Coyle, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, experimental economics, failed state, fake news, Firefox, fixed income, full employment, gender pay gap, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, impact investing, Jeremy Corbyn, Khartoum Gordon, lateral thinking, Live Aid, lockdown, loss aversion, low skilled workers, microaggression, mittelstand, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Ocado, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, Panamax, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, quantitative easing, remote working, road to serfdom, Salesforce, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, South China Sea, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, surveillance capitalism, transaction costs, transcontinental railway

The inept, unjust, impersonal bureaucracy and lack of care that resulted in the Windrush scandal do not. The lessons of what happened should be learned by the machinery of government. THE BRITISH EMPIRE Britain’s view about its colonial past is being revised. We have not always taught the Empire in classrooms, leading some to accuse us of historical amnesia. But the truth is many of us did not know anything to forget. We haven’t been informed and therefore we haven’t had time to think or evaluate the bad and the good of our country’s past. At its height in 1922, the British Empire was the largest the world had ever seen, covering a quarter of the world’s total land area and one fifth of humanity.

…

The panel spoke about both the good and the bad: ‘In Britain, we’re ashamed of our colonial past, but when I work with highly educated people from around the world, they often say the British system is why they are where they are today.’ A YouGov poll published on 19 January 2019 found that 43 per cent of Brits thought the British Empire was a good thing, while 32 per cent were proud of Britain’s colonial history.95,96 In the same poll, 19 per cent said it was bad. Although the proponents of the Empire say it brought various economic developments to the parts of the world it controlled, critics point to massacres, famines, the use of concentration camps.

…

When refusing an MBE for services to the arts, writer and spoken-word artist Jonzi D said, ‘Man, I’m a Star Wars fan – Empire is bad.’99 Fellow spoken-word artist and podcaster George the Poet, aka George Mpanga, expressed similar sentiments when he rejected an honour in 2019, saying he had done so because of the ‘pure evil’ perpetrated by the British Empire. ‘It’s not fair that in order to accept this accolade, in order to accept this recognition, I have to submit to that interpretation of empire,’ he said.100 We don’t want to offend its existing recipients. We don’t want to make a fuss; it is, after all, only 2 per cent who refuse. Yet, the fact that one in fifty do, for the reason George explained, should make us pause.

Empire of Cotton: A Global History by Sven Beckert

agricultural Revolution, Bartolomé de las Casas, British Empire, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, Corn Laws, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, deindustrialization, European colonialism, flying shuttle, Francisco Pizarro, Great Leap Forward, imperial preference, industrial cluster, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, joint-stock company, laissez-faire capitalism, land tenure, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, race to the bottom, restrictive zoning, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, spinning jenny, Suez canal 1869, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, vertical integration, women in the workforce, work culture

Penzer, Federation of British Industries, Intelligence Department, Cotton in British West Africa (London: Federation of British Industries, 1920); John Harris, Parliamentary Secretary of the Society, to E. Sedgwick, Boston, November 10, 1924, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, MSS. British Empire S22, G143, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth & African Studies, University of Oxford; John Harris to Maxwell Garnett, January 20, 1925, MSS. British Empire 522, G446, Papers of the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, Rhodes House Library, Oxford; D. Edwards-Radclyffe, “Ramie, The Textile of the Future,” Imperial and Asiatic Quarterly Review, Third Series, 20 (July–October 1905): 47. 18.

…

England’s domination of these global networks, as we will see, was essential to recast production and become the unlikely source of the cotton-fueled Industrial Revolution. While certainly still revolutionary, industrial capitalism was the offspring of war capitalism, the previous centuries’ great innovation.3 Samuel Greg and his fellow innovators knew that the global reach and power of the British Empire gave them a tremendous advantage over their fellow merchants and artisans in Frankfurt, Calcutta, or Rio de Janeiro. Having started out as a merchant in the employ of his uncles, he had already organized a large putting-out network of cotton spinners and weavers in the Lancashire and Cheshire countryside before investing in his new machines.

…

But while the cotton plant found a favorable environment in large stretches of the world’s arable lands, Lancashire, or anywhere else in the British Isles for that matter, was not among them. Outside of the greenhouses at the Royal Gardens at Kew (which to this day showcase the core commodities on which the British Empire rested), Britain and much of Europe was too cold and wet for cotton. Among European leaders, only French revolutionaries, with their fervent belief in inventing the world anew, seriously tried to outwit the local climate and grow cotton—and even they failed.5 Indeed, British cotton manufacturing—and later, manufacturing across Europe—seemed a poor bet, for it was the first major industry in human history that lacked locally procured raw materials.

I You We Them by Dan Gretton

agricultural Revolution, anti-communist, back-to-the-land, British Empire, clean water, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, conceptual framework, corporate social responsibility, Crossrail, Desert Island Discs, drone strike, European colonialism, financial independence, friendly fire, ghettoisation, Honoré de Balzac, IBM and the Holocaust, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, laissez-faire capitalism, Large Hadron Collider, liberation theology, Mikhail Gorbachev, Milgram experiment, military-industrial complex, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, Pier Paolo Pasolini, place-making, pre–internet, restrictive zoning, Stanford prison experiment, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

The truth which, as Sebald says, ‘lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered’. * But, to return to Günter Grass’s implicit challenge, how should we begin trying to teach our children about the crimes and genocides committed in the name of the British Empire? Where would you start? There is an immediate challenge here – whereas the particular savagery of Nazism occured within a twelve-year span (or perhaps two generations, going back to its causation), the violence unleashed by the British Empire took place over almost 500 years – more than twenty generations. The contrast with Germany could not be greater. And this is not only a matter of the time frame. The Holocaust took place in a recognisably modern world – we can see television images of Hitler and Himmler chatting, of the senior perpetrators on trial at Nuremberg, we even have images and photographs of the extermination camps.

…

No one points out that during Hitler’s childhood, a major element in the European view of mankind was the conviction that ‘inferior races’ were by nature condemned to extinction: the true compassion of the superior races consisted in helping them on the way. All German historians participating in this debate seem to look in the same direction. None looks to the west. But Hitler did. What Hitler wished to create when he sought Lebensraum in the east was a continental equivalent of the British Empire. It was in the British and other western European peoples that he found the models, of which the extermination of the Jews is … ‘a distorted copy’. We are part of a European culture, for which the extinction of peoples is not a recent phenomenon, but a pattern repeated over centuries. The first documented European genocide began in 1478 – that of the advanced Berber-speaking inhabitants of the Canary Islands (then ironically called ‘the Fortunate Isles’) – the Guanches.

…

When I began researching in the late 1990s, very little had been published on the subject; it seemed to be one of the least known, one of the least understood of all genocides. I wondered whether one of the reasons for this cultural invisibility in the West, aside from our historic racism, was that imperial Germany, quite explicitly, had copied the brutal methodologies already established by the British Empire in its colonies and by the United States in its treatment of American indigenous peoples. So maybe there was a deep-rooted, and unacknowledged, shame in our cultures that did not want to see the linkage between our extermination of indigenous peoples and what Germany did to the people of South-West Africa, and later to its own Jewish population.

1939: A People's History by Frederick Taylor

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Brexit referendum, British Empire, collective bargaining, delayed gratification, facts on the ground, false flag, full employment, guns versus butter model, intentional community, mass immigration, rising living standards, the market place, women in the workforce

How horrible, fantastic, incredible it is that we should be digging trenches and trying on gas-masks here because of a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing. It seems still more impossible that a quarrel which has already been settled in principle should be the subject of war . . . . . . However much we may sympathise with a small nation confronted by a big powerful neighbour, we cannot in all circumstances undertake to involve the whole British Empire in war simply on her account. If we have to fight it must be on larger issues than that.4 It did not quite amount to a volte-face – any more than did Hitler’s temporary change of tactic – but it came close. The bizarre assertion that the crisis was taking place ‘in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing’ seemed especially egregious.

…

The animal duly dived into it and Read shut the door. Shortly after, the local stag hunt rode up. On Chamberlain’s instructions, the chauffeur professed to have no idea of their quarry’s whereabouts. The hunt galloped off, and the animal was saved. All this time, Chamberlain – the most powerful elected official in the British Empire – remained in the highest branches of the tree, saw in hand, silent and unobserved.7 Neville Chamberlain was also a martyr to gout, and Read became expert, he recalled, at easing the Prime Minister’s swollen feet into his boots. The chauffeur even says that, when Chamberlain had occasion to fly to Germany for the first crisis meeting with Hitler, there were discussions as to whether he might be included in the party, in case a gout attack occurred during the crucial negotiations.

…

A plan to allow these persecuted Jews into Britain. What good purpose will it serve? Is it proposed to admit more refugees into Britain? That is a dangerous proposition. We have already accepted our full quota of foreign Jews. We cannot assimilate any more.50 It might be possible to allow Jews to settle in ‘undeveloped parts’ of the British Empire, of course. Except Palestine, which ‘cannot take in any more of them’. Otherwise the problem was a ‘purely administrative one which should be dealt with by Mr Chamberlain and his colleagues’. Under the rubric ‘Least said—’ the leader column concluded with matchless banality: The Daily Express has the greatest sympathy with the Jews.

Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World by Mark Kurlansky

British Empire, European colonialism, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith

Ironically, when France retained Guadeloupe but lost Canada—held its slave colonies but lost its fisheries—the demand this created for West India cure in the French Caribbean led New Englanders on a direct collision course with the British Crown. The conflict went back to the Acts of Trade and Navigation, one of the foundations of the British Empire, according to which colonists were to sell their goods to England and buy their goods from England. Legally, New Englanders should not have traded directly with Spain and the Caribbean but were supposed to have sold their cod to England and then to have purchased Spanish wine and iron from England.

…

Felton & Company, a Boston rum maker founded in the early nineteenth century, described the trade with remarkable candor in its 1936 drink guide. “Ship owners developed a cycle of trade involving cargoes of slaves to the West Indies—a cargo of Blackstrap Molasses from those islands to Boston and other New England ports—and finally the shipment of rum to Africa.” Soon the British Empire was not only too small a market for New England’s cod catch but too small a molasses producer for New England’s distilleries. Total British West Indies molasses production was less than two-thirds of what Rhode Island alone imported. The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses.

…

The French colonies needed New England cod, and New England needed French molasses. Then the British Crown, after letting New Englanders taste free trade for more than a century, decided in 1733 to regulate molasses as a key step toward reasserting its control over commerce. Instead the measure turned out to be one of the first inadvertent steps toward dismantling the British Empire. WEST INDIA IN THE WEST INDIES TIME SO HARD YOU CANNOT DENY THAT EVEN SALTFISH AND RICE WE CAN HARDLY BUY. —1940s calypso by “the Tiger” (Neville Marcano) In Puerto Rico there was a piropia, a catcall to attractive women, that went Tanto carne, y yo comiendo bacalao (so much meat, and I’m just eating salt cod).

Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World by Noam Chomsky, David Barsamian

British Empire, collective bargaining, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, failed state, feminist movement, Howard Zinn, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, launch on warning, liberation theology, Monroe Doctrine, Nelson Mandela, offshore financial centre, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Upton Sinclair, uranium enrichment, Westphalian system

Think of Mexico, large parts of which we took over in the 1840s, or Hawaii, which was stolen by force and guile in 1898. In both cases the native population was pretty much replaced, they weren’t colonized. Again, not totally replaced. The indigenous people are still there, but they’ve essentially been taken over. Also, if you look at the traditional empires, say, the British empire, it’s not so clear that the population of Britain gained from it. It’s a very difficult topic to study, but there have been a couple of attempts. And for what it’s worth, the general conclusion is that the costs and the benefits pretty much balanced out. Empires are costly. Running Iraq is not cheap.

