The Rise and Fall
of the British Empire
Part I
Professor Patrick N. Allitt
THE TEACHING COMPANY ®
Patrick N. Allitt, Ph.D.
Goodrich C. White Professor of History, Emory University
Professor Patrick N. Allitt was born in 1956 and raised in Mickleover, England. He attended John Port School in the
Derbyshire village of Etwall, and he was an undergraduate at Hertford College, Oxford University, from 1974 to 1977. In
1978, he began graduate school in the United States. He studied American History at the University of California, Berkeley,
where he earned his Ph.D. in 1985. Between 1985 and 1988, he was a Henry Luce Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Divinity
School, where he specialized in American Religious History. Since then he has been on the history faculty of Emory
University in Atlanta, Georgia, except for one year (1992–1993) when he was a fellow at the Princeton University Center for
the Study of Religion. Since 2007 he has been the Goodrich C. White Professor of History at Emory University, and since
2004 he has been the director of Emory College’s Center for Teaching and Curriculum.
Professor Allitt is the author of four scholarly books: The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities Throughout American
History (Yale University Press, 2009); Catholic Intellectuals and Conservative Politics in America: 1950–1985 (Cornell
University Press, 1993); Catholic Converts: British and American Intellectuals Turn to Rome (Cornell University Press,
1997); and Religion in America Since 1945: A History (Columbia University Press, 2003). In addition, he is the editor of
Major Problems in American Religious History (Houghton-Mifflin, 2000) and the author of a memoir, I’m the Teacher,
You’re the Student: A Semester in the University Classroom (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). He has written
numerous articles and reviews for academic and popular journals, including recent reviews in The New York Times Book
Review. He has made five other courses for The Teaching Company: American Religious History, Victorian Britain, The
History of the United States, 2nd Edition (with Professors Allen C. Guelzo and Gary Gallagher), The American Identity, and
The Conservative Tradition.
Professor Allitt’s wife, Toni, is a Michigan native, and their daughter, Frances, is (in 2009) a rising senior in Emory College.
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Table of Contents
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Professor Biography ...................................................................................................................................................................i
Course Scope .............................................................................................................................................................................. 1
Lecture One
The Sun Never Set.............................................................................................................. 2
Lecture Two
The Challenge to Spain in the New World ......................................................................... 4
Lecture Three
African Slavery and the West Indies .................................................................................. 5
Lecture Four
Imperial Beginnings in India .............................................................................................. 7
Lecture Five
Clive and the Conquest of India ......................................................................................... 8
Lecture Six
Wolfe and the Conquest of Canada .................................................................................. 10
Lecture Seven
The Loss of the American Colonies ................................................................................. 12
Lecture Eight
Exploring the Planet ......................................................................................................... 14
Lecture Nine
Napoleon Challenges the Empire ..................................................................................... 16
Lecture Ten
The Other Side of the World ............................................................................................ 18
Lecture Eleven
Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery......................................................................... 20
Lecture Twelve
Early African Colonies ..................................................................................................... 22
Lecture Thirteen
China and the Opium Wars............................................................................................... 24
Lecture Fourteen
Britain—The Imperial Center........................................................................................... 26
Lecture Fifteen
Ireland—The Tragic Relationship .................................................................................... 28
Lecture Sixteen
India and the “Great Game” ............................................................................................. 30
Lecture Seventeen
Rebellion and Mutiny in India.......................................................................................... 32
Lecture Eighteen
How Canada Became a Nation ......................................................................................... 34
Lecture Nineteen
The Exploration and Settlement of Africa ........................................................................ 36
Lecture Twenty
Gold, Greed, and Geopolitics in Africa ............................................................................ 37
Lecture Twenty-One
The Empire in Literature .................................................................................................. 39
Lecture Twenty-Two
Economics and Theories of Empire.................................................................................. 41
Lecture Twenty-Three
The British Empire Fights Imperial Germany .................................................................. 43
Lecture Twenty-Four
Versailles and Disillusionment ......................................................................................... 45
Lecture Twenty-Five
Ireland Divided ................................................................................................................. 46
Lecture Twenty-Six
Cricket and the British Empire ......................................................................................... 48
Lecture Twenty-Seven
British India between the World Wars ............................................................................. 50
Lecture Twenty-Eight
World War II—England Alone ........................................................................................ 52
Lecture Twenty-Nine
World War II—The Pyrrhic Victory ................................................................................ 54
Lecture Thirty
Twilight of the Raj............................................................................................................ 56
Lecture Thirty-One
Israel, Egypt, and the Suez Canal ..................................................................................... 58
Lecture Thirty-Two
The Decolonization of Africa ........................................................................................... 60
Lecture Thirty-Three
The White Dominions ...................................................................................................... 62
Lecture Thirty-Four
Britain after the Empire .................................................................................................... 64
Lecture Thirty-Five
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature ................................................................................ 66
Lecture Thirty-Six
Epitaph and Legacy .......................................................................................................... 68
Timeline .................................................................................................................................................................................... 70
Glossary .................................................................................................................................................................................... 73
Biographical Notes................................................................................................................................................................... 75
Bibliography............................................................................................................................................................................. 77
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©2009 The Teaching Company.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Scope:
Between the 17th and 20th centuries, Britain built the largest empire in the entire history of the world. It developed gradually
and without prior planning, mainly through the initiatives of chartered trading companies such as the East India Company
and the Virginia Company. Some colonies were devoted primarily to white settlement, and earlier indigenous populations
were displaced or destroyed. These colonies included America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. Others
were sites from which lucrative raw materials could be drawn, such as the sugar islands of the West Indies (Barbados and
Jamaica), and whose labor was provided largely by slaves. Others again were areas in which the British presence was
numerically small but powerful enough to ensure law and order over large areas that had previously been torn by perpetual
warfare, such as India.
This great empire received its worst setback in the 1770s and 1780s when the English colonies along the eastern seaboard of
North America rebelled under the leadership of George Washington and the Continental Congress, defeated the greatest
military power of the day, and established their independence as the new United States of America. This catastrophe did not
lead to the breakup of the rest of the empire, however. On the contrary, Britain became more powerful than ever and was
able, 20 years later, to defeat the immense threat presented by Napoleon.
In the 19th century, for the first time, the empire became something ordinary Britons might take pride in, especially once
politicians like Benjamin Disraeli recognized the political benefits of jingoistic patriotism. Missionaries eager to convert the
“heathen” spread out to Africa, India, and China. The most famous of them, David Livingstone, made few converts but did
excellent work in exploring south central Africa and its river systems. Others challenged traditional customs in India such as
sati (widow burning) and may have helped provoke a dangerous rebellion, the Indian Mutiny of 1857.
In the mid-20th century, the empire broke up with surprising speed. The white settler colonies were already self-governing by
then. The British Labour Party was ideologically opposed to imperialism, and it granted independence to India and Israel
when it took power in the late 1940s. After that, both the major British parties, fully aware of a shift in world opinion in favor
of self-government and away from empires, granted independence to the remaining African colonies, avoiding the kind of
bitter rebellions France endured in the last days of its empire in Algeria and Vietnam.
Although it has disappeared as a formal entity, however, the British Empire’s legacy is immense. English is the dominant
language of the entire world, and British ideas of justice, political stability, and human rights have spread around the world.
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture One
The Sun Never Set
Scope: Between the 17th and 20th centuries, Great Britain built the greatest empire in the history of the world. It dominated
large parts of America, Africa, and Asia and turned Britain from an isolated island at the edge of Europe into the
world’s first superpower and the world’s first industrial nation. Generations of ambitious young Britons went to the
colonies in search of adventure and fortune. They encountered alien societies and exploited them, but an intellectual
minority also studied them and helped to develop such new disciplines as anthropology and comparative religion.
By the time Britain took over the colonies of the defeated Central Powers at the end of World War I, the imperial
edifice was crumbling. Doubts about the right to rule, combined with anticolonial movements, created political
pressure for independence. This pressure became overwhelming once Britain was weakened by World War II. The
empire fell with astonishing speed, but its effects—and the effects of its ending—are still felt throughout the world.
Outline
I.
The British Empire was not purpose-built, and at different times very different motives impelled Britain’s acquisition of
foreign territories.
A. In the 16th century, English monarchs and merchants envied Spain’s gold- and silver-rich New World possessions.
1. Privateers like Sir Francis Drake plundered Spanish ships and raided Spain’s colonies in the Caribbean.
2. England’s victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 marked its maturing as a naval power and raised the
possibility that it too could create overseas colonies.
B. Some of England’s early colonizing ventures were for profit, others for religious sanctuary.
1. The Virginia settlers were disappointed not to find gold and silver but discovered that tobacco could also be
profitable.
2. West Indian sugar plantations were far more valuable than mainland settlements into the 18th century.
3. The Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay Colony founders aimed to build ideal Puritan settlements.
4. William Penn aimed equally for religious liberty and prosperity.
C. England’s first ventures into the Indian Ocean imitated those of Portugal and were directed at the spice trade.
1. India was dominated by the Mughal Empire in the 17th century, and the East India Company sought trading
rights, not territory.
2. English, Dutch, and Portuguese traders (with royal backing) battled for local supremacy and for Indian and Far
Eastern kings’ favor.
II. In a long series of 18th-century wars, England and France struggled to seize each other’s overseas colonies.
A. British superiority at sea gradually gave it an advantage over France and enabled it to gain a stronger colonial
position.
B. Two battles in the 1750s augmented British colonial power and diminished that of France: at Plassey in India and at
the Heights of Abraham in French Canada.
C. An unforeseen consequence of the British conquest of Canada was that American colonists felt less need of
protection from the French. This does not explain the American Revolution but was certainly a precondition.
