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Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

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In many ways, of course, this long history could not be more timely. Elkins offers an open and shut case for those who believe that Rhodes must fall. Her book should, you hope, also find its way into the hands of at least some of that 60% of the nation who, when polled in 2014, thought the British empire was, in general, “something to be proud of”. Richard Drayton charts the interconnectedness between scientific breakthroughs and the spread of colonialism as new opportunities and problems led to new advances which further increased Britain's ability to colonise. In Jamaica, the abolition of slavery in 1833 had not actually freed enslaved people. They were forced to work as unpaid apprentices for their former masters. The British rulers were concerned that those formerly enslaved could now vote in elections and threaten their power. In 1838, the British governors of Jamaica made plans to introduce a law that ensured only property owners could vote. No colony in their empire gave the British more trouble than the island of Ireland. No subject people proved more rebellious than the Irish. From misty start to unending finish, Irish revolt against colonial rule has been the leitmotif that runs through the entire history of empire, causing problems in Ireland, in England itself, and in the most distant parts of the British globe. The British affected to ignore or forget the Irish dimension to their empire, yet the Irish were always present within it, and wherever they landed and established themselves, they never forgot where they had come from.

Allan Mallinson was a Brigadier in the Light Dragoons, as an author he created the Matthew Hervey character of a cavalry officer who serves around the empire just after the end of the Napoleonic War. Just as the nature of colonial governance varied across time and space, so did liberalism, whose “perfidiousness” is as much a bête noire of Elkins’s book as empire is. Strains of liberalism embraced or accommodated paternalism, racism, and authoritarianism, helping provide intellectual cover for unimaginable cruelty. Yet liberal philosophies also elaborated ideas of autonomy, individuality, and collective self-rule that, in turn, seeded principles about legitimacy that anti-colonial thinkers and activists enlisted to their cause. Amid colonial condescension about their peoples’ civilizational adequacy, they sought to teach their Western liberal counterparts to imagine politics in genuinely universalist terms. Pax Britannica is actually a collection of three books charting the history of most of the British Imperial experience. The first book in the trilogy is entitled Heaven’s Command and charts the rise of the Victorian Empire. It documents the bravado, confidence, absent mindedness and cunning that led to the creation of the largest empire the world has ever seen. The second book is entitled Pax Britannica and is intended as a snapshot of the Imperial world at the apogee of its power in 1897. This is the year in which Queen Victoria held her Diamond Jubilee in truly imperial pomp and ceremony. The Final book is entitled Farewell the Trumpets and documents the final retreat from the great adventure. Over two centuries, this resistance took many forms and had many leaders. Sometimes kings and nobles led the revolts, sometimes priests or slaves. Some have famous names and biographies, others have disappeared almost without trace. Many died violent deaths. Few of them have even a walk-on part in traditional accounts of empire. Many of these forgotten peoples deserve to be resurrected and given the attention they deserve. The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great. The rulers of the empire may one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the 20th century as the authors of crimes against humanity.His adventures in these distant and forgotten ends of the earth make compelling, often funny reading and tell a story most of us had thought was over: a tale of the last outposts in Britain’s imperial career and those who keep the flag flying.” Written in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, this book attempted to justify the enormous expansion of the Empire and justify its place as a possible Bulwark to the newly realised threat of Bolshevik Communism. In this cause it intellectually tried to tie the United States to British ideas of democracy before the US would withdraw into its period of isolationism. The blood-red thread through all of that history, in Elkins’s persuasive reading, is a strain of moralising superiority that convinced successive generations of politicians, from Benjamin Disraeli to Clement Attlee, that restive subject populations must be periodically taught a lesson in the realities of “civilised” power. “The moral effect of immediate mass destruction,” as Elkins describes it. She painstakingly traces how the personnel and methodologies of suppression and torture were passed between territories, at the same time that sentimental propaganda campaigns told a different story of those conquests: from the Nobel laureateship of Kipling to the Boy’s Own potboilers of George Alfred Henty (25m copies of whose books remained in circulation in the 1950s). After that is a section on fiction writers who have written about The British Empire or an aspect of British imperialism in some way. It does not list all the books written by these authors but only those connected to The British Empire in some way.