…

The Marshall Plan aid to France just about covered the costs of the French effort to reconquer Indochina. So the U.S. taxpayer wasn’t rebuilding France. They were paying the French to buy American weapons to crush the Indo-Chinese. And they were paying Holland to crush the independence movement in Indonesia. Returning to the British empire, the costs to the British people may have been about on a par with the benefits that the British people received from it, but for the guys who were running the East India Company the empire led to fantastic wealth. For the British troops who were dying out in the wilderness somewhere, the costs were serious.

…

. … The twenty-first-century imperium is a new invention in the annals of political science, an empire lite, a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known. “14 Of course, the apologists for every imperial power have said the same thing. So you can go back to John Stuart Mill, one of the most outstanding Western intellectuals. He defended the British empire in very much those words. Mill wrote the classic essay on humanitarian intervention.15 Everyone studies it in law schools. He argued that Britain is unique in the world. It’s unlike any country in history. Other countries have crass motives and seek gain and so on, but the British act only for the benefit of others.

Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind by Yuval Noah Harari

Admiral Zheng, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, An Inconvenient Truth, Apollo 11, Atahualpa, British Empire, cognitive dissonance, correlation does not imply causation, credit crunch, David Graeber, Easter island, Edmond Halley, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, glass ceiling, global village, Great Leap Forward, greed is good, income per capita, invention of gunpowder, Isaac Newton, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kickstarter, liberal capitalism, life extension, low interest rates, Mahatma Gandhi, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, Neil Armstrong, out of africa, personalized medicine, Ponzi scheme, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, stem cell, Steven Pinker, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, zero-sum game

Reluctantly, in 1789, Louis XVI convened the Estates General, the French parliament that had not met for a century and a half, in order to find a solution to the crisis. Thus began the French Revolution. While the French overseas empire was crumbling, the British Empire was expanding rapidly. Like the Dutch Empire before it, the British Empire was established and run largely by private joint-stock companies based in the London stock exchange. The first English settlements in North America were established in the early seventeenth century by joint-stock companies such as the London Company, the Plymouth Company, the Dorchester Company and the Massachusetts Company.

…

At least some of the praise usually heaped on Mahatma Gandhi for his non-violent creed is actually owed to the British Empire. Despite many years of bitter and often violent struggle, when the end of the Raj came, the Indians did not have to fight the British in the streets of Delhi and Calcutta. The empire’s place was taken by a slew of independent states, most of which have since enjoyed stable borders and have for the most part lived peacefully alongside their neighbours. True, tens of thousands of people perished at the hands of the threatened British Empire, and in several hot spots its retreat led to the eruption of ethnic conflicts that claimed hundreds of thousands of lives (particularly in India).

…

They can swallow and digest more and more nations and territories without altering their basic structure or identity. The British state of today has fairly clear borders that cannot be exceeded without altering the fundamental structure and identity of the state. A century ago almost any place on earth could have become part of the British Empire. Cultural diversity and territorial flexibility give empires not only their unique character, but also their central role in history. It’s thanks to these two characteristics that empires have managed to unite diverse ethnic groups and ecological zones under a single political umbrella, thereby fusing together larger and larger segments of the human species and of planet Earth.

A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet by Raj Patel, Jason W. Moore

"World Economic Forum" Davos, agricultural Revolution, Anthropocene, Bartolomé de las Casas, biodiversity loss, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon credits, carbon footprint, classic study, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, company town, complexity theory, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, double entry bookkeeping, energy transition, European colonialism, feminist movement, financial engineering, Food sovereignty, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Haber-Bosch Process, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, low interest rates, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megacity, Mercator projection, meta-analysis, microcredit, Naomi Klein, Nixon shock, Occupy movement, peak oil, precariat, scientific management, Scientific racism, seminal paper, sexual politics, sharing economy, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, surplus humans, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, wages for housework, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War

After an initial flurry of productive activity at new frontiers, Giovanni Arrighi argues, “decreasing returns set in; competitive pressures on the system’s governmental and business agencies intensify; and the stage is set for the change of phase from material to financial expansion.”88 After a roughly century-long cycle of accumulation has generated profits and more liquid capital, the balance of power shifts in a moment of crisis away from the capitalists who organized the accumulation and into the hands of bankers. This happened in the Genoese, Dutch, and British Empires, and it’s now playing out in the United States. But there’s something very different about the era of financialization that began in the 1980s. Previous great financial expansions could all count on imperialism to extend profit-making opportunities into significant new frontiers of cheap nature.

…

Index Aboriginal Australians, 99, 200 accumulation: as capitalism’s driving force, 38, 87–88; and cheap food, 144; financial engineering and, 88–89; and remaking of nature, 26; wars and, 69 Afonso de Albuquerque, 17 Africa: cultural interventions in, 231n97; Europe, Supported by Africa and America (Blake), 112 fig. 1; extinction in, 213n7; Green Revolution, 150, 157–58 Africans: in domain of Nature, 109; expulsions of, 39; New World production system and, 46; social death for, 30; transatlantic enslavement of women, 129–130. See also slaves/slavery Agricola, Georgius, 73 agricultural revolutions: climate change and, 159–160; in Europe, 232n12; Green Revolution, 149–152; inorganic fertilizer, 147, 172–74 agricultural sector: agricultural revolutions, 103; of Brazil, 143; of British empire, 141–43; communal ownership, 220n51; of Europe, 142–43; of France, 142–43; of Mexico, 142; of Poland, 142; and productivity, 48; swidden agriculture, 231n8; work and, 103. See also Cheap Food Alfonso V, King of Portugal, 92 Anderson, Benedict, 195, 196 Andes: mining in, 52–53, 101; mita labor system, 100 animal food industry, 153, 154 fig. 5, 155–56; food price changes of, 154 fig. 5 Anthropocene era, 1–2, 213n2 appropriation: of extrahuman natures, 63, 95; of human reproductive labor, 110; of Natures, 109; of unpaid work, 95 Araghi, Farshad, 158 Arrighi, Giovanni, 87 Asia: capitalism and, 220n50; global power shift and, 46; global production shift and, 46; global silver trade and, 85; Medieval Warm Period, 48.

…

See also Cheap Money; financial sector; Genoese banking Bhopal disaster, 209 Biidewe’anikwetok, 211 Black Death, 11–13, 70, 183–85, 238n9 blood ranking, 185–86 Bohemia, 70 Bois, Guy, 10 Bolivia, 179, 200–201 Borlaug, Norman, 149–150 Bosch, Carl, 148, 172, 172–74 Braudel, Fernand, 68, 86, 139, 144, 160, 231n8 Brazil, xiv map 1; deforestation, 174; food price changes, 154 fig. 5; industrialization in, 100, 101; Muslim slave uprising, 106; planetary ecological revolution in, 52–53; slave trading, 31; as sugar frontier, 16, 32–33 British empire: agricultural imports, 103–4; agriculture of, 141–43, 145; botanical imperialism, 147; cotton industry and, 103, 106; Ireland and, 51–52, 190–92, 239n26; labor organizing, 175; labor organizing in, 106; Nigeria and, 128–29, 175; Reclaim the Streets movement, 206. See also England; United Kingdom Brotton, Jerry, 58 Burawoy, Michael, 109 Cadamosto, Alvise da, 14 Canary Islands, 13, 16, 29 Cantino Planisphere, 55, 56–57map3 capitalism: as an ecology, 26, 38; emergence of, 13, 25–26; foundations of, 228–29n22 capitalist ecology: capitalist frontiers, 18–20; cheap money system and, 68; Descartes and, 52–53; domestication and, 230–31n79; effects on planet’s ecology, 28; finance and, 28; global story, 81–85; knowledge, policing of, 225n6; laws of, 52–54; microfinance and, 224n92; Schumpeter on, 215n62; shifts in, 220n50 Cárdenas, Lázaro, 148 care work: austerity programs and, 136; extrahuman natures and, 110, 117; growth of, 134; nationalism and, 136; unequal by gender, 31, 116–17; United States, 134, 135–36; value of, 137; wageworkers and, 116–17.

A Concise History of Modern India (Cambridge Concise Histories) by Barbara D. Metcalf, Thomas R. Metcalf

affirmative action, Berlin Wall, British Empire, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, demand response, European colonialism, Fall of the Berlin Wall, gentleman farmer, income inequality, joint-stock company, Khyber Pass, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, scientific management, Silicon Valley, spice trade, Suez canal 1869, telemarketer, trade route, upwardly mobile, urban planning

This page intentionally left blank A Concise History of Modern India In this second edition of their successful A Concise History of India, Barbara Metcalf and Thomas Metcalf explore India’s modern history afresh and update the events of the last decade. These include the takeover by Congress from the seemingly entrenched Hindu nationalist party in 2004, India’s huge advances in technology, and the country’s new role as a major player in world affairs. From the days of the Mughals, through the British Empire, and into independence, the country has been sustained and transformed by its institutional structures. As the authors argue, it is these institutions which have helped bring about the social, cultural, and economic changes that have taken place over the last half-century and paved the way for the modern success story.

…

It will then ask how and why the British went on to conquer the entire Indian subcontinent in the first two decades of the nineteenth century, and it will conclude by assessing the relationships that grew up between what was known as the ‘Company Bahadur’, as though it were a Mughal grandee, and its Indian subjects in the years up to 1850. 56 The East India Company Raj, 1772–1850 57 f o u n dat i o n o f c o l o n i a l ru l e When Hastings took office, the East India Company’s agents knew nothing about India apart from the requirements of trade, and they almost never ventured outside their coastal enclaves. With rare exceptions, among them Hastings himself, they knew no Indian languages. Within the existing British Empire, furthermore, rule over a vast indigenous population such as that of India was unprecedented. With the partial exception of Ireland, Britain’s previous imperial expansion, in the West Indies and North America, had involved the dispossession of the native peoples in favour of settlers from Europe and Africa.

…

Bayly has written, ‘set it apart even in its early days from all the regimes which had preceded it’. conquest and settlement The arrival of Lord Wellesley as governor-general in 1798 ended a quarter-century during which the British had existed as one among several Indian ‘country powers’. Spurred on by a new vision that saw the British Empire encompassing the entire subcontinent, Wellesley inaugurated twenty years of military activity that made the Company by 1818 master of India. Complementing Wellesley’s conquests-at-arms was the elaboration of an aggressive imperial enthusiasm. Much of this was the product of events in Europe. Thoughout these years an embattled Britain confronted Napoleon, whose armies triumphed not only in Europe but in 1798 in Egypt, the gateway to India; and the patriotism stirred up by this desperate struggle easily spilled over into a conviction of Britain’s right to rule whatever territories its armies might conquer.

The Idea of Israel: A History of Power and Knowledge by Ilan Pappe

affirmative action, Ayatollah Khomeini, Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, disinformation, double helix, facts on the ground, feminist movement, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, mass immigration, Mount Scopus, Nelson Mandela, New Journalism, one-state solution, postnationalism / post nation state, stem cell, Suez canal 1869, urban planning, Yom Kippur War

Amud Ha’Esh, a TV documentary series directed by Yigal Lusin for the first, and that time the only, Israeli TV channel in 1981, gives the viewer a good sense of why the Israelis call the 1948 war the War of Independence. That year is described as the culmination of an anti-colonialist struggle against the evil British Empire. The British were defeated and so, according to this narration, left Palestine because they could not withstand the Jewish resistance against them. Meanwhile, the professional historiography indicated that the British decision to withdraw from Palestine arose from the overall and inevitable global collapse of the British Empire. This wider context informed the financial and regional strategic decisions that led to the end of British rule in Palestine.22 The lengthiest feature film on 1948 during those years was He Walked Through the Fields, based on a novel by Moshe Shamir.

