As Great Britain’s formal empire has finally receded into the distance, the 21st century has witnessed an agonised public debate about the legacies and meaning of that colonial past. Funds from London, Paris and Berlin finance houses were sunk into major infrastructure schemes – docks, railways, trams – as well as used to open up the colonial hinterland. The Spanish Empire covered 7.72 million … Sultan, a retired soldier, was from a village near Jhelum. At its height it was the largest empire in history and, for over a century, was the foremost global power. In this week’s column, Vir Sanghvi reviews and recommends Lizzie Collingham’s The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World. Of course, my kids know that their grandparents, along with the citizens of almost half the globe, were once British subjects. Nearly 90,000 Indian soldiers laid down their lives for Britain in the second world war, yet the scale of that sacrifice – and the troubled history of the imperial project – is barely recognised, Last modified on Sat 25 Nov 2017 04.11 GMT. Yet despite its difficult legacy, says Tristram Hunt, the cities that the empire helped forge are fast becoming the economic powerhouses of the 21st century... On 30 June 1997, the United Kingdom’s 99-year lease on Hong Kong’s New Territories came to an end. International investment of the British Empire was another form of indirect imperialism used effectively. Few places prospered more aggressively from Britain’s imperial markets and global reach than Liverpool, and no city suffered more wretchedly from the end of empire. She has studied history from the age of nine, but the closest she has come to any mention of empire was in her GCSE syllabus that included the run-up to the second world war. In 1876 Disraeli overcame vehement Liberal opposition and obtained for Queen Victoria the title of "Empress of India" (she was not "Empress of the British Empire.") Empire shaped the world. Duration: 01:29 ... Rudyard Kipling believed in the British empire… Furthermore, the British Empire was comprised of an incredibly diverse set of actors through its many years of existence. You can unsubscribe at any time. At the peak of its power, the empire controlled 25% of the world’s land. Whatever the original rationale, the ugly xenophobia unleashed since the EU referendum has brought home the urgent need to reform history textbooks and address this abyss at their heart. The colony of Victoria was one strand of a “crimson thread of kinship” (a term coined by the Australian statesman Henry Parkes) uniting the Anglo-Saxon family. Steaming out of Victoria Harbour, as the Royal Marines played Rule Britannia and Land of Hope and Glory, aboard the Royal Yacht Britannia, “that night we were leaving one of the greatest cities in the world, a Chinese city that was now a part of China, a colony now returned to its mighty motherland in rather different shape to that in which it had become Britain’s responsibility a century and a half before”. Since globalisation and the modern world were, for Ferguson, a ‘good thing’, this also meant the British empire – for all its messy crimes and misdemeanours – was equally praiseworthy. While the formal dominion of the old European empires has faded, competing nations have emerged to fill the vacuum. British Empire, a worldwide system of dependencies— colonies, protectorates, and other territories—that over a span of some three centuries was brought under the sovereignty of the crown of Great Britain and the administration of the British government. Churchill’s only option was to try and evacuate as many British, Belgi… Her teacher thought it important for the paper on orientalism and, something of a political activist in her youth, gave them an impassioned lecture on Britain’s imperial past. 12 alternative giant leaps for mankind – from carnivorism to Magna Carta, The lion and the rising sun: Britain and Japan’s 400-year relationship. For some, such as Robert Cooper, British foreign policy continues to be shaped by an ascription to ‘liberal imperialism’. The British empire has receded into history. The Janus face of empire, its dual ability both to enrich and undo, is only now being overcome along the docks and wharfs of an otherwise often silent river Mersey. In the 21st century, it is China and India who are on the rise, dictating a broader pivot in world affairs from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Indian soldier Bhandari Ram with his father after he was awarded the Victoria Cross in New Delhi in 1945. hen I was a child in Lahore in Pakistan, my parents employed a driver called Sultan. My research has also taken in the end of empire and the harrowing effect that decolonisation had on a colonial city within the British Isles. The British Empire of the 1950s looked very different from that of the 1850s and certainly that of the 1750s and 1650s! Last year, my daughter, who is studying history of art at A-level, was taken to see Tate Britain’s exhibition Art and Empire. And, rather like the port cities of the European empires, they operate increasingly outside the traditional framework of the nation state. In my book, Ten Cities That Made an Empire, I argue that urban history offers a vehicle for a more balanced and reflective history of the British empire. The Ottoman Empire, the Chinese Empire and the Mughal Empire had developed trading connections. And it is the very complexity of this urban past that allows us to go beyond the ‘good’ and ‘bad’ cul-de-sac of so much imperial debate. Scotland also attempted to establish colonies, first in Canada and later in Panama, but was unsuccessful. In London, they are encouraged to question and argue. I looked at Chris Patten a bit bemused. England’s successes and Scotland’s failures contributed to England’s gradual do… Everything you ever wanted to know about... Germany’s pre-Nazi history: rethinking the Second Reich, To beard or not to beard? Let’s find out more in our British Empire facts… British Empire facts. So, in their second year at university, when my students discover the extent of their ignorance, they are furious.”, I don’t know whether this amnesia is due to embarrassment or fear of reparations or, indeed, a sinister desire to keep the electorate ignorant and pliable. If you subscribe to BBC History Magazine Print or Digital Editions then you can unlock 10 years’ worth of archived history material fully