D. Britain’s loss of its American colonies by 1783 was a jarring reversal to their power and prestige but did not prove to
be a mortal wound.
III. Britain consolidated its power over India and other colonies in the 19th century and undertook to modernize and
Christianize them.
A. Where the first generation of “nabobs” had plundered India, the second and third generations brought internal peace
and regular administration.
1. They tried to suppress customs they found abhorrent, such as sati (widow burning).
2. The Indian Mutiny of 1857 taught the British that such projects could be hazardous.
B. White settler colonies like Australia, New Zealand, and Canada prospered as producers of farm exports and
minerals.
1. Canada refused to join the United States in revolution.
2. The Durham Report (1839) granted Canada a high measure of self-government and was a model for the other
“white dominions.”
3. The colonies provided a safety valve for Britain’s excess population and received steady drafts of immigrants.
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C. Only in the late 19th century, during the “scramble for Africa,” did the British Empire become an object of national
pride.
IV. Britain’s role in the two world wars weakened it and forced it to give way to new superpowers.
A. The Australians and New Zealanders at Gallipoli thought they had been unnecessarily sacrificed by blundering
British generals.
B. Outrage at the Amritsar Massacre (1919) and growing doubt about Britain’s right to dominate other peoples spread,
along with postwar disillusionment.
C. Independence-movement leaders like Mahatma Gandhi in India exploited Britons’ troubled consciences.
D. The Irish War of Independence (1916–1922) brought strife to the heartland of the empire.
E. By 1945, Britain was clearly the inferior of the United States and the Soviet Union and could no longer convincingly
play the role of world power.
1. Clement Attlee’s Labour government disavowed the imperial role and gave independence to India, Pakistan,
and Israel.
2. His successors, Labour and Conservative alike, found themselves bound to follow suit in an international
atmosphere now hostile to empires.
F. Despite all this, the British Empire’s legacy is immensely influential in matters of language, politics, sport, and
ideas.
Suggested Reading:
Chua, Day of Empire.
Ferguson, Empire.
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Mead, God and Gold.
Questions to Consider:
1. Which was more important in the development of the British Empire: the search for wealth or the search for power?
2. What attitudes are necessary among colonizers?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Two
The Challenge to Spain in the New World
Scope: For five centuries after the Norman Conquest of 1066, the kings of England struggled to maintain a foothold in
France. By the time they lost the last of their continental possessions in the 1550s, however, a more attractive
alternative had been discovered: America. English monarchs and merchants looked with envy at Spain and
Portugal’s great empires in the New World as treasure fleets brought back thousands of tons of silver and gold.
English adventurers like Sir Francis Drake preyed on the Spaniards with the approval of Queen Elizabeth I. English
defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 demonstrated the importance of sea power and emboldened England to plan
New World colonies of its own. In 1607, the first permanent English settlement got a foothold in Virginia. The
Virginia settlers were disappointed to discover no precious metals, but they soon realized that growing tobacco for
export was almost as lucrative.
Outline
I.
Throughout the Middle Ages, England’s kings were preoccupied with securing their rule at home and trying to dominate
France.
A. The Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453) was a protracted and unsuccessful attempt to dominate France.
B. The War of the Roses (1455–1489) demonstrated the weakness of the monarchy at home.
C. Henry VII brought internal civil strife to an end, while his son Henry VIII enriched and strengthened the monarchy
by seizing church properties during the Reformation.
D. A dynastic alliance with Spain ended with the death of Queen Mary I in 1558.
II. English politicians and merchants envied Spanish and Portuguese domination of the New World.
A. With the Treaty of Tordesillas (1493), the pope drew a vertical line through the New World, declaring all lands east
of it Portuguese and all lands west of it Spanish. Other Europeans were forbidden.
B. Annual silver and gold shipments from America to Europe contributed to Spain’s great power.
C. Royal Charters gave monopolies to groups of traders, enabling them to pool resources and share risk. But they were
strictly trading ventures, not colonizers.
D. English sailors in the 16th century learned the techniques of blue-water sailing, on which the empire would depend in
the coming centuries for fishing, trading, and privateering.
E. English victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 demonstrated the quality of British ship design and seamanship.
III. A century after the Spaniards, England founded colonies of its own in the New World.
A. Early ventures like Sir Walter Raleigh’s Roanoke Colony (1585) failed.
B. The Virginia Company’s colony at Jamestown, planted in 1607, survived difficult early years before prospering as a
tobacco plantation.
C. European observers disagreed about whether or not tobacco had medicinal benefits. King James I wrote a pamphlet
condemning it, despite the revenue it brought to his government.
D. In Virginia, land was plentiful but labor was scarce, which prompted the importation of indentured servants. Many
died in the unhealthy climate, and all were subject to severe discipline.
IV. By the beginning of the 17th century, English sailors and traders were traveling to every part of the world, even though
England’s colonial possessions were still minuscule.
Suggested Reading:
Black, The British Seaborne Empire, chap. 1.
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Kelsey, Sir Francis Drake.
Vaughan, American Genesis.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did England begin its overseas venturing so long after Spain and Portugal?
2. What motives inspired these early voyages?
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Lecture Three
African Slavery and the West Indies
Scope: After early experiments with indentured servants, Virginia tobacco planters and West Indian sugar planters began to
import slaves from Africa. Africans were better adapted to the climate than the fever-prone English and with no
prospect of freedom could not become the older planters’ rivals. British slave traders established stations on the west
coast of Africa and bought their human cargo from African chiefs or obtained them by raiding inland villages. A
triangular trade in slaves, sugar and tobacco, and finished goods developed. The Navigation Acts, passed in the mid17th century, built up the merchant navy by making sure that all this trade was confined to English and colonial
shipping. Meanwhile, as Spanish imperial power declined, Britain began to challenge it directly in the Caribbean,
notably by seizing Jamaica in 1655.
Outline
I.
English settlers developed profitable sugar plantations in the West Indies, despite intermittent conflicts with Spain, the
Netherlands, and France.
A. England’s first colonies in the West Indies were islands Spain neglected to settle: Barbados (1627), St. Christopher
(1624), Nevis (1628), Antigua (1632), and Montserrat (1632). They straddled and threatened Spain’s main trading
routes and lived by the rule “no peace beyond the line.”
B. The first settlers cultivated tobacco, indigo, and cotton.
C. In the 1640s, Barbados switched to sugar cane, a volatile but extremely profitable business that needed more capital
and a larger work force.
D. After midcentury, African slaves began to replace indentured servants as large plantations displaced small farmers.
E. Jamaica, captured from Spain in 1655, was a much larger and potentially more profitable colony.
1. A poorly led and fever-wracked English army seized the island after failing to take Hispaniola.
2. Its proximity to major Spanish colonies made it a center of English buccaneering for the next 35 years.
F. The planters tried to hold on to English traditions and to assert their political rights.
1. Plantation owners resisted eating tropical food that grew in abundance, preferring imported English salt beef
and salted New England fish.
2. They refused to obey imperial trade rules unless they enjoyed representation in Parliament.
II. Slave trading was highly profitable, and in the 17th century almost no one had any moral qualms about it.
A. England, the Netherlands, France, and Spain established slave “factories” along the western African coastline.
1. King Charles II gave monopoly slaving rights first to the Company of Royal Adventurers, then to the Royal
African Company.
2. By the 1670s, about 7,000 slaves per year were being shipped to the West Indies.
B. African chiefs bartered human captives for metal goods, firearms, alcohol, and gunpowder. In the 1670s, slaves cost
about 3 pounds in Africa but sold for about 15 in the Indies.
C. Conditions on slave ships led to epidemics, uprisings, and a high mortality rate. On arrival, the survivors were
stripped, greased, and paraded naked for auction, then branded by their new owners.
D. Slaves were subjected to harsh discipline.
1. Masters could flog, mutilate, and even kill them without suffering prosecution.
2. Slaves were forbidden to learn many skilled crafts.
E. Slave rebellions were frequent but rarely succeeded.
1. Ethnic and linguistic divisions discouraged unified resistance.
2. Jamaica lent itself more readily to uprisings because of its size and its Maroon (escaped slave) population.
III. The Navigation Acts of 1651, 1660, and 1661 encouraged the growth of the English merchant navy while excluding the
Dutch and other rivals.
A. The acts specified that all English colonial produce should be carried in English ships, whose crews were at least
three-quarters English.
B. Three midcentury trade wars against the Dutch established English naval superiority in the Caribbean.
C. An earthquake in 1692 destroyed Port Royal, Jamaica, the buccaneers’ base. Religious observers regarded the event
as a sign of God’s wrath on a wicked place.
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Suggested Reading:
Burn, The British West Indies.
Cruickshank, The Life of Sir Henry Morgan.
Dunn, Sugar and Slaves.
Klein, The Middle Passage.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did slavery replace indentured servitude as the principal form of labor in the English West Indies by 1700?
2. How were the English able to rival and then displace Spain and the Netherlands in the Caribbean?
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Lecture Four
Imperial Beginnings in India
Scope: India and the Far East were sources of silks and spices and an exotic drink called tea, which could not be made or
grown in Europe. A slow and costly overland trade to India persisted through the Middle Ages. When Vasco da
Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and sailed into the Indian Ocean in 1497, however, he showed the possibility
of cutting out the middlemen. The sea trade, dominated at first by the Portuguese and Dutch, was soon invaded by
Britain’s East India Company. The Islamic Mughal Empire was the Indian subcontinent’s greatest political power in
the 17th century. As Mughal authority began to decline after 1700, however, the British involved themselves in local
Indian power struggles, first to ensure uninterrupted trade, then to combat other European challengers.
Outline
I.
The Mughal Empire dominated northern and central India throughout the 17th century.