The British often perceived the Irish as "savages", and they used Ireland as an experimental laboratory for the other parts of their overseas empire, as a place to ship out settlers from, as well as a territory to practise techniques of repression and control. Entire armies were recruited in Ireland, and officers learned their trade in its peat bogs and among its burning cottages. Some of the great names of British military history – from Wellington and Wolseley to Kitchener and Montgomery – were indelibly associated with Ireland. The particular tradition of armed policing, first patented in Ireland in the 1820s, became the established pattern until the empire's final collapse. Anthony Kirk-Greene reflects on the quantity and quality of poetry by those who lived and worked in the British Empire. He is interested in how these lines can throw unusual light on the intricacies of daily life for the imperial servants.. A writer who sets his stories of a fictional British officer in the middle to late Victorian period - 1870s to 1880s. He finds himself in many of the crucial battles at the apex of British Imperial ambition. The drive towards the annihilation of dissidents and peoples in 20th-century Europe certainly had precedents in the 19th-century imperial operations in the colonial world, where the elimination of "inferior" peoples was seen by some to be historically inevitable, and where the experience helped in the construction of the racist ideologies that arose subsequently in Europe. Later technologies merely enlarged the scale of what had gone before. As Cameron remarked this month, Britannia did not rule the waves with armbands on. This is a hoary way for Britons to fend off post-imperial guilt: however reprehensible they were, many told themselves for decades, someone else was worse. Self-serving as it seems, Professor Biggar wants to recover this sense of moral superiority. In that way, he writes, the empire can give those “who identify ourselves with Britain cause for lament and shame”, but also “cause for admiration and pride”.As the author has donated the profits from this book to the Catholic Mission in Marsabit, Northern Kenya, he very much hopes that readers who access this FREE copy may consider makinga similar donation sending their cheques (made out to 'Consolata Fathers') to:The Superior, Consolata Fathers, 3 Salisbury Avenue, Finchley,London N3 3AJ - and please mention "From Mtoto to Mzee" Kipling, Henty and Rider Haggard were all wildly popular writers of imperial stories for boys of all ages. This book has three examples of their work in a very nicely designed book: King Solomon's Mines, The Man who would be King, With Clive in India Simon Schama's third book in his 'History of Britain' series concentrated on how Britain's national character was changed from being one of exporting its views on civilisation to dealing with the consequences of being an imperial power and transforming itself into a multicultural society.

Jan (or James) Morris has written one of the more elegant sweeps of the imperial story. The style, elegance and organisation of the prose really brings this trilogy to life. Highly recommended for those ready for a bit more substance to their overview of The British Empire. Yet “Legacy of Violence” goes further than detailing the depravities of empire; it has a larger thesis to advance, concerning liberal imperialism’s extraordinary resilience. The test of that thesis must be its ability to explain not only how the Empire endured but also how it ended. And it’s here that Elkins’s account runs into trouble. This was a text book written and published during the baptism of the First World War. It was written by James Williamson, it spans from the Tudor age to the outbreak of the war. Interestingly, it has some very nice maps to illustrate the growth of the empire over the years. Two new books consider the “here” and “there”. “One Fine Day” is a sprawling account of the British Empire by Matthew Parker, a historian. It travels like the never-setting imperial sun across Asia, Africa and outposts of the “new world” in the Caribbean. The book’s organising principle is a day—September 29th 1923—when the British Empire reached its maximum territorial extent. The portrait is achieved with a wide-angle lens, but the choice of a single day also brings focus.Joyce Cary was a novelist who actually served in the British Empire as an assistant District Officer in Nigeria and so brought his inside knowledge to the stories he wrote. Anthony Kirk-Greene writes about his service and its impact on his writings here Caryl Phillips is an author of Afro-Caribbean descent who has written extensively on the slave trade and the movement of peoples from Africa to the Caribbean and/or on to Britain. He is particularly interested in the difficulties of and challenges of identification and cultural integration.

Most tellingly, Biggar seems not to recognise as a moral issue the fact that while slave owners received reparations, slaves themselves did not. Ignoring all evidence to the contrary, Biggar imagines that freed slaves continued working on the old plantations not out of economic necessity, having been deprived of all resources, but because of the generosity of former masters in providing housing and food. But before that could happen, Elkins said, bright light needed to be trained on the gauzy narrative of the success surrounding the Empire’s civilizing mission. “I’m trying to challenge these recent historiographical and particularly political defenses of British exceptionalism,” she said, “to puncture the myths of paternalism and progress and demonstrate liberalism’s perfidiousness across the Empire and at home.”

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Farrell’s story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion—at once brutal, blundering, and wistful—is soon revealed.”

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