…

In Israel, this revolt usually appeared as a chapter in the history of Palestinian terrorism.28 In both Palestinian and less biased historiography, it appeared as the first, and in many ways, one of the few, successful popular revolts of the Palestinians that achieved some significant political gains, notably the British White Paper of 1939, which limited Jewish immigration and land purchase. This new British policy, together with the emergence of Nazism in Europe, led to a Jewish Zionist revolt against the British Empire. It was a heroic deed against all odds in Israeli historiography, amounting to terrorism in the eyes of not only the Mandatory government of the day but subsequently, leaders of the Irgun and the Stern Gang, such as Menachem Begin and Yitzhak Shamir, were regarded as personae non gratae in the United Kingdom because of their terrorist past in Palestine.

…

Cohen revealed a far more pragmatic and sensible Bevin than was depicted in the myth.13 Nevertheless, the narrative became an intricate sequence of interdependent elements. Thus, while the Yishuv (the Jewish community in Mandatory Palestine) faced annihilation from a barbaric Arab world, as a hostile British Empire and an indifferent international community looked on, it had no time to bother with the indigenous population. According to this narrative, these native people became refugees because their own leaders, and those of the Arab League, told them to leave, paving the way for an all-Arab invasion.

Inside British Intelligence by Gordon Thomas

active measures, Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Ayatollah Khomeini, Berlin Wall, Bletchley Park, British Empire, country house hotel, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, false flag, job satisfaction, Khyber Pass, kremlinology, lateral thinking, license plate recognition, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, old-boy network, operational security, Ronald Reagan, sensible shoes, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, University of East Anglia, uranium enrichment, Yom Kippur War

The building was designed by Sir Frank Baines and shows the influence of the Imperial Neoclassical style of Edwin Lutyens, the designer of the Cenotaph in Whitehall. By 1929, Thames House had risen over what had once been a slum quarter of the city, a massive structure in Portland stone hailed as “the finest office building in the British Empire.” Stella Rimington, the first woman to be appointed MI5’s director-general, saw Thames House as “a great pale ghost.” Others who worked there said the exhaust fumes from traffic and the smell of the river penetrated the inner recesses of Thames House. For outsiders who had business with MI5, there was a ritual to be observed: First, hand in their passport to one of the guards in the entrance hall and then be walked through the security barriers to take an elevator to the appropriate floor.

…

The one question she repeatedly asked was: Could it happen to London? Could the carnage be repeated in the capital, striking at the principal symbols of Britain’s hegemony, its global commercial and financial power, and call into question the certainties and beliefs that had continued to survive long after the British Empire had become a fading memory? “It was catchup time,” recalled Annie Machon, a former MI5 counterterrorism officer, to the author. Although the Security Service also found itself confronting civil liberties groups opposed to some of those “catchup” methods. In August 2002, Home Secretary David Blunkett had issued an unprecedented public apology to British Muslims about “information sweeps conducted by MI5 in Muslim communities.”

…

Then came the terrible winter of 1946–47 when Eliza’s parents, like millions of others, found themselves living in temperatures below zero from one month to the next as blizzards piled layer upon layer of record-breaking snowfalls across the country. England was gripped in frozen paralysis: Industry closed down; electricity was limited to five hours a day; unemployment rose to six million. Few people realized that was also the time when world leadership began to move from the dying British Empire to the muscular power of the United States. It started when President Harry Truman, in July 1946, signed a congressional bill authorizing a fifty-year loan of $3.75 billion to His Majesty’s government to liquidate America’s obligation to rebuilding the United Kingdom after the war (the loan, with accrued interest, was finally paid off in 2007).

Broken Markets: A User's Guide to the Post-Finance Economy by Kevin Mellyn

Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bond market vigilante , Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Carmen Reinhart, central bank independence, centre right, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collateralized debt obligation, compensation consultant, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, credit crunch, crony capitalism, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency risk, disintermediation, eurozone crisis, fiat currency, financial innovation, financial repression, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, global supply chain, Home mortgage interest deduction, index fund, information asymmetry, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, labor-force participation, light touch regulation, liquidity trap, London Interbank Offered Rate, low interest rates, market bubble, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, Michael Milken, mobile money, Money creation, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, Ponzi scheme, profit motive, proprietary trading, prudent man rule, quantitative easing, Real Time Gross Settlement, regulatory arbitrage, reserve currency, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Savings and loan crisis, seigniorage, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, SoftBank, Solyndra, statistical model, Steve Jobs, The Great Moderation, the payments system, Tobin tax, too big to fail, transaction costs, underbanked, Works Progress Administration, yield curve, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

Hence, the Chinese dismissal of the first British attempts to open trade under Lord Macartney’s diplomatic mission of 1792–1794 was entirely rational because China didn’t need to trade (much less finance) outside its borders. The British Empire by contrast was a merchant-state, where trade, finance, and diplomatic influence vastly outweighed territory or military power. The United States was originally part of that empire and essentially remains a merchantstate, but an inward-looking one, given its vast internal market. Modern China is, whether it likes it or not, a merchant-state built on globalization, just as the British Empire was during the first great age of globalization it led from 1815 to 1914.This global merchant-state role is totally new to China as first a self-contained empire and then a victim of predatory merchant-states such as Britain and Japan.

…

Of course, today we call integration of markets for goods, services, and money “globalization,” and for much of the last decade we have debated whether it was a good thing or a bad thing. Actually, to the Victorians, including Marx, global markets were a fact of life, and barriers to moving capital were almost nonexistent. Between 1815 and 1914, especially in the second half of the period, the combination of a British Empire committed to free trade, the pound sterling backed by gold as anchor currency for the world, and London as the world’s money market allowed capital to go anywhere it could make a good return. Contemporaries called this system of free markets and the limited constitutional government that went with it liberalism, almost the opposite of how the word is used in America today.

…

Subsidized green energy is but an extreme example, since the Eisenhower national highway system, subsidies for home ownership, and student loans are all examples of using the financial system for essentially nonmarket, noneconomic ends. This kind of thing goes back to the day when royal monopolies Broken Markets were given to joint stock companies to build out the British Empire for broke British monarchs, and it is not going away any time soon. It is all a matter of degree and balance. In the Victorian Era, the markets became free and global for several generations, but that was an anomaly backed by British wealth and sea power along with an almost mystical British belief in free trade.

Enemy of All Mankind: A True Story of Piracy, Power, and History's First Global Manhunt by Steven Johnson

British Empire, Burning Man, cognitive dissonance, cotton gin, Great Leap Forward, Jeff Bezos, moral panic, Stewart Brand, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, urban planning, wikimedia commons

The historian Philip Stern has argued, persuasively, that this strategy—first dreamed up by Samuel Annesley under house arrest in the Surat factory—would prove to be a critical turning point in the relationship between India and England, one that is inevitably neglected in the traditional version of the rise of the British empire in the subcontinent. The standard account, according to Stern, imagines the East India Company as “a commercial body that only ‘turned’ sovereign—accidentally, haphazardly, and unwillingly—with the Company’s great territorial acquisitions in Bengal following Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey in 1757 and the assumption eight years later of revenue and governance responsibilities in the Mughal office of diwan.”

…

The admiralty had planned to use the case against the Every gang as a show trial, a statement to the world that would announce the British government’s new zero-tolerance policy for piracy. They had even hired a publisher named John Everingham to release the transcripts of the trial allowing interested readers throughout the British empire who couldn’t make it to Sessions House Yard to follow along. Needless to say, Everingham never published the transcripts. One London periodical apologized for its lack of coverage: “We had prepared a more ample account of the Tryal of the Pyrates,” the editors noted, “but in compliance with the prohibition of Authority have omitted it.”

…

They had at last established a compelling ending for the dominant narrative. John Everingham’s contract was renewed, and the printer released the court transcripts—with only a brief allusion to the unsuccessful first trial—as a twenty-eight-page bound volume within a matter of weeks. The publication went through multiple printings, and was read throughout the British empire. Its final lines left no doubt where the Crown stood regarding the crimes of piracy: According to this sentence, Edward Foreseth and the rest were executed, on Wednesday, November the 25th, 1696; at Execution-Dock, that being the usual Place for the Execution of Pirates. FINIS. EPILOGUE: LIBERTALIA A few days before his stolen coins were found quilted into his jacket—starting the whole chain of events that would lead to five of his shipmates hanging at Execution Dock—John Dann stumbled across Henry Adams’s new bride in the London suburb of St.

The Marshall Plan: Dawn of the Cold War by Benn Steil

Albert Einstein, Alistair Cooke, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, British Empire, business cycle, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, currency manipulation / currency intervention, deindustrialization, democratizing finance, disintermediation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, full employment, imperial preference, invisible hand, Kenneth Rogoff, kremlinology, land reform, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, open economy, Potemkin village, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, structural adjustment programs, the market place, trade liberalization, Transnistria, Winter of Discontent, Works Progress Administration, éminence grise

British prime minister Winston Churchill shared these fears, particularly as regards Poland—a country he saw as a barrier to Soviet westward expansion, much as Stalin saw it as a barrier to Western encroachment.4 But FDR never bought into Churchill’s vision of Britain and America marching forward shoulder to shoulder into the postwar era. “The President shared a widespread American suspicion of the British Empire as it had once been,” noted Foreign Secretary Anthony Eden. And he had “no fear that other powers,” besides the United States, “might fill that role” after the war.5 Yet by 1947, such fear would concentrate minds in the State Department and Pentagon. The Big Three wartime conference at Yalta in February 1945 was Roosevelt’s last face-to-face meeting with Stalin, a final chance to reconcile clashing interests over the shape of postwar Europe before the advancement of Soviet, American, and British troops settled matters on the ground.

…

In response to the rising threat of a new security vacuum in Europe, Truman’s State Department effectively mothballed the newly born IMF, dismissing disdainfully the assumptions Morgenthau and White had made to justify their faith in it—that Soviet cooperation would continue into the postwar period; that Germany’s economic collapse could be safely, and indeed profitably, managed; that the British empire could be peaceably dismantled; and that modest balance-of-payments credit support was sufficient to reestablish global trade. These had been based on “misconceptions of the state of the world around us,” future secretary of state Dean Acheson reflected, “both in anticipating postwar conditions and in recognizing what they actually were when we came face to face with them. . . .

…

Clement Attlee’s Labour Party swept to power on a platform of creating full employment, a National Health Service, and a cradle-to-grave welfare state. “Let us face the future” was the theme of the victorious campaign. Yet the belief remained, even within the Labour leadership, that the country’s strength lay in its past—in (a reformed) empire. “I know that if the British Empire fell,” Foreign Minister Ernest Bevin told the House of Commons in February 1946, “it would be a disaster. I know, further, it would mean that the standard of life of our constituents would fall considerably.”22 But what a difference a year would make. BRITAIN’S NATIONAL DEBT HAVING QUADRUPLED during the war, the strain of policing occupied Europe and restless far-flung colonies had, by 1947, become an intolerable financial burden.