A. To secure the imperial throne, Mughal emperors had to fight their brothers. They rewarded their loyal servants
(nawabs) with lands in return for the promise of military service.
B. Jahangir (r. 1605–1627) and Shah Jahan (r. 1627–1658) brought Persian influence to India.
C. Aurangzeb (r. 1658–1707) tried to centralize power and promote Islam, counter to his predecessors’ policy of
religious tolerance.
D. After Aurangzeb’s death, local Indian princes, previously Mughal vassals, began to rule on their own account, and
Persian invasions devastated the empire in the 18th century.
II. The British East India Company, founded in 1600, established itself in India despite Portuguese and Dutch opposition.
A. Vasco da Gama and other Portuguese explorers and traders had learned how to sail to and from India with the
annual monsoon shift.
B. The East India Company’s first voyages were to the East Indies for the spice trade, rather than to India itself. Its first
director, Sir Thomas Smythe, was determined to trade peacefully if possible and to avoid politics and war.
C. The Amboyna Massacre of 1623 diverted the company to India, where it prospered, trading silver for spices,
textiles, indigo, and tea.
D. The company, rechartered in 1661, built trading centers at Bombay, Madras, and Calcutta.
E. The Glorious Revolution of 1688 ended the Anglo-Dutch wars.
1. The foundation of the Bank of England (1694) strengthened the connection between the London merchants and
the English government.
2. Union with Scotland (1707) created Great Britain as a stronger political and economic unit.
III. The Anglo-French wars of the mid-18th century were played out in India as well as Europe, North America, and the
Caribbean.
A. Joseph Francois Dupleix of the French East India Company demonstrated the superiority of European-trained armies
over those of India in the 1740s and 1750s, became a king maker in the Carnatic, and threatened the British by
seizing Madras in 1746.
B. Robert Clive, an East India Company clerk, distinguished himself in local conflicts against French and Indian
antagonists. By escaping from Madras in 1746, and then holding the fortress of Arcot in 1751, he rescued the
company from disaster.
Suggested Reading:
Carrington, The British Overseas.
Farrington, Trading Places.
James, Raj.
Wolpert, A New History of India.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did a trading company gradually become involved in Indian politics in the 18th century?
2. How did the distance between Britain and India affect the work of the East India Company?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Five
Clive and the Conquest of India
Scope: As the British East India Company competed against its French counterpart, it recognized the advantage of taking
over the country around its factories. Now that the Mughal Empire was weakened, local princes threatened the
company’s position, as Siraj ud-Daulah showed when he seized Calcutta in 1756 and imprisoned the British
residents in the notorious Black Hole. Robert Clive’s triumph at the Battle of Plassey in 1757, despite the British
being outnumbered more than 10 to 1, gave the company control over the whole of Bengal and laid the foundation
for British domination of all India. The nabobs of the following generation were Englishmen who exploited this new
situation to make themselves fabulously wealthy, often at the expense of the Indian princes and people. One of them,
Warren Hastings, was impeached by Parliament in a case that prompted the British government to intervene directly
in the company’s rule.
Outline
I.
Clive’s exploits in the late 1750s transformed the East India Company into the most powerful political force in India.
A. The nawab of Bengal, Siraj ud-Daulah, seized Calcutta in 1756 and imprisoned the British residents in the prison
now known as the Black Hole.
B. Clive asserted British supremacy in Bengal: He won the Battle of Plassey, deposed Siraj ud-Daulah, and made Mir
Jafar the new nawab.
C. Mir Jafar’s gifts made Clive immensely wealthy. The company also profited from access to Bengal’s revenue.
D. Despite his reputation as greatest of the nabobs, Clive tried to restrain company servants from plundering the
country.
1. He cautioned against being drawn more deeply into the power politics of northeastern India, preferring to be a
protector rather than a ruler.
2. Continued company depredations contributed to the catastrophic Bengal famine of 1770–1773.
II. Warren Hastings, Clive’s successor, made a fortune in India but was impeached by Parliament for acting like a despot.
A. By the Regulating Act of 1773, the British government appointed a council of state and a supreme court to supervise
company affairs in India.
B. Warren Hastings was the first governor-general under the act; he centralized the tax-collection system and increased
the company’s efficiency.
C. He directed company forces to intervene in conflicts in Bombay and Madras and extorted heavy indemnities from
client princes to pay for these expensive campaigns.
D. Whig politicians, notably Edmund Burke, impeached Hastings in 1787 for his behavior and for threatening the
principles of English law.
1. Burke argued that no Englishman should be able to hide behind “geographical morality” and that what was
wrong in England was equally wrong in Asia.
2. Hastings defended himself as acting in the interest of the company and in the manner of other Indian rulers.
3. The House of Lords exonerated Hastings, but not until 1795.
III. The Earl of Cornwallis, defeated at Yorktown but not disgraced, became governor-general of India in 1786 and
introduced wide-ranging reforms.
A. He argued that the company should pay its employees in India high salaries to discourage corruption and trading on
their own accounts.
B. He introduced British common-law concepts of private property to Bengal, imposing them over the older customary
system and winning the loyalty of the local landholders and Hindu bankers.
C. He reorganized the army on strictly racial lines, making Indian sepoys ineligible to become officers.
Suggested Reading:
Bernstein, Dawning of the Raj.
Harvey, Clive.
Louis et al., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2.
Wolpert, A New History of India.
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Questions to Consider:
1. Why was Clive, with tiny forces, able to dominate the 20 million people of Bengal?
2. Which was more reasonable: Burke’s prosecution or Hastings’s defense?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Six
Wolfe and the Conquest of Canada
Scope: During the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763), Britain overpowered French armies in India and North America. French
settler populations around the St. Lawrence River and the Great Lakes were small, but the fur trade was lucrative,
and British settlers on the Massachusetts frontier suffered recurrent raids by Indians in French service. The British
military attacked French Canada first at the fortress of Louisbourg in Nova Scotia, then upriver at Quebec. In 1759,
British commander General James Wolfe defeated Louis-Joseph de Montcalm on the Plains of Abraham and secured
Quebec city. Canada became a British possession by the Treaty of Paris. To pay off its heavy war debts, however,
the British government imposed new taxes at home and in the American colonies, which now enjoyed greater
security than ever before. The Stamp Act, mandating one of these taxes, soon became the object of bitter colonial
resentment.
Outline
I.
th
France colonized the St. Lawrence Valley in the 17 and early 18th centuries.
A. The St. Lawrence, the Ottawa River, and the Great Lakes gave them access to the interior of the continent and the
Mississippi Valley. A profitable fur trade developed.
B. Farming settlers came later to Canada and in much smaller numbers than the British further south, settling mainly
along the St. Lawrence between Quebec and Montreal.
C. Indians in the service of the French raided New England, causing constant anxiety. Catholic-Protestant tensions
added a religious element to the conflict.
II. Britain made repeated attempts to capture French Canada during the recurrent great-power struggles of the 18th century.
A. British fishermen had been plying the Grand Banks for more than two centuries by the early 1700s. Britain acquired
Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, and Hudson’s Bay by treaty in 1713.
B. In 1745, a British force seized Louisbourg, the fortress guarding the St. Lawrence estuary, during the War of the
Austrian Succession.
1. American recruits in the British army felt betrayed by several broken promises of the British generals.
2. The Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle (1748), which returned Louisbourg to France in exchange for Madras in India,
further soured colonists’ mood.
3. Diplomats and politicians still thought of the Caribbean sugar islands as more valuable than this vast but mainly
empty northern territory.
III. General James Wolfe captured Quebec in 1759, and Britain confirmed its conquest of Canada by the Treaty of Paris in
1763.
A. The French and Indian Wars began in 1754 and brought to prominence the young George Washington, a junior
officer in British service.
B. Wolfe had devoted his life to warfare. A sober, hard-working professional soldier, he despised the American
militiamen who fought in the British service.
C. The campaigns of 1758 and 1759 moved slowly but inexorably to conquest.
1. A British force recaptured Louisbourg in 1758.
2. Captain James Cook navigated British men-of-war upriver to Quebec.
D. Wolfe triumphed at the Battle of the Heights of Abraham in 1759, although Wolfe and his French counterpart LouisJoseph de Montcalm both died in the battle.
E. Admiral Hawke’s victory at Quiberon Bay later in 1759 completed the British triumph.
IV. Britain, heavily in debt from the war, imposed new taxes on its American colonies, which had benefited from the war.
A. No longer threatened by French forces to their North, the Americans felt less need for British military protection.
B. The colonists’ angry response to the Stamp Act prefigured the conflict of the 1770s.
C. Britain meanwhile realized the need to mollify the large French-speaking and Catholic population now under its
control.
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Suggested Reading:
Lower, Colony to Nation.
McLynn, 1759.
Schwartz, The French and Indian War.
Warner, With Wolfe to Quebec.
Questions to Consider:
1. What were the strengths and weaknesses of the French colonial position in North America before 1750?
2. Was Britain unreasonable in seeking American aid to defray the cost of victory?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Seven
The Loss of the American Colonies
Scope: British settlers and their descendants in North America resented being taxed when they lacked representation in
Parliament. A series of escalating confrontations in the 1760s and 1770s led the colonies to cooperate with one
another as never before. In 1775 they rebelled under talented leaders from the elite of Massachusetts and Virginia,
and in 1776 they declared their independence from Britain. British opinion was divided between those who felt their
government justified in regulating colonial affairs and those who deplored its intransigence. Nearly all agreed,
however, that the British army would have little difficulty in overcoming the inexperienced Americans. They were
mistaken.
Outline
I.
Britain’s American colonies prospered and expanded steadily between the early 17th and mid-18th centuries.