searchable by Topic, Location, Period and Person. Post-Brexit, I am not amused. Indeed, Martin Jacques thought the ceremony showed, “no sense of contrition, of humility, of history. There was the conquest of India. I have charted the changing character of British imperialism through the architecture and civic institutions, the street names and fortifications, the material culture and ritual. When we talk of Syria today, they have no knowledge of Britain’s role in the Middle East in the last century. In 2004 Germany apologised for the massacre of 65,000 Herero people in what is now Namibia; in 2008 Italy announced it was to pay reparations to Libya for injustices committed during its 30-year rule of the north African state; and in 2011 the Dutch government apologised for the killing of civilians in the 1947 Rawagede massacre in Indonesia. “Never before has Britain passed a colony directly to a communist regime that does not even pretend to respect conventional democratic values.” Historian Paul Johnson concurred: “The surrender of the free colony of Hong Kong to the totalitarian communist government is one of the most shameful and humiliating episodes in British history.”, A few brave commentators suggested there might be a more complex prehistory to this handover. For half-term, his English teacher has asked him to read another novel about India. It is British history. A week later it was already becoming clear that the Germans would seize control of France after what Churchill described as a “colossal military disaster”. This was British hypocrisy at its most rampant and sentimental.”. By 1913 the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, 23% of the world population at the time, and by 1… The British Empire was made up of the colonies, protectorates, mandates and other territories which were controlled by the United Kingdom.. Really?” they breathed. Novels That Shaped Our World — Series 1, The Empire Writes Back. Aged 11, my son learned in a geography class that one of the many reasons Ghana (the Gold Coast to its 19th-century British rulers) was economically less developed was because of its colonial past. More clips from The Empire Writes Back. England established colonies along the eastern coast of North America, which gradually became profitable over time. For the history of empire is always more complicated than the simple binary of ruler and ruled – as episodes such as the loss of America in 1776, the tortured psychology of the settlers of the White Dominions, or the endlessly unclear place of Ireland within the British imperial imagination demonstrate. Urban history helps to move us beyond casting the indigenous victims of colonialism as just that – passive recipients of metropolitan, European designs in which they had neither voice nor influence. As the Indian scholar Partha Chatterjee has written, “empire is not an abstract universal category… It is embodied and experienced in actual locations.” The shifting justifications and contested understandings of empire shaped the design and planning, the ethos and infrastructure, the rhetoric and politics of Britain’s colonial cities. By contrast, the Edwardian Raj was about power and authority and no city in the world symbolised this imperial sensibility with more grandeur and world-historic self-regard than New Delhi. “When someone referred to the Chinese as the ‘Dewhursts of Peking’ there was a mild laugh around the table. The British Empire comprised of Britain, the 'mother country', and the colonies, countries ruled to some degree by and from Britain. Ferguson’s trenchant thesis provoked a furious reaction among commentators who sought, by way of contrast, to cast British imperialism as a very bad thing. Britain’s colonization of the Americas is unique in that Britain was not a unified state when it began its colonial project. It could often operate differently in a colony on one side of the world from a colony on the other side. In the words of the leftwing author Richard Gott, “the rulers of the British empire will one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the 20th century as the authors of crimes against humanity on an infamous scale”. The advent of the steamship and telegram network, the cutting of the Suez canal and increase in shipping, the acceleration of global trade in the lead up to the First World War, and the role of these cities as entrepot and export hubs gave them a powerful, semi-autonomous place within the imperial hierarchy as engines of global growth. And no organisation has done more to impose western norms of law, order and governance around the world,” he wrote. Tristram Hunt MP is a historian, author, broadcaster and politician who is currently shadow secretary of state for education. Much of the chaos of the 20th century was, he suggested, a product of the decline of transnational empires. The historian John Darwin has described empire as “not just a story of domination and subjection but something more complicated: the creation of novel or hybrid societies in which notions of governance, economic assumptions, religious values and morals, ideas about property, and conceptions of justice, conflicted and mingled, to be reinvented, refashioned, tried out or abandoned”. For hundreds of years, Britain shaped the history of the world. The city – be it Hong Kong, Bridgetown or indeed London – is once again the backdrop for the power struggles of empire. Usefully, he also compares the British Empire with its rivals: while by no means overlooking its faults, he overall finds in its favour. Yet, for all the range and candour of their education, they haven’t once encountered Britain’s colonial past in school. Yet, whether it is Hong Kong or Mumbai, or indeed Shanghai or Dubai (two cities not included in this study), it is notable how Britain’s imperial cities currently play a far more significant role in world affairs than those of any other former European power. Decades later, when I told my children about Sultan, they were gobsmacked. Initially, this meant the establishment of ports – such as Bridgetown for sugar, Boston for fisheries or Melbourne for gold – and the emergence of more complicated economies around them, from ship-building to financial services to foodstuffs, leisure and retail. Famously, in his 2003 book Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, the historian Niall Ferguson made a stirring and influential case for the