Free World: America, Europe, and the Surprising Future of the West by Timothy Garton Ash

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Albert Einstein, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, centre right, clean water, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, Eratosthenes, European colonialism, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), James Watt: steam engine, Kickstarter, Mikhail Gorbachev, Nelson Mandela, Peace of Westphalia, postnationalism / post nation state, Project for a New American Century, purchasing power parity, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, trade liberalization, Washington Consensus, working poor, working-age population, World Values Survey

He was, noted the diarist Henry “Chips” Channon, “a fanatical Francophil [sic].”49 When he spoke in April 1939 of “a solid identity of interest between the Western democracies,” he meant Britain and France.50 “The French,” he said a month later, “have the finest, though not the largest, army in existence at the present time.”51 Only when that army was so shockingly defeated in June 1940, only when his last, extraordinary offer of a complete political union between France and Britain failed to forestall Pétain’s capitulation to Hitler, did he turn all his efforts to the United States. The way he then conjured the British Empire’s tenuous, tense prewar relationship with America into an enduring Special Relationship (with, for the British if not for Americans, a capital “S” and “R”) was to prove the most enduring Churchillism. If you want a glimpse of the great conjuror at work, read the eyewitness account by H. V. Morton of Churchill’s August 1941 meeting with Roosevelt on Canada’s Placentia Bay.

…

Churchill walked about inspecting every detail, often taking a hand by moving a chair an inch one way or another and by pulling out the folds of the Union Jack.”52 Then, in a radio broadcast, he interpreted his own theatrical production to the world, evoking “that densely packed congregation of fighting men of the same language, of the same faith, of the same fundamental laws, of the same ideals, and now to a large extent of the same interests, and certainly in different degrees facing the same dangers.” They represented “two major groupings of the human family, the British Empire and the United States, who, fortunately for the progress of mankind, happen to speak the same language and very largely think the same thoughts, or anyhow think a lot of the same thoughts.”53 Notice how the essential qualifications, “very largely,” “a lot of,” “certainly in different degrees,” are scattered like foam in the wake of a battleship advancing at full speed.

…

He was a founding father of the Council of Europe, the original pan-European organization of democracies, and spent weeks actively involved in its debates. During its meeting at Strasbourg in 1949, he addressed—“Prenez garde! Je vais parler en français”—the largest, most enthusiastic outdoor rally that city had ever seen in the cause of European union.59 He was, however, grandly ambiguous and inconsistent about Britain’s role. Would the British Empire be a benign external “friend and sponsor,” like the United States, as he explained at Zurich, or was it for “France and Britain to take the lead,” as he declared in the Albert Hall in 1947?60 Generally, he stuck with the less committed stance, frustrating practical enthusiasts of European integration such as Jean Monnet.

The Domestic Revolution by Ruth Goodman

air gap, British Empire, clean water, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, haute cuisine, James Watt: steam engine, period drama, trade route, upwardly mobile

It can be done of course – if you have the time, wood supplies and relevant skill – but it is neither convenient nor easy. That which had been a simple, basic dish back home, well within the skills of any cook or housewife accustomed to coal, frequently went disastrously wrong when attempted over wood in some distant corner of the British Empire. The mistress had scant experience of cooking over wood, and her local servants had no experience of the dishes and methods she was asking them to re-create. Indeed, they were being asked to do something technically awkward, and their chances of success were slim. Many people, in search of the taste of home-cooking halfway around the world, went to the enormous expense of hauling familiar cooking equipment to their new homes.

…

Wood burnt within them has to be well seasoned and chopped into quite small sections, and the fire needs frequent feeding. Because wood burns at a lower temperature, bringing that whole big mass of iron up to temperature for cooking a meal is a very slow process, much slower than when the same range is fired by coal. The exported foods of the British Empire – beef stew and dumplings, spotted dick, toad in the hole, rice pudding, boiled beef and carrots, apple crumble or a festive dinner of roast turkey and Christmas pudding – all relied on the long, rolling boil of a pot on top of a cast-iron range, or the red-hot iron oven at its side. The range had to be really hot to provide this sort of cooking, and it needed to stay hot for a long period.

…

In 1600 white Castile soap, you may remember, retailed at 6d a pound; in 1833, it was still selling at 6d a pound – even after taxes and two centuries’ of general price inflation. In 1600 you could have bought six loaves of bread for the price of a pound of soap; in 1833 you would have got not much more than half a loaf. When Robert Montgomery Martin published his political and economic discussion Taxation of the British Empire in 1833–4, he argued that soap was a commodity ‘of essential importance to the cleanliness and comfort of the people’. He may well have been entirely unaware that there were effective alternatives for cleaning available and still in daily use in those remote pockets where the waterways and railways were not yet delivering cheap coal.

What We Owe the Future: A Million-Year View by William MacAskill

Ada Lovelace, agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, Bartolomé de las Casas, Bletchley Park, British Empire, Brownian motion, carbon footprint, carbon tax, charter city, clean tech, coronavirus, COVID-19, cuban missile crisis, decarbonisation, deep learning, DeepMind, Deng Xiaoping, different worldview, effective altruism, endogenous growth, European colonialism, experimental subject, feminist movement, framing effect, friendly AI, global pandemic, GPT-3, hedonic treadmill, Higgs boson, income inequality, income per capita, Indoor air pollution, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Islamic Golden Age, iterative process, Jeff Bezos, job satisfaction, lab leak, Lao Tzu, Large Hadron Collider, life extension, lockdown, long peace, low skilled workers, machine translation, Mars Rover, negative emissions, Nick Bostrom, nuclear winter, OpenAI, Peter Singer: altruism, Peter Thiel, QWERTY keyboard, Robert Gordon, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stanislav Petrov, stem cell, Steven Pinker, strong AI, synthetic biology, total factor productivity, transatlantic slave trade, Tyler Cowen, William MacAskill, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

Clarkson in turn convinced the parliamentarian William Wilberforce to become the political leader of the British abolitionist movement.44 Working together with formerly enslaved people such as Olaudah Equiano and Ottobah Cugoano, who formed the Sons of Africa—Britain’s first Black political organization45—the abolitionists’ campaign in Britain was enormously successful. Britain’s parliament was persuaded to abolish the slave trade in 1807 and to make owning people illegal across most of the British Empire in 1833.46 After 1807 the British government resolved to stamp out slave trading worldwide. They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas.47 This made it harder for slave ships to travel between West Africa, the United States, and the American and Caribbean colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland.

…

They used diplomacy and bribery to persuade other nations to ban the transatlantic slave trade and used the Royal Navy’s West Africa Squadron to police the seas.47 This made it harder for slave ships to travel between West Africa, the United States, and the American and Caribbean colonies of France, Spain, Portugal, and Holland. The campaign ultimately captured more than two thousand slave ships and freed over two hundred thousand enslaved people, although those freed were often exploited in other ways and sent to work across the British Empire.48 The abolition of slavery was an example of a values change, by which I mean a change in the moral attitudes of a society, or in how those attitudes are implemented and enforced. In my view, the abolition of slavery was one of the most important values changes in all of history. Over the course of this chapter and the next, I’ll argue that changing society’s values is particularly important from a longtermist perspective.

…

In the years leading up to abolition, British colonies produced more sugar than the rest of the world combined, and Britain consumed the most sugar of any country.85 When slavery was abolished, the shelf price of sugar increased by about 50 percent, costing the British public £21 million over seven years—about 5 percent of British expenditure at the time.86 Indeed, the slave trade was booming rather than declining: even though Britain had abolished its slave trade in 1807, more Africans were taken in the transatlantic slave trade between 1821 and 1830 than in any other decade except the 1780s.87 The British government paid off British slave owners in order to pass the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, which gradually freed the enslaved across most of the British Empire.88 This cost the British government £20 million, amounting to 40 percent of the Treasury’s annual expenditure at the time.89 To finance the payments, the British government took out a £15 million loan, which was not fully paid back until 2015. The economic interpretation of abolition also struggles to explain the activist approach that Britain took to the slave trade after 1807.

Scots and Catalans: Union and Disunion by J. H. Elliott

active measures, agricultural Revolution, banking crisis, British Empire, centre right, land tenure, mass immigration, mobile money, new economy, North Sea oil, Red Clydeside, sharing economy, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, work culture

It was faced, too, by the no less ‘provincial’ society of eighteenth-century Catalonia as it struggled to find its place in a Spain dominated by Castile. The Scots had the advantage over the Catalans of being actively involved in the construction of a global empire, and one that defined itself not as English but as British. It was as the Scottish members of a British Empire rapidly outpacing that of Spain – an empire that could take pride in its unique blend of freedom, religious tolerance and commercial enterprise – that they would be able to make their mark in the world. 116 They were British, but not English, while still remaining patriotic Scots. The options available to eighteenth-century Catalans were less immediately attractive.

…

Forward-looking Catalans like Capmany rejected ‘provincialism’, or anything that smacked of federalism, as threatening the unity of the Spanish nation. 49 The two national communities of Scotland and Catalonia, however, would take very different paths over the course of the century as they grappled with the consequences of industrialization and sought to affirm their distinctive identities in a political and economic environment much less favourable to consensus in Spain than in Britain. Industrialization and Its Consequences Massive Scottish participation in the construction of the British Empire from the middle of the eighteenth century onwards did much to reconcile Scots at many levels of society to the fact of Union. It also strengthened their dual patriotism as loyal members of the new British state that had been created in 1707 and also as loyal Scots who could take a justifiable pride in a national contribution to Britain’s international power and overseas expansion out of all proportion to the size of their population.

…

One was to demand a reorganization of the state along the federal lines advocated by Pi i Margall, and a second was to seek a form of home rule within a more or less centralized state. While Pi was himself a doctrinaire liberal, an important practical precedent for this second option had been set by the British North America Act of 1867, which made Canada a self-governing entity within the British Empire. 7 The war in Cuba, breaking out in 1868 and brought to a temporary close ten years later by a proposal from the Spanish authorities for a form of autonomy that came to nothing, showed that home rule, as a possible solution to the problems of Spain and its overseas possessions, was at least an option deserving of serious consideration.

Happy Valley: The Story of the English in Kenya by Nicholas Best

British Empire, Cape to Cairo, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Etonian, lateral thinking, out of africa, Scramble for Africa

Although Thomson had been prepared to wander through Masai Land simply for the hell of it, the hard-nosed businessmen of the Royal Geographical Society who had put up the cash for his expedition were far more interested in what might come of it in the way of trade. Trade, and ensuing profit for the motherland, was the only reason for the existence of the British Empire. The great powers of Europe were beginning to look towards Africa as a massive counter in the absorbing game of politics. Thomson’s journey raised the question of just how much profit could be squeezed from this vast new territory, at present under no country’s sphere of influence. Thomson himself, a romantic pure and simple, vigorously opposed the idea of opening up the area to commerce.

…

If he could divert stores and badly needed troops from the Western Front and bog them down in the malarial and disease-ridden bush of East Africa, he would be doing more than his bit for his country. He acted swiftly. Immediately after the shelling of Dar-es-Salaam by the Astraea and Pegasus, a small force of commandos crossed into Kenya, the only part of the British Empire to be invaded by Germans during the entire war. They had orders to blow up railway bridges, cut telegraph wire and confuse the enemy. The men were led by Tom von Prince, a Scotsman with a German mother, who had taken service with the Germans after being turned down for a commission by the British army.

…

Von Lettow’s men obeyed the order with alacrity. Whenever the invading British moved forward in strength, the Germans would linger just long enough to inflict heavy casualties before slipping away into the bush, leaving their enemies to pick up the pieces and plod on with the advance as best they could. By January 1916 the number of British Empire troops on active service in East Africa had swelled from a few thousand to two divisions, totalling more than thirty thousand men. A large percentage of these lost their lives during the campaign, not from enemy action, but from disease. If malaria did not claim them, then bacillary or amoebic dysentery did.