A. The New England colonies bore the imprint of their Puritan origins.
B. The middle colonies—New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania—already had populations from diverse origins.
C. The southern colonies were tied to the transatlantic slave trade.
D. Colonial legislatures had gained leverage over royal governors because they raised money and men for the era’s
recurrent wars.
E. The colonies began to recognize common problems for the first time in 1754 at the Albany Conference.
F. British revenue needs ended a long era of benign neglect after 1763 and provoked resistance.
G. British attempts to prevent settlement beyond the Appalachians angered frontier Americans.
II. British politicians were divided in the 1760s and 1770s over whether to make judicious concessions to the American
colonists or to try repression.
A. It was widely felt that the Americans were ungrateful for British help in the recent wars, especially as they were far
less heavily taxed than Britons at home.
1. Americans abroad, including Benjamin Franklin, were slow to appreciate the intensity of opposition to the
Stamp Act.
2. The Stamp Act Congress of 1765 was a second American experiment in common political action.
B. The theory of virtual representation was sincerely offered and was applicable equally to many parts of Britain and to
the colonies.
C. Lord North, the prime minister, was conciliatory at first.
1. The Boston Tea Party in 1773 bore witness to the interdependence of Britain’s colonies in America and India.
2. The Coercive Acts (1774) demonstrated British politicians’ underestimation of the degree to which the colonies
shared common fears.
3. William Pitt’s argument that an American parliament might take care of its internal affairs was a minority view.
III. The outbreak of hostilities in 1775 created severe logistical problems for Britain, and the revolutionaries’ French alliance
in 1778 made matters worse.
A. Britain had to depend on the unpredictable winds and currents of the North Atlantic to move its forces.
B. The Americans, fighting for their homes in a familiar environment, had a local advantage over the British soldiers
and their German auxiliaries.
C. The British Army’s use of 18,000 German soldiers intensified the Americans’ fear of “tyranny.”
D. General Washington concentrated on keeping the Continental Army in existence rather than seeking decisive
battlefield victories.
E. France sought to embarrass Britain and to avenge its losses in the French and Indian War by entering the conflict on
the side of the American revolutionaries.
1. The French waited for an American victory before committing themselves.
2. As soon as France entered the war, America became a secondary sphere of operations for the British as troops
were recalled to defend Britain itself.
F. The French blockade of Chesapeake Bay isolated General Cornwallis and forced him to surrender at Yorktown
in 1781.
G. Britain, still at war with France, gave generous territorial terms to the new United States in the Treaty of Paris.
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IV. The loss of its American colonies was the worst military reverse in the entire history of the British Empire, but it did not
bring the empire as a whole to dissolution.
A. Canada and the British West Indies both declined to join the revolution.
B. A large contingent of loyalists moved to British Canada or to Britain itself.
C. British politicians learned the value of conciliation with English-speaking colonies in subsequent crises.
D. Britain and the United States remained vital trading partners, while their mutual cultural influence spread worldwide
in the following century.
Suggested Reading:
Louis et al., The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 2.
Morgan, The Birth of the Republic.
Shy, A People Numerous and Armed.
Wood, The Creation of the American Republic.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why was Britain unable to win a decisive military victory in the American war as it had recently done in Canada?
2. Did Britain act foolishly in its approach to American affairs in the 1770s, or was its conduct reasonable?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Eight
Exploring the Planet
Scope: Trade prompted Britain to build an empire, but along the way the nation made great strides in exploration, invention,
and science. Captain James Cook, for example, guided General Wolfe’s force up the narrow St. Lawrence River to
its victory at Quebec and later explored the southern Pacific Ocean and the coasts of Australia, New Zealand, and
Tasmania. He used recently perfected marine chronometers made by John Harrison, superbly accurate clocks that
finally enabled sailors to measure longitude accurately. Among Cook’s companions was Joseph Banks, a first-rate
naturalist who identified and named hundreds of previously unknown species of plants and animals. Banks in turn
organized other scientific and exploratory voyages. The acceleration of scientific knowledge in the late 18th and
early 19th centuries can be linked directly to British exploration, mapping, and colonization of previously remote
areas of the world.
Outline
I.
James Cook (1728–1779) rose from humble origins to resolve several of the 18th century’s great geographical mysteries.
A. Son of a Yorkshire farm laborer, Cook went to sea in the coasting trade and became a master mariner.
B. He served as a pilot and chart maker in the British campaign against Quebec.
C. His three Pacific voyages between 1769 and 1779 proved the nonexistence of the Great Southern Continent and the
nonexistence of an ice-free Northwest Passage.
1. His use of Harrison’s chronometer enabled him to measure latitude more accurately than earlier sailors and map
makers.
2. His expedition made contact with Australian aborigines and discovered strange “leaping quadrupeds.”
D. By careful attention to good diet, exercise, and sanitation, he dramatically improved the quality of his sailors’ health.
E. Hawaiian natives killed Cook in 1779.
II. Joseph Banks (1743–1820), a brilliant naturalist who sailed with Cook, later organized the worldwide collecting of plant
and animal species.
A. Elected to the Royal Society at age 23, Banks corresponded with Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus, the taxonomist
who created a system for categorizing all living things.
B. Banks accompanied Cook’s first voyage (1768–1771) and subsidized the observation in Tahiti of a transit of Venus
across the Sun.
C. He and his assistants also gathered, illustrated, and named more than 800 species in Madeira, Brazil, Australia, and
New Zealand.
D. He became president of the Royal Society at age 35 and held the position for the next 42 years. He patronized and
encouraged some of the leading explorers and botanists of the age, including Francis Masson, Archibald Menzies,
and James Bruce (who discovered the source of the Blue Nile).
E. As the king’s scientific advisor, he was influential in recommending leaders and scientists to accompany other
voyages of discovery.
III. The Admiralty, like a variety of societies in Britain, sought practical benefits from exploration.
A. The Royal Society for the Encouragment of Arts, Manufactures, and Commerce offered a prize for the
transplantation of breadfruit trees from Tahiti to Jamaica.
1. Captain William Bligh’s attempt to win the prize was interrupted by a famous mutiny in his crew.
2. On a second voyage, Bligh succeeded and won the prize.
3. Breadfruit became a food for West Indies slaves.
B. On Banks’s recommendation, Bligh later became governor of Australia.
Suggested Reading:
Alexander, The Bounty.
Black, The British Seaborne Empire.
Horwitz, Blue Latitudes.
O’Brian, Joseph Banks.
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Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the exploration and mapping of the Pacific take more than 250 years after Magellan first sailed there in the
1520s?
2. From the point of view of the British government, were Cook’s and Banks’s discoveries useful to the empire or merely
interesting?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Nine
Napoleon Challenges the Empire
Scope: By the late 18th century, the British Empire was one on which the Sun never set. However, between 1793 and 1815
British politicians were much more concerned with European power politics than with the colonies. The French
Revolution and the rise of Napoleon created an unprecedented crisis for Britain, which was in danger of invasion
and conquest until 1805. British domination of the sea offset France’s domination of the Continent, bottling up the
French fleet in its ports for years at a time. The British were thus able to acquire numerous highly productive
French, as well as Spanish and Dutch, colonies in the Caribbean. Britain had a far stronger banking and commercial
system than any rival, enabling its government to borrow massive sums quickly and at low rates of interest. This
combination of assets contributed to its ultimate victory in 1815.
Outline
I.
Defeat in the American War did not destroy or impoverish the British Empire.
A. Anglo-American trade was stronger in the 1780s and 1790s than in any previous decade.
B. Adam Smith’s Enquiry into the Wealth of Nations (1776) encouraged a reconsideration of Britain’s mercantilist
policy.
1. Smith argued for free trade, against restrictive monopolies, and against mercantilism.
2. Smith also witnessed the early stages of the industrial revolution and foresaw its capacity to generate immense
wealth.
C. Politicians also began to learn this new economic logic and to apply it to British colonial and trade policy.
II. The Napoleonic Wars were conflicts of ideas as well as nations.
A. The British establishment never accepted the French revolutionary principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity.
1. Edmund Burke, formerly the scourge of Warren Hastings, wrote the classic conservative indictment of the
French Revolution.
2. Fears that revolutionary ideas had infected the common people led to repression of English radicals.
B. The Terror of 1793, followed by the rise of Napoleon, confirmed a long tradition of British political thought.
III. The French Revolution and Napoleon posed the greatest threat to Britain between the Spanish Armada in 1588 and Nazi
Germany in 1940.
A. England faced the danger of a French invasion between 1795 and 1805.
1. Blockades and embargoes on both sides tried to force the antagonist into submission.
2. British industrial superiority and control of the sea lanes enabled it to generate new trade wealth throughout the
conflict.
B. The naval war demonstrated that British sea power could restrict French expansion, as when Napoleon’s army
defeated an Ottoman army in Egypt (1798) but Admiral Horatio Nelson’s fleet destroyed its transports and left it
stranded.
C. A series of naval victories over France and its allies, culminating in Admiral Nelson’s victory at the Battle of
Trafalgar (1805), gave Britain overwhelming maritime dominance then and for the next century.
1. High-quality seamanship and superior gunnery proved decisive in each encounter.
2. Nelson’s death at the moment of his greatest victory enhanced his legend and inspired subsequent generations
of British sailors.
D. British eagerness to see a strong monarchy restored in France discouraged holding captured French colonies.
E. Slave uprisings and tropical diseases made it difficult for Britain to ensure permanent dominance in the Caribbean.
F. Britain did seize and hold strategic points and communications centers, such as Cape Town, Ceylon, and Mauritius.
IV. The Anglo-American War of 1812 affirmed equally the permanent separation of the United States from Britain and the
permanent adhesion to Britain of Canada.