British empire as the handmaiden of globalisation and force for progress. Working chronologically and then (broadly) geographically from west to east, I have traced the history of these cities, their ruling ideas and their place within the story of British imperialism. Students were required to restrict themselves to a technical visual analysis of the paintings they studied, not explore the political background that produced them. In these terms, a history of British imperial cities could be matched by an account of their German, Spanish or, most usefully, French counterparts – with the development of, say, Pondicherry, Casablanca or Saigon offering equivalent insights into French imperial development. But to me the most interesting fact about Sultan was that he could speak Italian. Opium and then cotton production turned Bombay into one of the first industrial cities of the British empire and, accompanying it, all the attendant problems of urban sanitation and mass immigration. Facial hair through history. The Hungry Empire: How Britain’s Quest for Food Shaped the Modern World by Lizzie Collingham - review. The history of colonialism covered by my research suggests a more diffuse process of exchange, interaction and adaptation. Rediscovering the British World is one part of an ongoing attempt to approach British Imperial history from a different viewpoint, placing the colonies of settlement at the centre. I used to laugh when British people asked me where I had learned my English. We in the west live in an increasingly post-colonial era, yet that does not mean that empire as a global force has ended. He called me signorina and taught me three Italian words: si, grazie and buongiorno. The policy of granting or recognizing significant degrees of self-government by dependencies, which was favoured by the far-flung nature … Not only does the majority of the world’s population now live in urban areas (with tens of millions – across Africa, China and India – accelerating the rate of urbanisation each passing year), the top 23 ‘megacities’ contribute by themselves some 14 per cent of global GDP. If Calcutta signified mercantilism then Hong Kong was a testament to free trade, standing as a monument to the new ideologies of laissez-faire, and the instrument of Britain’s ‘informal empire’ in China. You have successfully linked your account! The Spanish Empire was one of the first global empires. Opinion British empire. “No! In London, the atmosphere was altogether shriller. By entering your details, you are agreeing to HistoryExtra terms and conditions and privacy policy. Hence her astonishment at Sultan’s Italian connection. This nuanced account of negotiation and exchange is nowhere more obvious than in the advanced intellectual and cultural environment of the British imperial city – in the Indo-Saracenic architecture of Bombay, the east African mosques of Cape Town, or the Bengali Renaissance that British scholarship helped to foster in Calcutta. In one sense, an account of imperialism pursued through urban history is obvious. But there was no such nuance from Britain’s politicians. Then, in 2013, the United Kingdom government (having apologised for the Great Irish Famine of 1845–52 and expressed official regret over Britain’s role in the Atlantic slave trade) was forced by a high court judgment to announce a £20m compensation package for 5,228 Kenyan victims of British abuse during the 1950s Kenya Emergency or Mau Mau Rebellion. It was built as a monument to eternal imperial governance – and yet, barely finished, it became the capital of an independent India. Moni Mohsin. They don’t understand why people of other ethnicities came to Britain in the first place. But to me the most interesting fact about Sultan was that he could speak Italian. On May 10, 1940 two things happened to really kick-start the war: German forces invaded France and the Benelux countries and Winston Churchill became Prime Minister and wartime leader of the United Kingdom. Most of them also attest to the defining attributes of colonial cities, as first set out by the urban historian Anthony D King: power primarily in the hands of a non-indigenous minority; the relative superiority of this minority in terms of technological, military and organisational power; and the racial, cultural and religious differences between predominantly European, Christian settlers and the indigenous majority. He called me. They haven’t learned any of it at school. History TV and radio in the UK: what’s on our screens in March 2021? Any such aspirations depended upon the ability of the Royal Navy to see off competing imperial powers, and the fight against the Dutch to take the city of Cape Town is a microcosm of the broader, geopolitical struggle that the forces of western Europe played out across the high seas. When discussing burning political questions today, they have no historical context to  draw on that links Britain’s own past with those events. When I was a child in Lahore in Pakistan, my parents employed a driver called Sultan. Melbourne was another port in that global, commercial nexus: the development of the ‘Queen-city of the south’ signals the emergence of finance-capital in British imperialism and highlights the very different place the White Dominions (Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa) had within the colonial firmament. The development of British colonies in America mirrored that of the British state in Europe. My children (daughter 17, son 15) were born and raised in London and have had the good fortune to attend fantastic schools where they have been offered, alongside the usual array of subjects, a rich diet of music, drama, art, sport and languages. The diaries of Alastair Campbell, Prime Minister Tony Blair’s director of communications, describe the scene among the UK delegation preparing for the ceremony. And it’s no good pretending that the history of Malaysia, Nigeria, India or Kenya is world history and therefore not relevant to the modern British curriculum. Though she read about the brutal battles in the Pacific and North Africa, no mention was made of the 2.5 million Indian soldiers who volunteered to fight in the second world war – or the 1.3 million who served in 1914-18. Sultan, a retired soldier, was from a village near Jhelum. It began with the overseas colonies and trading posts set up by England between the late 16th and early 18th centuries.