Pax Technica: How the Internet of Things May Set Us Free or Lock Us Up by Philip N. Howard

Aaron Swartz, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Berlin Wall, bitcoin, blood diamond, Bretton Woods, Brian Krebs, British Empire, butter production in bangladesh, call centre, Chelsea Manning, citizen journalism, Citizen Lab, clean water, cloud computing, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, digital map, Edward Snowden, en.wikipedia.org, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Google Earth, Hacker News, Howard Rheingold, income inequality, informal economy, information security, Internet of things, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kibera, Kickstarter, land reform, M-Pesa, Marshall McLuhan, megacity, Mikhail Gorbachev, mobile money, Mohammed Bouazizi, national security letter, Nelson Mandela, Network effects, obamacare, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, packet switching, pension reform, prediction markets, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, spectrum auction, statistical model, Stuxnet, Tactical Technology Collective, technological determinism, trade route, Twitter Arab Spring, undersea cable, uranium enrichment, WikiLeaks, zero day

The botnet that Amanda exposed could be very destructive if it is ever used, and some might even see her as a threat because she was fooling around with the world’s device networks. Still, in exposing these dark secrets, Amanda revealed a lot about what our internet is becoming. What’s in a Pax? The Pax Britannica was a period of history, between Napoleon’s defeat and World War I, during which the British Empire managed global affairs. London was the center of power, the British navy controlled the most important sea-trading routes, and relatively efficient bureaucracies put the world’s resources and people into the Empire’s service. Several aspects of the Pax Britannica may actually describe our future as much as that moment of our past.

…

The British were strong because their network infrastructure gave them unparalleled levels of political, economic, and cultural control. The Pax Britannica was hardly a period of universal peace—it was a period of stability more than peace. There were nasty, violent brushfire wars throughout the British Empire as poor communities resisted the oppression of colonial masters. Rival kings, separatist movements, nationalist causes, and radical socialists (and anarchists, for that matter) constantly challenged the authority of the British crown. When the Pax Britannica finally waned in the middle of the twentieth century, these conflicts between allies and challengers had lasted more than a century and cost millions of lives.

…

It was an extensive network, but good roads and public works projects ended where the Visigoths began. Rome was not and could not be everywhere. Having power during the Pax Romana meant having some control over the nodes in the Empire’s networks, and as a city, Rome was the confluence of these networks of power. Similarly, in the British Empire, London served as the node, and the big corporate players all managed their affairs from the capital. The fashions, designs, and innovations of London radiated outward to the colonial seats of British power. Cultural exports from the United States were an important part of the Pax Americana: Hollywood movies, television programs, music, and advertising techniques had a significant impact on the values of viewers, listeners, and consumers around the world.

QI: The Third Book of General Ignorance (Qi: Book of General Ignorance) by John Lloyd, John Mitchinson

Albert Einstein, Apollo 11, Boris Johnson, British Empire, California gold rush, cognitive dissonance, Cornelius Vanderbilt, dark matter, double helix, epigenetics, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Johannes Kepler, Kickstarter, music of the spheres, Neil Armstrong, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, Ronald Reagan, The Wisdom of Crowds, trade route

Alternatively known as moss mites or beetle mites, they can also pull something 530 times their own weight up a vertical surface, using only two of their eight legs. To test this, researchers from the University of Tübingen fixed the mites to a pin with superglue and measured how much force it took to pull them off. Isn’t science fun! STEPHEN What would you say if I said to you that the British Empire was built on diarrhoea? RICH HALL I’d say you were full of shit. Any word that ends in ‘rhoea’ is just bad news, isn’t it? Diarrhoea, pyorrhoea, gonorrhoea. North Korea. What’s the worst thing a swan can do to you? A number of alarming things, but it can’t break your arm. Swans may make threatening noises but your arms are safe with them.

…

You could have corrugated iron stables, gymnasia, hunting lodges, billiard rooms and laundries. In 1890 the catalogue of David Rowell & Co. was offering a cricket pavilion for £63.50 (£6,000 today), a two-storey cottage for £166 (£16,000 today) or a theatre for £695 (£67,000 today). Corrugated iron churches (or ‘tin tabernacles’) sprang up all over the British Empire: several are still in use as listed buildings today. The craze reached its height in 1851, when Prince Albert ordered a corrugated iron ballroom for Balmoral Castle. It’s still there, now used as a carpenter’s workshop. It wasn’t universally popular. William Morris, founder of the Arts and Crafts Movement, wrote that it was spreading ‘like pestilence over the country’, and some bishops were reluctant to consecrate iron churches.

…

As well as Pacific, Mountain, Central and Eastern times on the US mainland, it has Alaska time, Hawaii time and zones that cover its possessions in the Pacific: American Samoa, Guam and the US Virgin Islands. Canada stretches over six time zones and Russia 11, but it’s on the French empire that the sun nowadays never sets. It’s still true that the sun never sets on the British Empire – but only just. The UK currently covers nine time zones. The most easterly is the British Indian Ocean Territory, a collection of atolls midway between Indonesia and Tanzania and home to the Diego Garcia military base. It is six hours ahead of the UK. The most westerly is the Pitcairn Islands, and it’s thanks to these four tiny volcanic islands in the Pacific, inhabited by descendants of the mutineers from the Bounty, that the British can still make this claim.

Water: A Biography by Giulio Boccaletti

active transport: walking or cycling, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, conceptual framework, Corn Laws, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Deng Xiaoping, energy transition, financial engineering, Great Leap Forward, invisible hand, John Snow's cholera map, joint-stock company, land reform, land tenure, linear programming, loose coupling, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, means of production, Medieval Warm Period, megaproject, Mohammed Bouazizi, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, oil shock, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peace of Westphalia, phenotype, scientific management, South China Sea, Suez crisis 1956, text mining, the long tail, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade route, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Part I of this book follows the dialectic relationship between the water landscape and human society from the neolithic to classical antiquity, showing how it contributed to shaping statehood. Part II then shows how—over a thousand years—antiquity was metabolized by European nations into the modern state. The legal legacy of Rome, classical republicanism, political liberalism, the sirens of utopianism, all mixed to inspire institutions, from the American Republic to the British Empire, which set the stage for the twentieth century. Part III describes how the power of the modern state and the force of industrial capitalism led to the most radical transformation of landscape in history. Its success was so complete as to make society’s relationship with water invisible, hidden under the fabric of modern life, and sowing the seeds of the dangerous illusion that governs the present.

…

It was also to plan the works required to ensure the river continued to be navigable, and it even had recourse to the military vessels of the participating powers in case of need and could enter into loan agreements to finance its works. Nineteenth-century globalization was going to travel on the rivers of the great continent. A Water Legacy The legacy of the British Empire was not just economic or political. The reason rivers are considered central to the historical development of civilization has its roots in British attempts at justifying their own imperial project. Britain’s state religion provided some moral justification for the imperial project. The Church of England adopted Augustinian ideas of a Christian Commonwealth, which nicely fit with the empire’s aspirations of universality.

…

The United States government appointed him to a commission called upon to rule on how to apportion water between Egypt and Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Egypt had become independent in 1922. At that point, the likelihood of an engineered integration of the Nile along the lines of what British engineers had imagined was practically zero. But because Egypt was so central to the security of the British Empire—the Suez Canal was the maritime gateway to India—the British were reluctant to relinquish control. The issue of who had authority over Sudan had been left unresolved at independence, so the British used its upstream position to control the river, creating a powerful point of leverage over the downstream, newly independent nation.

The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power by Daniel Yergin

anti-communist, Ascot racecourse, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, Berlin Wall, book value, British Empire, Carl Icahn, colonial exploitation, Columbine, continuation of politics by other means, cuban missile crisis, disinformation, do-ocracy, energy security, European colonialism, Exxon Valdez, financial independence, fudge factor, geopolitical risk, guns versus butter model, Ida Tarbell, informal economy, It's morning again in America, joint-stock company, junk bonds, land reform, liberal capitalism, managed futures, megacity, Michael Milken, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, new economy, North Sea oil, oil rush, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, old-boy network, postnationalism / post nation state, price stability, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, stock buybacks, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, Thomas Malthus, tontine, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War

Brands, Inside the Cold War: hoy Henderson and the Rise of the American Empire, 1918-1961 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, forthcoming), chap. 18 (fainting spells); Anthony Eden, Full Circle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), p. 219 ("Old Mossy"); Painter, Oil and the American Century, p. 173 ("colonial exploiter"); Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 651 ("great actor"); Interviews with George McGhee and Peter Ramsbotham ("Moslem"); Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978), p. 262; C. M. Woodhouse, Something Ventured (London: Granada, 1982), pp. 113-14; Louis, British Empire, pp. 651-53 ("lunatic" and "cunning"); Paul Nitze, From Hiroshima to Glasnost, pp. 130-37. [7] Interviews; Louis, British Empire, pp. 667-74 ("Suez Canal"); Notes, June 27, 1951, EP 1531/ 870, FO 371/ 91555, PRO (Churchill); Alistair Home, Harold Macmillan, vol. 1, 1894-1956, (New York: Viking, 1988), p. 310; H. W. Brands, "The Cairo-Tehran Connection in Anglo-American Rivalry in the Middle East, 1951-1953," International History Review, 11 (1989), pp. 438-40 ("scuttle and surrender")

…

On Levy's proposals, see Logan memo, July 31,1951, with Minute, July 29,1951, EP 1531/1290, FO 371/ 91575 ("camouflage"); Shepherd to Foreign Office, October 10, 1951, EP 1531/1837, FO 371/91599 (John Kennedy); Cabinet Minutes, July 30, 1951, CM (51), CAB 128/20, PRO. Acheson, Present at the Creation, p. 655; Louis, British Empire, p. 677, n. 5 ("mongrelization" and "dilute"); Walters, Silent Missions, pp. 247-56 ("crafty," "Where else?," "certain principles" and Kashani); FRUS: Iran, 1951-1954, pp. 145 ("dream world"). [9] Louis, British Empire, p. 678 ("jolly good"); Fergusson to Stokes, October 3,1951, with Fergusson to Makins, October 4, 1951, EP 1531/1839, FO 371/91599; Ramsbotham to Logan, August 20, 1951, EP 1531/1391, FO 371/91580, PRO.

…

In his own memoirs, Arnold Wilson offered an epitaph for Reynolds's service: "He was able to endure heat and cold, disappointment and success, and to get the best out of every Persian, Indian, and European with whom he came in contact, except his Scottish employers, whose short-sighted parsimony had so nearly wrecked a great enterprise. ... The service rendered by G. B. Reynolds to the British empire and to British industry and to Persia was never recognized. The men whom he saved from the consequences of their own blindness became very rich, and were honoured in their generation." In firing Reynolds, the directors of Burmah Oil did manage some grudging praise for him, and they gave him a thousand pounds as a token for his troubles.[11] The "Big Company": Anglo-Persian On April 19, 1909, the Glasgow branch of the Bank of Scotland was mobbed by fevered investors.

Lawrence in Arabia: War, Deceit, Imperial Folly and the Making of the Modern Middle East by Scott Anderson

British Empire, centralized clearinghouse, disinformation, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Ford Model T, gentleman farmer, Islamic Golden Age, operational security, Potemkin village, Scramble for Africa, zero-sum game

To that end, they created a labyrinth of information firewalls—deceptions, in a less charitable assessment—to make sure that crucial knowledge was withheld from Britain’s wartime allies and even from many of her own seniormost diplomats and military commanders. Somewhat ironically, one of the first entities to come in for this treatment was the British Empire’s own “jewel in the crown,” British India. By the beginning of the twentieth century, the British Empire had devolved into a unique kind of colonial solar system, a galaxy in which its principal satellites operated with increasing autonomy from the central “star” of Britain. Nowhere was this truer than in India, where the British administration in Simla (as the British government of India was commonly referred to, even though Simla was only its summer capital) pursued its own domestic agenda and, to a remarkable degree, even its own foreign policy.