A. Successive American incursions into Canada were defeated easily.
B. After 1815, Britain and the United States never again came to blows.
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Suggested Reading:
Adkins, Nelson’s Trafalgar.
Black, The British Seaborne Empire.
Harvey, The War of Wars.
Mead, God and Gold.
Questions to Consider:
1. How did Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations affect British thinking about the empire?
2. What factors guaranteed the eventual defeat of Napoleon?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Ten
The Other Side of the World
Scope: The British Empire developed two types of colonies: In colonies like India, a tiny British elite presided over millions
of natives. In colonies like America, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, the small indigenous population was
devastated by disease and war, leaving the land open to large-scale settlement. Australia became a prison colony in
1788. After serving their sentences, many convicts were allowed to claim land and become farmers. They soon
discovered that sheep thrived as well in Australia as did tobacco in America or sugar in the West Indies. Australia’s
economy took an immense leap forward in 1851 when disappointed treasure seekers returning from California found
gold at Bendigo and Ballarat. Meanwhile, the British government had signed a treaty with New Zealand’s Maori
chiefs in 1840, guaranteeing in theory the chiefs’ rights as British subjects but unable in practice to prevent the
gradual deterioration of their power and population.
Outline
I.
The British Government established a penal settlement at Botany Bay in 1788, which formed the nucleus of the
Australian colony.
A. Prisoners who might earlier have been shipped to America now went to Australia instead.
1. Many of them were petty thieves, but a few were political prisoners.
2. Conditions in the prison colony were harsh.
B. On their release, prisoners could acquire farmland.
1. The colony expanded rapidly when John MacArthur discovered the possibilities of sheep farming.
2. The healthy climate made the prospect of survival good for former prisoners and free immigrants.
C. The spread of white settlement forced the Aborigines into increasingly arid and marginal lands. Their way of life
was so alien to British immigrants that it drew little sympathy or understanding.
D. Early governors battled for control in a chaotic political environment.
1. William Bligh, of Bounty fame, was the fourth governor, and he suffered yet another mutiny when he tried to
suppress the rum trade.
2. Lachlan Macquarrie an army officer and Napoleonic war veteran, was a more effective governor who turned
Sydney into a model city and believed in reforming prisoners.
II. New Zealand’s indigenous people, the Maoris, lived in more complex societies and were more warlike than the
Australian aborigines. They fought a prolonged rearguard against white domination.
A. The land was biologically alien to the first European visitors, but its climatic similarity to Britain and the lack of
predators meant that European plants and animals would thrive there.
B. European sealers exploited the seal population until it almost disappeared in the 1820s.
C. Edward Gibbon Wakefield, a British civil servant, was determined that New Zealand should be a white settler
colony rather than one comprised of Christianized natives.
D. Subsidized immigration from England began in the 1830s.
E. The Treaty of Waitangi (1840) and formal annexation by Britain could not prevent the decline of Maori power and
population.
III. The Australian gold rush of 1851 swelled its population and prompted the first stirrings of a movement for democratic
self-government.
A. Edward Hargraves, a disappointed forty-niner returning from California, found gold at Bathurst, New South Wales,
in 1851. Bendigo and Ballarat in Victoria became gold rush towns.
B. The Ballarat Reform League protested against costly government mining licenses. A lethal pitched battle between
authorities and miners in 1854 led the government to conciliate the miners rather than escalate the confrontation.
Suggested Reading:
Crosby, Ecological Imperialism.
Hughes, The Fatal Shore.
Kenneally, Commonwealth of Thieves.
Pine, World Fire.
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Questions to Consider:
1. Does the early Australian experience suggest that English criminals could be turned into honest, upright citizens?
2. How did the first British settlers of Australia and New Zealand adapt to unfamiliar environmental conditions?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Eleven
Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery
Scope: Slavery in various forms has been widespread throughout world history. The surprise is less that the British Empire
used slaves than that it finally decided to abolish the system. A resistance movement began among Quakers and
evangelical Anglicans in 18th-century England. It found a parliamentary champion in William Wilberforce, who
helped to abolish the transatlantic slave trade in 1807, and then slavery itself throughout the empire in 1833. West
Indian plantation owners, the principal users of slave labor, were compensated, and the process took place relatively
peacefully, whereas America, 30 years later, was plunged into civil war over the issue. Meanwhile, the West African
colony of Sierra Leone developed from a population of former slaves. A Royal Navy squadron patrolled the African
coast in an effort to prevent other nations’ continuation of the slave trade, and the British government pressured the
other Atlantic nations into ending it by the end of the American Civil War (1865).
Outline
I.
The humanitarian and religious campaign against slavery gathered strength when it found supporters in Parliament.
A. The earliest advocates of abolition were the Quakers, who condemned slavery from 1727. In the 1760s, Granville
Sharp began to litigate on behalf of Africans in England.
B. The Somersett case (1772) destroyed the legal protection given to slavery in England and encouraged a new
approach to the issue.
C. Sharp and others founded the Committee for the Abolition of the African Slave Trade in 1787.
1. Thomas Clarkson was his close collaborator.
2. Olaudah Equiano and other former slaves provided eloquent testimony as to the human cost of slavery.
D. Antislavery philanthropists founded Sierra Leone as a home for former slaves who had fought with the British in the
American Revolutionary War.
E. William Wilberforce became parliamentary leader of the abolitionists.
II. Abolition of the Atlantic slave trade was a crucial first step for the abolitionists.
A. Parliament abolished the slave trade in 1807 despite fierce opposition from the West India lobby.
B. The Royal Navy’s Preventive Squadron, nicknamed the sentimental squadron, struggled to stamp out other
European nations’ slave trade across the Atlantic.
1. It had limited success in preventing contraband trade.
2. Its sailors were vulnerable to tropical diseases.
C. Abolitionists continued to argue against slavery itself. The Anti-Slavery Society, founded in 1823, intensified its
parliamentary agitation under the leadership of Thomas Fowell Buxton.
D. Slave rebellions intensified the controversy.
E. Rivals to the West India traders argued that their system was inefficient, depended on British subsidies, and could
not survive in the free market.
III. Slavery itself was abolished by act of Parliament in 1833 and led to a transformation of the West Indies.
A. Slavery was to be phased out gradually, with the owners compensated for loss of their property.
B. Plantations’ productivity went down because freed slaves preferred to establish small farms of their own rather than
work as laborers for their former owners.
C. The West Indies lost their place as the most profitable and most coveted parts of the empire.
IV. The end of slavery in the British Empire ratcheted up the moral pressure on the United States between the 1830s and the
1860s.
A. In the 1830s and after, American advocates of slavery began to argue that it was a positive good, morally superior to
free industrial labor.
B. Mutual suspicion between North and South forestalled a compromise.
C. Union victory in the Civil War (1861–1865) finally ended the dispute.
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Suggested Reading:
Craton, Sinews of Empire.
Martin, Britain’s Slave Trade.
Walvin, An African’s Life.
———, Britain’s Slave Empire.
Questions to Consider:
1. What factors prompted the eventual abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire?
2. Why did the United States persist with slavery after its abolition in the West Indies?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Twelve
Early African Colonies
Scope: In 1652, Holland established a farming and trade settlement at the Cape of Good Hope, the southern tip of Africa, as
a way station for its ships en route to the East Indies. Britain seized Cape Town during the Napoleonic Wars.
Tensions between the British and Dutch (or Boer) settlers, acute from the outset, intensified in 1833 when Britain
abolished slavery throughout the empire. Many of the Boers, resentful at being deprived of the forced labor they had
used for 200 years, decided to move into the interior of South Africa, a journey remembered today as the Great Trek.
As these Voortrekkers moved north and east, they encountered fierce resistance from the expanding Zulu kingdom
of Chaka and Dingaan but were able to establish two republics, the Orange Free State and the Transvaal. Britain
formalized its rule over the Cape Colony, inland from Cape Town, and Natal, inland from Durban.
Outline
I.
For nearly 200 years, the tip of Africa was interesting only as a way station to India and the Far East.
A. The Dutch founded a settlement at Cape Town in 1652.
1. The Dutch Boers, many of them puritanical zealots, saw themselves as God’s chosen people.
2. They enslaved the Khoi (“Hottentot”) Africans of the Cape region.
B. Britain held Cape Town between 1795 and 1802 and again from 1806 onward.
C. British and Dutch settlers clashed over access to land and over the treatment of Africans.
II. The abolition of slavery in 1833 prompted the 1835–1840 migration of the Boer, called the Voortrekkers, into the
interior of South Africa, which brought them into conflict with the expanding Zulu kingdom.
A. Between 10,000 and 14,000 trekkers left the Cape to found independent Boer republics.
B. Chaka, the Zulu king (r. 1816–1828), had developed a fierce, aggressive, and expansionist empire that traumatized
the interior of South Africa just before the Boer arrived.
1. The entire Zulu social structure was dedicated to war and plunder.
2. The impact of Chaka’s conquests created waves of dislocation beyond their boundaries.
3. Chaka’s half-brother Dingaan assassinated him in 1828.
C. Louis Trigardt, Andres Pretoria, and other legendary Boer leaders led ox-wagon trains across the Orange and Vaal
Rivers and the Drakensberg Mountains.
D. Piet Retief crossed the Drakensberg and met the Zulu king Dingaan. Dingaan lured Retief to a parley, then murdered
him.
E. The Boers avenged Retief’s death at the Battle of Blood River (1838), which demonstrated the superiority of
disciplined riflemen over a much larger Zulu force armed only with spears.
F. The trekkers deposed Dingaan and helped make Mpande king of the Zulus in his place.
1. Mpande ruled for more than 30 years—one of very few Zulu kings to die peacefully of old age.
2. Christian missionaries, active in Africa as in the West Indies, found it almost impossible to make Zulu converts.
3. Zulu questions and challenges prompted the Anglican bishop of Natal, William Colenso, to rethink his own
theological views.