…

As a student of British history, Colonel Lawrence knew precisely what was about to occur. The pedestal was an investiture stool, upon which he was to kneel as the king performed the elaborate, centuries-old ceremony—the conferring of a sash and the medals on the pillow, the tapping with a sword and the intoning of an oath—that would make him a Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. It was a moment T. E. Lawrence had long dreamed of. As a boy, he was obsessed with medieval history and the tales of King Arthur’s court, and his greatest ambition, he once wrote, was to be knighted by the age of thirty. On that morning, his youthful aspiration was about to be fulfilled. A couple of details added to the honor.

…

If stultifying, this stratification also meant that everyone knew his place, the station in life to which he might reasonably aspire. To the degree possible, social and economic advancement was obtained through the “godly virtues” of modesty, self-reliance, diligence, and thrift. Perhaps the least questioned tenet of the time was the notion that the British Empire now stood at the very apex of modern civilization, and that it was the special burden of this empire to spread its enlightenment—whether through commerce, the Bible, the gun, or some combination of all three—to the world’s less fortunate cultures and races. While this conviction extended to all segments of British society, it had special resonance for the middle class, since it was from precisely this social stratum that the chief custodians of empire—its midlevel military field officers and colonial administrators—were drawn.

The Linguist: A Personal Guide to Language Learning by Steve Kaufmann

borderless world, British Empire, discovery of DNA, financial independence, Great Leap Forward, haute cuisine, language acquisition, South China Sea, trade liberalization, urban sprawl

In Eastern Canada, small permanent settlements of English and French speaking people from Europe eventually expanded across the North American continent, driven by the search for furs and by the desire to find farmland. Canada became a colony of the British Empire in 1763. Soon after, as a result of the American Revolution, Canada received a major influx of Americans who wished to remain loyal to the British Crown: the United Empire Loyalists. This group determined how Canadians speak English today. The majority of immigrants to Canada for the first half of the 19th century were British Protestants who reinforced strong feelings of loyalty to the British Empire, opposition to the United States, and a sense of rivalry with the entrenched French speaking Catholic society of Quebec.

…

Canadian English is a very useful version of English for non-native speakers. It is easily understood and not out of place anywhere in the world. The Immigrant Experience English speaking Canada does not have a powerful distinctiveness. The ever-increasing variety of people who make up English Canada has meant the decline in importance of British Protestantism, the British Empire and British A Personal Guide to Language Learning 141 institutions. There is no longer a typical Canadian name, nor ethnic origin, nor religion. This lack of clear markers is what makes Canadian culture so accessible. Even the relative neutrality of the Canadian accent and the lack of regional accents make it easier for newcomers to blend into Canadian society.

The Last Lingua Franca: English Until the Return of Babel by Nicholas Ostler

barriers to entry, BRICs, British Empire, call centre, en.wikipedia.org, European colonialism, Internet Archive, invention of writing, Isaac Newton, language acquisition, machine translation, Machine translation of "The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak." to Russian and back, mass immigration, Nelson Mandela, open economy, precautionary principle, Republic of Letters, Scramble for Africa, statistical model, trade route, upwardly mobile, Wayback Machine

What has perturbed the even flow of English as it has spread along with the interests of its speaker communities, making it seem to have a life of its own, or rather a life constrained and defined by interests and activities expressed in other languages? Looking round the world for places where English is notable for its rarity, our gaze First lights on three countries that had once hosted massive use of the language, since they were colonies within the British Empire, but have since moved to promote other languages in its place. They are distributed round the Indian Ocean: Malaysia in the east, ri Lanka centrally, and Tanzania in the west. Each of these countries had multiple language communities when the British took over, and so in each of them English might have been considered able to go on playing a convenient, almost natural, role as a neutral lingua-franca for the whole country.

…

In the area that became Tanzania, however, this Swahili language (named from Arabic saw hil ‘coasts’, and referring to itself as kiSwahili) had spread particularly widely as a lingua-franca, originally from the coastal region round Zanzibar. It had been picked up and reinforced by European (mainly German) missionaries’ schools in the nineteenth century and carried on under British administration after 1918. Essentially, it was the de facto lingua-franca in the country that had preceded the British Empire’s widespread introduction of English. Ever since the country became an independent and united state (over the period 1961– 64), its First president, Julius Nyerere, had been keen to promote it as the national language, and an effective lingua-franca for all Tanzanians, bridging the gaps among the more than a hundred languages they spoke with a distinctively African medium that avoided any recourse to the colonial language English.* Luckily for Swahili, in Tanzania there was no tribe or tribes much larger or more dominant than the others, as the Luo or Kikuyu were and are in Kenya, or the Baganda in Uganda.

…

Outside India and China, these developments that favored English-speaking powers had not required them to solicit the cooperation of foreigners who did not speak their language.* By contrast, third parties who wanted to join in had to make themselves understood. Just as Indians and other British colonial citizens who wanted to get a piece of the action in the British Empire had to strive to learn English, so other foreigners too had to take an interest in the language to make contact. Official(and Semi-official) Languages by Size—EU and Global (Credit: Nicholas Ostler, based on Eurobarometer data) Western Powers’ Shares of World Manufacturing, 1750–1900.

The Transformation Of Ireland 1900-2000 by Diarmaid Ferriter

anti-communist, Bob Geldof, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, collective bargaining, deliberate practice, edge city, falling living standards, financial independence, ghettoisation, greed is good, hiring and firing, housing crisis, immigration reform, income per capita, land reform, manufacturing employment, moral panic, New Journalism, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, open economy, Plato's cave, postnationalism / post nation state, sensible shoes, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban renewal, wage slave, women in the workforce

The republican Fenian movement of the nineteenth century, dedicated to overthrowing British rule in Ireland when circumstances would permit, was undergoing a process of rejuvenation, and the Irish Parliamentary Party reunited in 1900, after experiencing division and faction in the 1890s. The outbreak of the Boer War in 1899 provided advanced Irish nationalists with an opportunity to galvanise anti-British and pro-Boer sentiment, and to suggest there were lessons to be learned regarding how to take on the might of the British Empire. But it was also the case that thousands of Irish men were loyal servants of the army of that empire, whether out of conviction or economic necessity. The aged Queen Victoria visited Ireland in 1900, for the first time in thirty-seven years, and although advanced nationalists protested loudly, she was well received by most.

…

The most recent research suggests that the Irish ‘cultural revival’ of this period was a relatively coherent mass movement, despite differences in religion, class, gender and political conviction. But far from political pessimism, there was also, among the educated Catholic elite, a dynamism and confident outlook, with a vision of a Home Rule Ireland taking a central place in the British Empire.1 Alongside this, a nationalist tradition stretching back two centuries was being communicated to a newly literate mass audience, and sometimes reinterpreted. One aspect of that tradition was a belief in the use of violence to achieve Irish independence from Britain. Adherents of the various philosophies of Irish nationalism were exceptionally active in the opening decade of the twentieth century, and often borrowed freely from each other’s discourse.2 A year after the death of Parnell, in 1892, a small pamphlet was published in Dublin entitled Ireland in the Twentieth Century, in which the writer T.

…

Regarding his duties in the early days, he remembered a quiet time, occasionally punctuated by drink-induced disorder: ‘whiskey was popular, cheap and deadly … a man with a shilling in his pocket could quickly get fighting drunk … so the police had their hands full at every public gathering.’84 There were 27,000 soldiers stationed in Ireland in 1900 in addition to 12,000 armed RIC men, making Ireland the most densely militarised area of the British Empire in peacetime. The mobilisation caused by the Boer War undoubtedly hardened moderate opinion against the Empire, and helped the radicals in Irish politics to reach a wider audience, but it also obliged many Irish soldiers to fight against the Boers. David Fitzpatrick makes the point that in the early twentieth century ‘the common rhetoric of militarism transcended political divisions in Ireland throughout the turmoil of the period between the Anglo-Boer war of 1899–1902 and the Anglo-Irish settlement of 1921–2.

The Pursuit of Power: Europe, 1815-1914 by Richard J. Evans

agricultural Revolution, Albert Einstein, Alfred Russel Wallace, Anton Chekhov, British Empire, clean water, company town, Corn Laws, demographic transition, Edward Jenner, Ernest Rutherford, Etonian, European colonialism, feminist movement, Ford Model T, full employment, gentleman farmer, germ theory of disease, glass ceiling, Great Leap Forward, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, imperial preference, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial cluster, Isaac Newton, it's over 9,000, Jacquard loom, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, joint-stock company, Khartoum Gordon, land bank, land reform, land tenure, Livingstone, I presume, longitudinal study, Louis Blériot, Louis Daguerre, Louis Pasteur, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, mittelstand, Monroe Doctrine, moral panic, New Urbanism, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, profit motive, railway mania, Ralph Waldo Emerson, safety bicycle, Scaled Composites, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, source of truth, spinning jenny, strikebreaker, Suez canal 1869, the scientific method, Thomas Malthus, trade route, University of East Anglia, Upton Sinclair, urban renewal, vertical integration

A frenzy of cable-laying followed, and by 1871 punters in Calcutta could learn the result of the Derby no more than five minutes after the famous horse race was over. The scale of the British Empire and the dominance of British industry ensured that in 1890 nearly two-thirds of the telegraph lines in the world were owned by British companies, which controlled 97,000 miles of cables. But the influence of the system extended far beyond the British Empire. The growth of the new global communication networks meant, as the Hungarian writer Max Nordau (1849–1923) noted in 1892, that the simplest villager now had a wider geographical horizon than a head of government a century before.

…

Some 60,000 South Asians were sent to Fiji to work between 1879 and 1920, 25,000 to Mauritius, and 30,000 to build Kenya’s railways in the 1890s, more than a third of them suffering death or serious injury during the construction. The total number of South Asians, almost all of them Indian, working across the British Empire by 1900 totalled more than a million. Sometimes they were sent across vast distances to replace the slave labour that had now become illegal: nearly 75,000 Indians arrived in Trinidad between 1874 and 1915 in this way. The spread of Indian labour across the British Empire indicated its global nature, but it also caused disruption to Indian communities on the subcontinent, and led to racial tensions in some colonies, notably Fiji.

…

By 1912, FIAT, now a public company in which Agnelli owned most of the shares, was making a new cheap car, the Model Zero, production of which accelerated from 150 vehicles in 1903 to 4,500 in 1914. Britain could not keep up. In 1890, Frederick Simms (1863–1944), a businessman and engineer who invented the word ‘petrol’ and the term ‘motor car’ and founded the Royal Automobile Club, acquired the United Kingdom and British Empire rights for a high-speed petrol engine devised by the German inventor Gottlieb Daimler (1834–1900), although he used it at first to make motor launches. In 1896, Simms opened a factory producing Daimler cars. He also invented and built the first armoured car in 1899. Others followed suit, most notably Herbert Austin (1866–1941), who is generally credited with building the first all-British car.

Catch-67: The Left, the Right, and the Legacy of the Six-Day War by Micah Goodman

Boycotts of Israel, British Empire, European colonialism, mass immigration, one-state solution, public intellectual, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Zionism lacks some of the most basic characteristics of a classical colonial movement. First and foremost, the Zionists had no motherland sending them to a foreign land to exploit its resources. The British Empire did indeed support Zionism at the close of World War I, but Britain eventually surrendered to Arab pressure and turned its back on Zionism on the eve of World War II, almost totally halting Jewish immigration to Israel. At the end of the day, the Jewish state was created not through the benevolence of the British Empire but through a violent struggle against it. Many Israelis think of themselves as refugees from Europe, or even orphans of Europe, but certainly not emissaries of Europe. 5.