G. Britain took direct control of Natal in 1842 because of its strategic significance on the Indian Ocean but recognized
the Orange Free State and the Transvaal as Boer republics.
III. The discovery of diamonds at Kimberley in 1868 gave a new economic importance to the interior of southern Africa and
provoked renewed conflict between Britons, Boers, and Zulus.
A. Disraeli’s colonies minister, Lord Caernarvon, suggested a confederation of all South African provinces in 1875 and
denied that the Boer republics had been granted full independence from British sovereignty.
B. Theophilus Shepstone arranged a bloodless coup in the Transvaal in 1877.
C. British High Commissioner Sir Bartle Frere hoped to eliminate the Zulu kingdom.
1. He gave an impossible ultimatum to King Cetshwayo, then sent Lord Chelmsford’s force to invade Zululand
in 1879.
2. A crushing British defeat at Isandhlwana was avenged by victories at Rorke’s Drift and Ulundi.
3. Bishop Colenso denounced British aggression and bloodlust.
D. British forces endured another embarrassing defeat at Boer hands in 1881 when they refused to relinquish control
over the Boer republics.
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1.
2.
Paul Kruger’s force surprised the British at Majuba Hill.
Prime Minister Gladstone then reversed himself rather than launch a big campaign, and Transvaal regained
independence.
Suggested Reading:
Etherington, The Great Trekds.
Gump, The Dust Rose Like Smoke.
Morris, The Washing of the Spears.
Thompson, A History of South Africa.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the Boers undertake the Great Trek?
2. Was Britain justified in attempting to reassert its control over the Boer republics?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Thirteen
China and the Opium Wars
Scope: Britain’s industrial supremacy and control of the high seas led its leaders to favor free trade by the 1840s. China, by
contrast, was a closed and bureaucratic society, sealed off from nearly all the political and social changes of the 19th
century. British ships were only allowed to trade at Canton, and in 1839 China prohibited the most lucrative British
import: opium. The British government, under pressure from the East India Company, responded with a show of
military strength. China was forced to sign a treaty in 1842that gave Hong Kong to Britain as a naval station, opened
up five new ports to trade, and permitted the Royal Navy to patrol Chinese rivers and coasts to suppress piracy.
Although Britain never ruled China, it dominated Chinese trade between then and the end of the century. The
empire’s control of China was informal rather than direct but was nonetheless effective.
Outline
I.
Britain used its military and technological superiority to force its way into Chinese markets.
A. The British coastal stations, or factories, in China were officially confined to one site, outside the port of Canton on
the Pearl River.
1. Control of Singapore (founded by Stamford Raffles in 1819) had facilitated access for British ships sailing from
India or the Cape to China.
2. East India Company traders paid bribes to the local merchants and to the Chinese emperor’s viceroy.
B. Opium from India became increasingly popular among the Chinese in the early 19th century, although it was
outlawed.
1. Opium poppies grew in Bengal, and the East India Company shipped them to Lintin Island, near Canton, where
they were refined into the drug.
2. By bribing officials, British merchants were able to sell it through local mandarins.
C. A British attempt in 1834 to win concessions from the Chinese failed. Lord Napier, chief superintendent of trade,
ignored all elements of protocol at a diplomatic meeting.
II. The Chinese decision in 1838 to cut off the opium supply provoked military retaliation by Britain.
A. Emperor Tao-kuang tried to stamp out its use in China, with the help of an ambitious administrator, Lin Tse-hsu. In
a letter, Lin browbeat Queen Victoria.
B. Chinese soldiers besieged the British merchants until, under instructions from the commissioner, Charles Elliott,
they handed over 20,000 cases of opium, worth 2 million pounds.
1. Lin’s soldiers then set fire to the surrendered opium.
2. When the trade persisted despite the ban, Lin pursued the British traders to Macao and forced them to seek
shelter on board merchant ships.
C. China then blockaded all British trade in 1840, and a war began.
III. The British debated the rights and wrongs of the drug itself and the morality of fighting to force it on the Chinese.
A. Some prominent figures, including the rising politician William Gladstone, disapproved of it.
B. Others, including Lord Palmerston, tried to justify it as a medicine and as a valuable, revenue-raising trade item.
C. Thomas De Quincy’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1821) evokes the effects of the drug.
IV. Britain’s military superiority ensured victory in the ensuing war.
A. Fifteen British ships bombarded Tinghai on Chusan Island in July 1840 for nine minutes, with shattering effect.
B. To gain access to other ports and compensation for the confiscated opium, the Navy bombarded Canton in January
1841, killing 500 Chinese and suffering no losses.
C. British troops at Ningpo shattered a relieving Chinese army under the emperor’s cousin in March 1841.
D. The Treaty of Nanjing of August 1842 humiliated the Chinese emperor and turned four new treaty ports over
to Britain.
V. The catastrophic Taiping Rebellion (1850–1864) and the decline of the emperor’s power made China vulnerable to
further exploitation in the mid-19th century.
A. Hong Xiuquan, educated by American missionaries, believed he was the brother of Jesus and led the rebellion
against the emperor.
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B. Recurrent outbreaks of anti-British hostility led to further British bombardment of Chinese ports.
1. Britain responded with force—the Second China War of 1856–1858.
2. In a third show of force, British forces marched to Beijing in 1860 and set fire to the emperor’s Summer Palace.
3. Francis Doyle’s poem “A Private of the Buffs” commemorates an incident in the war and exhibits a rising form
of British imperial pride.
C. Britain imposed a harsher treaty on China, which made Tientsin, the port of Beijing, into a treaty port.
D. Foreign officers Frederick Townsend Ward and Charles Gordon helped the emperors suppress the Taiping
Rebellion. Their success effectively ended the rebellion but gave further evidence of the emperor’s dependence on
outsiders’ power.
Suggested Reading:
Gelber, Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals.
Inglis, The Opium War.
Mills, Drugs and Empires.
Waley, The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was Britain’s role in the Opium Wars in any way morally justifiable?
2. Why was the outcome of the fighting in China so lopsided in Britain’s favor?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Fourteen
Britain—The Imperial Center
Scope: Britain itself went through profound changes between its first colonial ventures in the days of Elizabeth I and the
accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. After civil wars in the 17th century and a prolonged struggle against the
Netherlands and France, it emerged from the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 as the most powerful nation in the world.
Scotland and England had been unified peacefully in 1707, and Ireland joined the United Kingdom in 1801; men
from both nations contributed greatly to the building of an overseas empire. By then, too, Britain was in the midst of
the world’s first industrial revolution, which made it vastly more productive and brought new men with new ideas
into political life. The nation’s development of sophisticated banking and insurance techniques, its profound
political stability, and its comparatively high measures of social mobility all contributed to its ability to project
power around the world.
Outline
I.
th
The English Civil Wars of the 17 century created a permanent role for Parliament in the constitution.
A. The Stuart kings, James I and Charles I, disputed the constitutional role of Parliament, then tried to govern without
it. Parliament insisted on redress of grievances before granting revenue to the king.
B. An escalating series of crises in the early 1640s prompted Charles I to declare war on Parliament.
1. Most of London’s merchants, and the City itself, remained loyal to Parliament and gave it a financial advantage
in the Civil War.
2. Parliament’s New Model Army proved decisive on the battlefield of Naseby in 1645.
C. When Charles I escaped from captivity and tried to renew the war, the Rump Parliament brought him to trial,
condemned him to death, and executed him in 1649.
D. Oliver Cromwell’s Protectorate promoted imperial expansion but could not perpetuate itself beyond his death in
1658.
E. King Charles II, recalled from exile, never forgot his father’s fate, but his brother James II was less circumspect.
1. James II’s attempt to reverse the English Reformation was catastrophic, and he alienated almost every potential
source of support.
2. James II fled in 1688, after which Parliament invited the Stadtholder of the Netherlands to become King
William III.
II. The political unification of the British Isles ended the danger that Ireland or Scotland might ally with a foreign adversary.
A. Scotland sued for inclusion in the United Kingdom after the disastrous failure of its own colonial venture, the Darien
Scheme of 1698–1699.
1. Two invasions by Stuart claimants to the throne were defeated in 1715 and 1745.
2. Scotsmen provided much of the manpower to Britain’s colonial armies.
B. The English domination of Ireland after the mid-16th century was embittered by religious conflict.
1. Cromwell’s massacre at Drogheda (1649) was taken by many Irish Catholics as symbolic of English attitudes
toward their country and their faith.
2. Recurrent uprisings failed to destroy English power and influence.
3. The Act of Union (1800) made Ireland an integral part of the United Kingdom from January 1, 1801, and
brought Irish members into the Parliament at Westminster.
III. Britain pioneered in banking, national finance, and industrialization, while its political system gradually adapted to new
realities.
A. The Bank of England, founded in 1694, gave the business community a stake in the regime’s survival while offering
secure loans at low interest. The bank and the low-interest national debt gave Britain an immense material advantage
in the sequence of 18th-century wars against France.
B. Industrialization in the late 18th century harnessed water and steam power to manufacturing, raising the quality and
quantity of goods while lowering the cost.
1. Capital generated in India and the West Indies was invested in industry.
2. Adam Smith, a Scottish economist, explained the advantage of free markets and entrepreneurial initiative.
C. Industrialization gave new prominence to religious nonconformists and to advocates of the new evangelicalism.
Their influence led to the abolition of slavery and the dispatch of missionaries to overseas colonies.
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D. The First Reform Act in 1832 realigned the British political system peacefully, entailing none of the chaos of the
French Revolution.
E. The repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846 indicated a further shift toward free trade and away from protectionism in the
interest of the old landed elite.
Suggested Reading:
Ashton and Hudson, The Industrial Revolution.
Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
Schama, A History of Britain, vol. 2.
Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why was Britain able to accomplish peacefully a series of changes that had led to war and revolution in most other
European nations?
2. How did changes in religious life affect British approaches to the colonies?
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Lecture Fifteen
Ireland—The Tragic Relationship
Scope: The most puzzling and tragic element of British history is its relationship with Ireland. The English had been
involved in Irish affairs since the 12th century and had largely conquered and pacified Ireland by the mid-17th. By the
19th century, most British people thought that Ireland was part of Great Britain, but most of the Irish thought of
Ireland as a separate nation and bitterly resented the English as alien invaders. Ireland’s widespread poverty was
aggravated by a sharp religious divide; the Catholics had long been suspected by the English of being in league with
France and Spain, and sometimes that was true. In 1846, Ireland suffered a catastrophic harvest failure in its one
principal crop, potatoes, which threatened millions of people with starvation. The crop failure was followed by mass
emigration to Canada, Australia, and America, which created large and politically important Irish lobbies abroad,
unsympathetic to Britain and to the empire itself.
Outline
I.
British involvement in Ireland had always been a source of friction, and the friction intensified after the Reformation.
A. British intervention in Irish politics began in the reign of Henry II in the 12th century.
B. It increased during the reign of the Tudor monarchs, with Henry VIII being the first monarch to declare himself
King of Ireland, in 1541.
C. In the early 17th century, militant Protestant settlements in the northern counties (Ulster) began the long history of
religious division that continues up to the present.
D. Oliver Cromwell, leader of the Parliamentary armies in the British Civil Wars of the 1640s, suppressed an Irish
rebellion in 1649–1651.
1. He massacred the inhabitants of Drogheda when they refused to surrender, the event for which he is still
demonized in Irish Catholic history.
2. He paid the members of his New Model Army in Irish lands. These men swelled the Ulster Protestant
population.
E. Catholic Ireland supported King James II against the Glorious Revolution of 1688–1689.
F. The Act of Union (1800) dissolved the Irish Parliament in Dublin after another Irish rebellion.
G. In the early 19th century, the Catholic majority, mostly very poor, lived on lands owned by Protestant landowners,
many of whom were absentees.
1. Local agents ran the estates and profited by multiple subdivision of plots.
2. Owners often did not even know how many tenants lived and worked on their estates.
3. Tenants were vulnerable to eviction without legal recourse and with no compensation for improvements.
H. The Protestant Church of Ireland was a standing grievance to the Catholic people, who had to pay for its upkeep.
1. The Catholic Association, founded by Daniel O’Connell in 1823, campaigned for Catholic emancipation.
2. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 gave Catholic property owners the right to become members of Parliament.
3. Not until 1869 was the Church of Ireland disestablished.
II. Population growth was not matched by industrialization or agricultural diversification.
A. By the early 1840s, the population was 8 million. Most, the cotters, lived on small rented plots, often housed with
their farm animals in mud huts.
B. Potatoes, introduced into Europe from America by Columbus, were the staple food of the rural poor.
C. Potato blight—beginning in late 1845, catastrophic in 1846 and again in 1848—denied millions their only supply of
food.
III. Irish suffering in 1846–1849 intensified Anglo-Irish bitterness and has never been forgotten.
A. Many of the Irish were starving, and cholera preyed on the weakened.
B. Emigrant ships, often overcrowded and vulnerable to epidemics, sailed to America and Canada. The survivors of
this traumatic emigration created anti-English constituencies in the colonies and the United States.
C. The British government, first under Tory Robert Peel, then under Whig John Russell, escalated public relief efforts.
1. Unsympathetic bureaucrats in England, obedient to the prevailing market theory, prevented fast, plentiful aid
from being sent at first.
2. By early 1847, 3 million Irish people were on direct relief, being given food from local soup kitchens.
3. The recurrence of crop failure in 1848 worsened an already desperate situation.
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D. Irish Nationalists denounced the British response as callously indifferent.
IV. Postfamine Ireland remained poor and much of it bitterly anti-English.
A. The Fenians, a revolutionary group, drew on Irish-Americans’ support for independence. American Fenians
launched an invasion of Canada in 1866 and another in 1870, hoping to spark an anti-British uprising there.
B. The Home Rule Party under Isaac Butt, a Protestant lawyer, tried to secure independence within a British federation.
C. An agricultural depression in the late 1870s led to a new wave of hunger and evictions.
1. Farming in Britain and Ireland were becoming vulnerable to American competition as the Great Plains were
opened after 1869.
2. Most landlords were in debt and regarded steady payment of their tenants’ rent as vital to their solvency.
D. The Land League (founded 1879) opposed high rents and evictions for nonpayment.
1. It was led by Charles Stewart Parnell, a Protestant who favored nationalism.
2. Cambridge-educated and with an English accent, Parnell had the confidence and leadership of a born aristocrat.
3. Home Rule members of Parliament, under Parnell’s leadership, disrupted parliamentary business with
filibusters.
E. Parnell became a folk hero among the Irish poor for his outspoken opposition to evictions.
V. By the early 1880s, another crisis was developing in Ireland. Its resolution in the period from 1880 to 1920 would have a
profound impact on the destiny of the entire British Empire.
Suggested Reading:
Cullen, An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660.
Foster, Modern Ireland.
Mokyr, Why Ireland Starved.
Woodham-Smith, The Great Hunger.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why was English mistrust and fear of the Irish so widespread for so long?
2. Was the famine of 1846–1849 the fault of the English, or was it a natural disaster?
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Lecture Sixteen
India and the “Great Game”
Scope: By the mid-19th century, Britain dominated India, ruling part directly and the rest through dependent princes. The
empire expanded into Burma, Sind, and the Punjab thanks to the East India Company army’s native troops led by
British officers. India remained a vast, colorful, and varied collection of states, with hundreds of different languages,
ethnic groups, and cultures, but it provided opportunities for wealth and adventure to all Britons able to adapt to its
climate. Rigorous governors, influenced by the evangelical movement and political liberalism, tried to suppress
customs they thought of as barbaric, such as sati (widow burning), and after 1813 they permitted Christian
missionaries to seek converts. Fear of Russian encroachment led the British to invade Afghanistan in 1839. For the
first time in the history of Anglo-India, they suffered defeat; only one survivor completed the dreadful retreat from
Kabul out of a column of 17,000.
Outline
I.
th
th
In the late 18 and early 19 centuries, Britain extended its conquests in India and tried to provide good and
conscientious government.
A. Since the trial of Warren Hastings, the British government had regulated the East India Company.
B. Cornwallis’s Forty-Eight Regulations (1793) established the principles on which British India would be run for the
next 70 years, including tax regulation and control of the salt and opium trades.
C. Richard Wellesley defeated Tipu Sultan in 1799 at Seringapatam and annexed Mysore. His system of subsidiary
alliances created what to India was the unfamiliar condition of widespread peace, law, and order.
II. Evangelical Christians and utilitarian administrators transformed the company’s approach to India.
A. The company’s Charter Act of 1813 permitted licensed missionaries to evangelize in India.
B. Administrators influenced by utilitarian philosophy tried to modify the governance of India in the interest of the
“greatest good for the greatest number.”
1. Governor William Bentinck urged the inclusion of Indians in the higher levels of the administration.
2. Bentinck legislated against sati (widow burning).
3. Historian and politician Thomas Macaulay wrote a revised code of Indian laws and foresaw the possibility of
eventual Indian self-rule under British principles.
C. British-educated reformer Ram Mohun Roy led a Hindu Renaissance to counter the missionaries’ influence.
D. English became the standard language of business, law, and politics throughout India.
E. The company established a school at Haileybury to prepare administrators and another at Addiscombe to train army
officers.
III. Fear of Russian influence, along with a desire to expand British territory, led to military ventures in Burma, Afghanistan,
the Punjab, and Sind.
A. The company’s army invaded Burma in 1824 and seized its coastal provinces.
B. A British invasion of Afghanistan in 1838, by contrast, led to the worst defeat the British ever suffered in India.
1. Political fragmentation, forbidding terrain, a harsh climate, and fanatical opposition made the British mission
impossible.
2. During a catastrophic retreat in January 1842, only one man escaped with his life.
C. To restore prestige and to gain the valuable lands of Sind and Punjab (now parts of Pakistan) Britain went on the
offensive again in the 1840s.
1. Sir Charles Napier conquered Sind in 1843.
2. Lord Gough conquered the Punjab in 1849 despite severe losses at the Battle of Chilianwala.
Suggested Reading:
Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 2.
Morris, Heaven’s Command.
Read and Fisher, The Proudest Day.
Wolpert, A New History of India.
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Questions to Consider:
1. Were the British justified in trying to wipe out practices like sati, which they thought of as barbaric?
2. What were the benefits and drawbacks of training an Indian elite to speak, read, and write in English?
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Lecture Seventeen
Rebellion and Mutiny in India
Scope: Areas of India under direct British control were probably governed better than ever before, but evangelical
missionaries and reforming administrators provoked unrest by threatening tradition. Introduction of new weapons
rumored to violate religious taboos in 1857 led to mutiny. Indian soldiers killed their officers, restored the old
Mughal emperor, and challenged British authority across a broad area of north India. Lurid atrocity stories circulated
in England. A horrified British government sent relief forces under General Colin Campbell, who defeated the
mutineers and exacted a terrible vengeance. The government dissolved the East India Company in 1858 and from
then on ran India directly. Westernization policies slowed, even as railroad building and economic development
accelerated. Between the mutiny and 1900, a British-educated Indian elite developed whose most famous member
was to be Mohandas “Mahatma” Gandhi.