…

This is of course a generalization that does not always hold true, but in Israel today an almost direct correlation exists between being right-wing and being religious. Things were not always this way. None of the founding fathers of Religious Zionism treated sovereignty over the whole Land of Israel as sacrosanct. Rabbi Yaakov Reines, who founded Religious Zionism in its political form, supported the Uganda Plan—the proposal by the British Empire in the early twentieth century to create a national home for the Jews in eastern Africa. The founder of the movement that would vigorously reject relinquishing parts of the Land of Israel was himself willing to concede the entire land.1 Later, the minister representing the National Religious Party, Haim-Moshe Shapira, strongly objected to Israel’s launching the Six-Day War.

…

Israel is the instrument of the Zionist movement, and geographical base for world imperialism placed strategically in the midst of the Arab homeland to combat the hopes of the Arab nation for liberation, unity, and progress.2 This perception finds a certain justification in the statements of some of the early Zionists, who initially conceived of a Jewish state as a force for extending the borders of Europe into Asia.3 The Zionists, in this narrative, were the emissaries of the British Empire, and when the imperial hegemon began to falter, they struck an alliance with the American empire instead. For many Palestinians, the confrontation with Israel is a confrontation with a world power that is greater than Israel.4 At the same time, many Israelis feel that their confrontation with the Palestinians is a confrontation with a historic force that is greater than the Palestinians.

Pacific: Silicon Chips and Surfboards, Coral Reefs and Atom Bombs, Brutal Dictators, Fading Empires, and the Coming Collision of the World's Superpowers by Simon Winchester

9 dash line, Albert Einstein, Boeing 747, BRICs, British Empire, California gold rush, classic study, colonial rule, company town, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Easter island, Frank Gehry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Korean Air Lines Flight 007, Kwajalein Atoll, land tenure, Larry Ellison, Loma Prieta earthquake, Maui Hawaii, Monroe Doctrine, ocean acidification, oil shock, polynesian navigation, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, Silicon Valley, South China Sea, The Day the Music Died, three-masted sailing ship, trade route, transcontinental railway, UNCLOS, UNCLOS, undersea cable, uranium enrichment

Yet so many glorious beginnings were inevitably followed by as many inglorious endings—with the result that all these various powers have retreated from the ocean, leaving the Pacific now almost entirely to its own devices, to be run by its own people. The graceful Cunarder RMS Queen Elizabeth, shown in her glamorous heyday and at her sad sabotaged demise in Hong Kong, had a thirty-three-year life, which marked the beginning of the decline and fall of the British Empire.* [Associated Press; Louis Gardella.] The foreigners’ first withdrawals from the ocean began, effectively, in the mid-1950s, when France came to accept the reality that its once great Southeast Asian peninsular landholding “Indochine” was no more, and had to be returned. For the next forty years, farewell ceremonies seemed to be held almost monthly, with alien flags lowered and swansdown plumes, helmets, and swords being loaded into cabin trunks and sent home to London, Lisbon, Paris, The Hague, and Washington, from islands and outposts dotted in and around the gigantic blue space of sea.

…

Then, at once, they began to notice that all along the ranks of portholes, from the ship’s stem to her very stern, and on three of her decks, black, oily smoke started streaming out into the clear winter air. This joined into a cloud, which the morning breeze blew in their direction. Within minutes, the lunching hundreds could smell an acrid, chemical, greasy industrial smoke, heavy and sinister. The greatest old ship of the British Empire was on fire. But no fireboats came, not right away. A local accountant was giving his English fiancée’s parents a Sunday boat ride around the harbor, and the four of them stayed, entranced, for three hours. For the first hour no rescue craft came, and they watched with amazement as the blazes consolidated, as explosions began to rock the ship, and as curtains of fire began to race uncontrollably along the vast superstructure.

…

The British forces who then took part in the flag lowering, moments before midnight, looked by contrast worn, weary, and unkempt, their uniforms still damp from the rainstorm, their performance to be seen as either shabbily charming or unhappily threadbare. The June 1997 night of Hong Kong’s long-awaited “retrocession” from the British Empire was cold and rainswept, drenching the ceremonial and those who attended, and making for an unseemly end to Britain’s presence in the North Pacific.* [FormAsia.] Once the flag was down, Hong Kong was no longer a British colony; and the governor’s formal telegram was transmitted to the queen, a relinquishment done, the retrocession achieved, the ills of the Opium Wars overturned and finished with.

Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism by Quinn Slobodian

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, Berlin Wall, bilateral investment treaty, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, central bank independence, classic study, collective bargaining, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Doha Development Round, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, floating exchange rates, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Greenspan put, Gunnar Myrdal, Hernando de Soto, invisible hand, liberal capitalism, liberal world order, Mahbub ul Haq, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, Mercator projection, Mont Pelerin Society, Norbert Wiener, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Pearl River Delta, Philip Mirowski, power law, price mechanism, public intellectual, quantitative easing, random walk, rent control, rent-seeking, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, special economic zone, statistical model, Suez crisis 1956, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Chicago School, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, urban renewal, Washington Consensus, Wolfgang Streeck, zero-sum game

On the one hand, they condemned the kind of empire that conflated the administration of an overseas territory with preferred access to its resources as itself being an insidious variety of economic nationalism. On the other hand, they looked wistfully back at the Habsburg Empire for supposedly balancing the demands of multiple nationalities while maintaining an internally ­free economic territory. They also praised the British Empire of the nineteenth ­century for preserving ­f ree trade in its colonial markets for all comers. The laudable model of free-­trade empire was promoted at the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, when the gathered Eu­ro­pean powers vowed to cooperate to preserve f­ ree commerce in the African continent and maintain what Mises praised in 1919 as “the open door for economic activity of all nations” in the Congo basin.11 The spirit of Open Door empire lived on in the League of Nations mandate system, which proposed a gradual movement of colonies ­toward self-­determination ­under the watchful eye of supranational authorities.12 The director (1920–1924) and l­ater member of the Mandates Commission (1924–1939) was the impresario of early neoliberalism, William Rappard, director of the Gradu­ate Institute of International Studies, who brought both Mises and Röpke to Geneva in the 1930s and hosted key lecture series by Hayek and Lionel Robbins in the same de­cade.

…

In their own variations on this theme, neoliberals ­imagined the end of empire managed by a supranational state that could override national sovereignty to protect global f­ree trade and ­f ree capital flows. The realization of the 1930s for neoliberals was that the self-­ regulating market was a myth. The foundations of world economic order—­t he gold standard, commercial treaties, and the Open Door policies of the British Empire—­were glaring in their absence. The world economy would not reproduce itself without concerted po­liti­cal effort. Instead of envisioning a return to empire, however, neoliberals acknowledged that the era of the nation was irreversible. The secret was how to keep the nation but defang it. How could nations be sapped of their power to disrupt the world economy?

…

On that day they parted com­pany.”28 The imagination from which Bonn spoke on that day in London in 1933 was shared by the neoliberals, including his colleagues Robbins and Hayek at the LSE and Röpke, who praised Bonn and likely was inspired to title his 1942 book International Economic Disintegration partially by the subtitle of Bonn’s 1938 monograph The Crumbling of Empire: The Disintegration of World Economy.29 Like Bonn, the neoliberals had a differentiated attitude t­oward empire. They saw a chasm between, on the one hand, the many bad empires that protected their colonial trade and saw the world economy as a zero-­sum container of finite resources, and, on the other hand, the single good empire of the British that promoted ­free trade and sound money. They saw the British Empire as the polestar of the first age of globalization from 1870 to 1914. The belief that the British had betrayed economic universalism since 1931 ­under the class pressures of or­ga­nized ­labor and the intellectual seductions of Keynesianism led them to think hard about what a new organ­izing princi­ple and an organ­izing force could be in a world ­after free-­trade empire ­under the indirect rule of the City of London.

When They Go Low, We Go High: Speeches That Shape the World – and Why We Need Them by Philip Collins

anti-communist, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, collective bargaining, Copley Medal, Corn Laws, crony capitalism, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, Donald Trump, F. W. de Klerk, fear of failure, Fellow of the Royal Society, full employment, Great Leap Forward, invention of the printing press, Jeremy Corbyn, late capitalism, Mahatma Gandhi, meritocracy, Mikhail Gorbachev, Monroe Doctrine, Neil Armstrong, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, plutocrats, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, Rosa Parks, stakhanovite, Ted Sorensen, Thomas Malthus, Torches of Freedom, World Values Survey

says the German Chancellor. ‘A scrap of paper.’ Have you any five-pound notes about you? I am not calling for them. Have you any of those neat little Treasury pound notes? If you have, burn them; they are only ‘scraps of paper’. What are they made of ? Rags. What are they worth? The whole credit of the British Empire. ‘Scraps of paper’ … Treaties are the currency of international statesmanship … This doctrine of the scrap of paper … that treaties only bind a nation as long as it is to its interest, goes to the root of public law. It is the straight road to barbarism and the whole machinery of civilisation will break down if this doctrine wins in this war.

…

The implication is that the same will happen again. We do not yet know what will happen in France or whether the French resistance will be prolonged, both in France and in the French Empire overseas … However matters may go in France or with the French Government, or other French Governments, we in this Island and in the British Empire will never lose our sense of comradeship with the French people. If we are now called upon to endure what they have been suffering, we shall emulate their courage, and if final victory rewards our toils they shall share the gains, aye, and freedom shall be restored to all. We abate nothing of our just demands; not one jot or tittle do we recede.

…

But if we fail, then the whole world, including the United States, including all that we have known and cared for, will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, and perhaps more protracted, by the lights of perverted science. Let us therefore brace ourselves to our duties, and so bear ourselves that, if the British Empire and its Commonwealth last for a thousand years, men will still say, ‘This was their finest hour.’ For the first time Churchill stops reporting and raises himself to his full rhetorical height. Note, though, that a grand message does not demand grandiose language. Three-quarters of the words in this section are monosyllables.

A United Ireland: Why Unification Is Inevitable and How It Will Come About by Kevin Meagher

Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Celtic Tiger, cognitive dissonance, colonial rule, deindustrialization, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, kremlinology, land reform, Nelson Mandela, period drama, Right to Buy, trade route, transaction costs

The same day, at a Gaelic football match in Dublin’s Croke Park, British soldiers, ostensibly preparing to search men leaving the ground, opened fire on the crowd, killing fourteen people including two boys aged ten and eleven. The events of 21 November 1920 became known as ‘Bloody Sunday’. (Again, Irish history repeats itself and there would be another, even more infamous, Bloody Sunday to come.) In 1922, a treaty was negotiated that would see an Irish Free State established, under the British Empire, while six counties of the historic province of Ulster would split off to form Northern Ireland. The treaty was narrowly supported in the Dáil, although it couldn’t stop civil war breaking out in Ireland between those for and against it. Eventually Irish Free State forces prevailed. The treaty was implemented and Northern Ireland went its own way.

…

So it split the difference, granting independence over most of the country to a Republican insurgency it could not supress, while creating a protectorate for loyalists it didn’t love but felt it owed. For a state whose empire then covered two-thirds of the globe, it was a large, humiliating concession. The Easter Rising of 1916, a week-long insurrection by armed Republicans against British rule, began a process of events which, in time, would signify the beginning of the end of the British Empire, with countless other national liberation movements taking their lead from Ireland’s example. So it’s hardly surprising that a succession of governments paid little attention to the vestigial statelet of Northern Ireland, a painful reminder of a national humiliation. In return, members of Northern Ireland’s idiosyncratic political class were given carte blanche to run their affairs as they saw fit.

…

RESETTING THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN BRITAIN AND A UNITED IRELAND T he Easter Rising, the week-long insurrection by Irish Republicans in Dublin in April 1916, triggered a sequence of events that eventually led to the creation of the Irish Free State and the establishment of Northern Ireland. It is something of a secret history to most people on the other side of the Irish Sea. This is remiss, given it also effectively symbolised the beginning of the end of the British Empire. The total loss of control in Dublin, even for just a week, was a wounding humiliation for Britain. If uppity Nationalists could bring the second city of the empire to its knees, nothing would ever be the same again. And, indeed, it never was. The event inspired countless other national liberation movements throughout the twentieth century.

America in the World by Robert B. Zoellick

Albert Einstein, anti-communist, banking crisis, battle of ideas, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, British Empire, classic study, Corn Laws, coronavirus, cuban missile crisis, defense in depth, Deng Xiaoping, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, energy security, European colonialism, facts on the ground, Fall of the Berlin Wall, foreign exchange controls, Great Leap Forward, guns versus butter model, hypertext link, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, Isaac Newton, Joseph Schumpeter, land reform, linear model of innovation, Mikhail Gorbachev, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Monroe Doctrine, mutually assured destruction, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Paul Samuelson, public intellectual, RAND corporation, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, scientific management, Scramble for Africa, Silicon Valley, Strategic Defense Initiative, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transcontinental railway, undersea cable, Vannevar Bush, War on Poverty

The United States is likely to continue to pursue the promise of Western Hemispheric partnerships. Second, America’s trading, transnational, and technological relations have defined the country’s political and even security ties—as well as its economic links—with the rest of the world. The United States arose out of protest against the British Empire’s infringement of liberties, including taxes on trade. From America’s founding, the country drew a connection between economic and political freedoms and embraced the idea that private parties should be the agents of commerce. America’s merchants became practitioners of a new type of transnational internationalism.

…

The territories would enjoy self-government at each phase, based on universal white, male suffrage; there would be little interference by the national government. At the time, only Pennsylvania’s constitution recognized such a democratic electorate. The territories would share obligations for the Confederation’s debt and for the common defense.4 Jefferson did not want the expansion of the United States to repeat the mistakes of the British Empire by creating second-class colonies. Jefferson’s suggested names for the new territorial-states were a mixture of Native American, classical, and honorific; most, including Cheronesus, Assenispia, and Polypotamia, fortunately fell into history’s wastebasket. But Illinois, Michigan, and Washington received their launch from Jefferson’s report.

…

He wrote to a friend that the United States opposed China’s dismemberment and that American public opinion would not support a grab for “spoliation,” “but for the present we think our best policy is one of vigilant protection of our commercial interests without formal alliances.” Neither recent immigrants from Ireland and Germany, nor foreign policy traditionalists, would like the idea of an alliance with London on behalf of the British Empire.29 During the summer of 1899, Alfred Hippisley, a Briton on leave from his post as inspector of maritime customs in China, visited his old friend Rockhill and Hay. Hippisley followed up with a letter to Rockhill that offered a practical step. The foreign powers controlled the collection of Chinese tariffs within their spheres of influence.

Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Berlin Wall, British Empire, centre right, clean water, operation paperclip, post-war consensus, V2 rocket, wikimedia commons, éminence grise

Just two years earlier, at Yalta, Churchill had striven to preserve the integrity of the British Empire. Now, the sun was rapidly setting on the country’s imperial dominions. On 20 February, the prime minister announced to the House of Commons that Britain would be leaving India ‘by a date not later than June 1948’. Ceylon and Burma would follow soon after. Nor was the situation any easier closer to home. Ernest Bevin announced that Britain could no longer provide essential financial aid to Greece and Turkey, while the problem of Palestine was referred to the United Nations after two decades of British rule. The British Empire seemed to be on the brink of collapse, with the mother country so destitute that it was unable to halt the decline.

…

‘I have noticed a tendency to regard Communists with suspicion almost automatically,’ he said, before informing them that the Soviets had ‘many sincere and able men among them, who have a valuable contribution to make’. His team were to be flag-bearers for Britain’s role in the post-war world, something that concerned Hinde as much as it did Churchill: ‘The example we set is a matter of the greatest importance. The prestige of the British Empire has never been higher than it is today, and it is up to us to see that in no case are we instrumental in lowering it.’10 As he eyed up his full-blooded young recruits, he could only hope they would be able to resist the temptations that would surely be on offer in Berlin. One of Brigadier Hinde’s first appointees was a snappy young lieutenant colonel named Harold ‘Tim’ Hays, a whirlwind of a man with gaunt features, a smart peaked cap and a devotion to work that was ‘far beyond the normal line of duty’.11 Amidst his many duties, Hays set himself the unofficial task of recording the adventures of the newly formed Berlin team, noting the highs and lows of everything that was to come.

…

If the western Allies could inflict a rapid and crushing defeat on the Red Army, then Stalin would have to rethink his planned domination of Eastern Europe. Operation Unthinkable was conceived as a military thrust deep into the heart of Soviet-occupied Europe, with the aim of imposing upon Russia ‘the will of the United States and British Empire’.42 The strategic architect of this land offensive was Brigadier Geoffrey Thompson, an ex-commander of the Royal Artillery with professional expertise in the terrain of Eastern Europe. His battle-plan envisaged a massive drive eastwards towards Berlin and beyond, with forty-seven British and American divisions driving the Red Army back to the Oder and Neisse rivers, some fifty-five miles to the east of Berlin.

The Silk Roads: A New History of the World by Peter Frankopan

access to a mobile phone, Admiral Zheng, anti-communist, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, bread and circuses, British Empire, clean water, Columbian Exchange, credit crunch, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, discovery of the americas, disinformation, drone strike, dual-use technology, energy security, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Isaac Newton, land reform, Mahatma Gandhi, Malacca Straits, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Murano, Venice glass, New Urbanism, no-fly zone, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, South China Sea, spice trade, statistical model, Stuxnet, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, the market place, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade route, transcontinental railway, uranium enrichment, wealth creators, WikiLeaks, yield management, Yom Kippur War

Lord Palmerston, the Foreign Secretary, was alarmed by this turn of events. ‘Russia and Persia are playing tricks in Affghanistan,’ he wrote in the spring of 1838 – although he remained optimistic that things would soon be satisfactorily resolved.30 Within a few weeks, however, he had become genuinely concerned. The jewel in the British Empire’s crown suddenly looked vulnerable. Russia’s actions had brought it ‘a little too near to our door in India’, he wrote to one confidant. A month later, he was warning others that the barrier between Europe and India had been taken away, ‘laying the road open for invasion up to our very gate’.31 The situation looked bleak indeed.

…

The problem was that this was not the message that sank in from Burnes’s work; what really hit home back in Britain was his alarmist report that ‘the court of St Petersburg have long cherished designs in this quarter of Asia’.40 This dovetailed with growing British anxiety in other quarters. The consul-general in Baghdad, Henry Rawlinson, lobbied tirelessly, warning all who would listen that unless Russia’s rise was checked the British Empire would be gravely threatened in India. There were two options: Britain should either extend the empire into Mesopotamia to build a proper buffer protecting the approach from the west; or a major force should be sent from India to attack the Russians in the Caucasus.41 Rawlinson took it upon himself to support local anti-Russian insurgencies wherever he could find them: he funnelled arms and money to Imam Shamil, whose power base in Chechnya was a constant thorn in Russia’s side in the mid-nineteenth century.42 The support he provided helped establish a long tradition of Chechen terrorism against Russia.

…

In 1880, construction started on the Trans-Caspian Railway, with a line soon connecting through to Samarkand and Tashkent, and by 1899 a spur connected Merv to Kushk, within striking distance of Herat.33 These railway lines were not just symbolic: they were arteries that would allow provisions, weapons and soldiers to be delivered to the British Empire’s back door. As Field Marshal Lord Roberts emphasised to the officers of the Eastern Command not long afterwards, it was regrettable that the railways had been extended so far. Now, however, a line had been established ‘over which Russia could not be allowed to cross’. If it did, he stated, it would be ‘considered a casus belli’ – that is, grounds for war.34 The railway lines also represented an economic threat.

Wealth, Poverty and Politics by Thomas Sowell

affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, Albert Einstein, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, colonial exploitation, colonial rule, Cornelius Vanderbilt, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, European colonialism, full employment, government statistician, Great Leap Forward, Gunnar Myrdal, Herman Kahn, income inequality, income per capita, invention of the sewing machine, invisible hand, low skilled workers, mass immigration, means of production, minimum wage unemployment, New Urbanism, profit motive, rent control, Scramble for Africa, Simon Kuznets, Steve Jobs, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, very high income, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty

Britain alone produced more than 40 percent of the major inventions, discoveries and innovations in the world, from the mid-eighteenth century to the first quarter of the nineteenth century.4 Its technological preeminence was matched by its preeminence as a conquering nation. A twentieth century Italian scholar asked, “How, in the first place, did a peripheral island rise from primitive squalor to world domination?”5 At its peak, the British Empire included one-fourth of the land area of the world and one-fourth of all the people on earth. Such historic changes in the roles of particular peoples and nations have occurred in other places and other times. The Chinese were for centuries more advanced than any of the Europeans, including among their discoveries and inventions the compass, printing, paper, rudders and the porcelain plates that the West called “chinaware” or simply “china.”

…

The English legacy is not the reason for the success of North America.26 While it is true that all these countries are former colonies of England, and thus might be described as having been influenced by the culture of England, it is also true that the people who founded Canada and the United States were Englishmen, descendants of people steeped in the culture of England as it unfolded over the centuries— while people in Sierra Leone and Nigeria were descendants of people steeped in the very different cultures of a region of sub-Saharan Africa for many centuries, and exposed superficially to the culture of England for less than one century, during which their own indigenous cultures were by no means extinguished in the historically brief period when they were part of the British Empire. French historian Fernand Braudel referred to “the late and ephemeral colonization of Black Africa by the European powers in the nineteenth century.”27 This was hardly enough to culturally turn Africans into Europeans. Many former English colonies populated by non-English peoples continued to observe some aspect of the culture of England after becoming independent— lawyers wearing wigs in court, for example— but these outward observances of English traditions did not prevent these former colonies from having a fundamentally very different cultural legacy from that of England, and correspondingly very different economic and political experiences going forward after independence.

…

Some of the counterproductive attitudes that Latin America inherited from Spain have been said to have begun to change in Spain itself, more so than in Latin America.112 It is hard to escape the fact that former British colonies proper— that is, countries founded by a transplanted British population— have generally done better economically than former Spanish or Portuguese colonies. Nor can this be due to the British Empire’s having made better initial choices as to places to settle, because the Spanish Empire was established first, giving Spain the first choices. Spaniards conquered lands and peoples in both North America and South America in the 16th century, before the first permanent British settlement in America was established, tenuously, at Jamestown in the 17th century.

The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times by Giovanni Arrighi

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, business logic, business process, classic study, colonial rule, commoditize, Corn Laws, creative destruction, cuban missile crisis, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, declining real wages, deindustrialization, double entry bookkeeping, European colonialism, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial independence, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, informal economy, invisible hand, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kōnosuke Matsushita, late capitalism, London Interbank Offered Rate, means of production, Meghnad Desai, military-industrial complex, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, new economy, offshore financial centre, oil shock, Peace of Westphalia, post-Fordism, profit maximization, Project for a New American Century, RAND corporation, reserve currency, scientific management, spice trade, Strategic Defense Initiative, Suez canal 1869, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transatlantic slave trade, transcontinental railway, upwardly mobile, vertical integration, Yom Kippur War