Outline
I.
British leaders’ cultural insensitivity provoked a mutiny in the Indian army in 1824 and a much more serious one in
1857.
A. High-caste soldiers at Barrackpore mutinied against a plan to send them by sea to the invasion of Burma in 1824.
B. British acquisition of Indian land continued under Governor-General James Dalhousie (1848–1856). He absorbed
directly into the empire when their princes died without heirs, disallowing the longstanding practice of adopting
heirs.
C. By the 1850s, British officers spent less time with their soldiers than in the early days of the raj and were slow to
react to rumors related to their weapons and supplies.
1. Sepoys believed that new cartridges for the Lee-Enfield rifle, which had to be bitten before use, were smeared
with beef grease (taboo to Hindus) or pork fat (taboo to Muslims).
2. Further rumors alleged that ground-up animal bones were mixed in the flour and cows’ blood in the salt, that all
the soldiers were to be converted to Christianity, and that the caste system was to be abolished.
D. The mutiny began at Meerut in May 1857, then spread to Delhi.
1. A group of sepoys refused to use the cartridges when the new guns were issued.
2. They were humiliated on parade, sentenced to 10 years’ imprisonment, stripped of their uniforms, and put in
leg irons.
3. Their comrades burst open the jail, liberated them, and killed the local British officers, along with their wives
and children, while they were at church.
4. They marched on Delhi, then almost empty of British troops, and seized the city, declaring 82-year-old Prince
Bahadur Shah the restored Mughal emperor.
II. News of the uprising led to similar outbreaks across northern India, but the rebels did not develop a unified command or
adequate communications.
A. The rebellion affected a 200-mile-wide area but did not spread to the southern provinces. None of the three centers
of British authority—Calcutta, Bombay, and Madras—was affected.
B. Caste distinctions and Muslim-Hindu tensions inhibited strong unity; neither was there any emotional tradition of a
united India.
C. The Britons at Canpore were massacred, whereas Lucknow, besieged, held out for months.
1. The Canpore garrison resisted a sepoy siege for 18 days.
2. Two hundred women and children were imprisoned at the bibighar (former home of an army officer’s mistress),
then massacred by local butchers and their dismembered bodies thrown down a well.
3. Lucknow, defended by Sir Henry Lawrence, held out for nine months despite the death and near starvation of
two-thirds of the residents.
III. Britain put down the rebellion with ferocious efficiency, under the leadership of General Colin Campbell, a successful
veteran of the Napoleonic and Crimean wars.
A. Atrocity stories, circulated widely in Britain, provoked calls for merciless vengeance from distinguished and
normally mild citizens like Charles Dickens and the Reverend Charles Spurgeon.
1. The Victorian ideal of defenseless womanhood made the killings seem particularly horrible.
2. The sense of betrayal by native troops whose loyalty until then had always seemed certain intensified the British
troops’ anger.
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B. When British troops recaptured Delhi, Canpore, and Lucknow, they killed all the defenders, took no prisoners, and
looted everything they could move.
1. Suspected rebels rounded up later were often killed without trial.
2. Condemned men in Canpore were forced to clean up the blood of the slain women and children before being
killed.
3. Some were hanged and shot, others blown from the cannons.
C. When the governor-general, Lord Canning, issued an order urging restraint to prevent indiscriminate retaliation, he
was bitterly criticized in Britain and given the derisive nickname “Clemency Canning.”
IV. After the mutiny, the prime minister, Lord Palmerston, dissolved the East India Company, and the British government
took direct control over the subcontinent.
A. A more cautious army policy was designed to forestall possible future uprisings.
B. Westernization policies for the Indian people themselves were largely abandoned, although an elite minority among
the Indian population continued to receive Western educations.
C. British Liberals like Gladstone looked forward to the eventual self-government of India, whereas Conservatives like
Disraeli anticipated a sustained British presence.
Suggested Reading:
Bayly, The New Cambridge History of India, vol. 2.
Edwardes, Red Year.
Embree, 1857 in India.
Wolpert, A New History of India.
Questions to Consider:
1. Would Britain have avoided the crisis of 1857 if its policies had been less culturally insensitive?
2. Why was the British response to the rebellion so ferocious?
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Lecture Eighteen
How Canada Became a Nation
Scope: Canada, with its mixed French and English population, stayed loyal to Britain during the American War of
Independence. A 12,000-strong American army invaded Canada during the War of 1812, but Anglo-Canadian forces
defeated it. Eventually, however, the Canadians found that they too disliked being governed from the other side of
the Atlantic without adequate representation. The British response to two small rebellions in 1837 was the Durham
Report of 1839. It recommended a much larger measure of self-government for Canadians, implicitly conceding a
point Britain had denied in 1775. One by one the provinces of Canada attained self-government, and they were
united in 1867. Britain applied the same principle in Australia, New Zealand, and later South Africa. Meanwhile, as
its frontier moved west, Canada was populated by British immigrants, especially Scots, a process accelerated by
completion of the Canadian Pacific Railroad in 1885.
Outline
I.
What we now call Canada was a cluster of independent colonies in the late 18th century.
A. The migration of 20,000 exiled loyalists from the American Revolutionary War, including slaves who had fought for
the British, gave the maritime provinces a stronger British character than before.
B. The influx of loyalists to Quebec intensified the conflict between French-speaking Catholics and English-speaking
Protestants, which persists to the present.
C. The vast interior of Canada was unsettled and unexplored, except by fur trappers.
D. Alexander Mackenzie pioneered the exploration and mapping of the Arctic and far west.
1. In 1789 he followed the river now named for him to the Arctic Ocean.
2. In 1792 and 1793 he traversed the Rockies and reached the Pacific, 12 years earlier than Lewis and Clark.
II. The War of 1812 cemented Canadians’ loyalty to Britain and began the slow progress of nation building.
A. The Treaty of Ghent (1814) marked the permanent end of British-American and Canadian-American warfare.
B. Five distinct political entities remained: Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Lower Canada
(Quebec), and Upper Canada (Ontario).
C. These colonies’ economies were based on export of basic commodities—wood, furs, fish, and wheat—or else on
subsistence farming.
D. Economic hard times in Britain brought immigrants to Canada, most of all to Upper Canada.
E. Most of the Canadian west—at one point an area three times bigger than the Roman Empire—still belonged to an
old chartered monopoly, the Hudson’s Bay Company, which was chartered in 1670. The company actively
discouraged settlement or economic development.
III. A love-hate relationship with the United States, and an awareness of the possibility of American encroachments, shaped
the expansion of 19th-century Canada.
A. Minor rebellions in 1837 led to a government enquiry led by Lord Durham.
B. The Durham Report of 1839 established the principle of internal self-government for white settler colonies that was
later adopted throughout the empire.
1. Upper and Lower Canada were unified in the hope that the French population would be anglicized.
2. Provincial governors now had to cultivate the support of representative assemblies and could not override them.
C. An era of energetic railroad building began in the 1850s.
D. The exhaustion of available farmland east of Lake Huron by the 1850s led to migration to the United States.
IV. A transcontinental railroad, built between 1871–1885, became the backbone of the Canadian nation.
A. Legislation unified the provinces under one Ottawa government in 1867.
B. The Hudson’s Bay Company ceded its western lands to Canada in 1869.
C. Conservative prime minister John Macdonald promised that an all-Canadian railway would reach the Pacific Coast
by 1881, in return for British Columbia’s promise to become part of a united Canada.
1. The promise was in part a reaction to completion of the first American transcontinental railroad in 1869 and fear
of American encroachments in the west.
2. It offered the prospect of commercially developing the Canadian Great Plains between Winnipeg and the
Rockies.
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3.
Railroad patronage helped Macdonald stay in power through most of the 1870s and 1880s, despite constant
allegations of corruption.
D. Political difficulties included a rebellion in 1870 by the Métis (people of mixed European and Native American
heritage), led by Louis Riel. Colonel Garnet Wolseley’s column, aimed against Riel, took 96 days to march from
Lake Superior to the site of present day Winnipeg, which underlined the need for improved communications.
E. The technical difficulties included crossing the Rocky Mountains but also the treacherously difficult swamplands
north of the Great Lakes.
F. The railroad was finally completed in 1885 at Craigellachie, British Columbia.
Suggested Reading:
Berton, The National Dream and the Last Spike.
Gough, First Across the Continent.
Herman, How the Scots Invented the Modern World.
Lower, Colony to Nation.
Questions to Consider:
1. Were early Canadians’ fears of the United States justified?
2. Why did Canada become a nation so much more slowly than the United States?
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Lecture Nineteen
The Exploration and Settlement of Africa
Scope: In the mid-19th century, British explorers traveled across Africa, mapping its mountains, tracing its river systems,
and preparing the way for traders and colonists to follow. Among the greatest of them were Richard Burton, David
Livingstone, and John Morton Stanley, who among them worked out the origins and courses of all the great rivers in
the continent’s interior. They also showed how difficult it would be to settle tropical Africa unless cures could be
found for malaria and other diseases. Nevertheless, the European colonial powers scrambled to conquer Africa in the
last three decades of the 19th century, especially after the discovery of diamonds and gold in South Africa. African
rulers who tried to stand in the way of these conquerors were annihilated by British rifles, machine guns,
and artillery.
Outline
I.
Commercial, religious, and intellectual factors motivated British exploration of the African interior.
A. John Hanning Speke, encouraged by the Royal Geographical Society, discovered and named Lake Victoria in 1858
and confirmed it as the Nile’s source in 1859.
B. David Livingstone, a Scottish doctor, went to Africa as a missionary but could not endure the monotony of
ministering for years in one place.
1. He discovered the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi River and made the first recorded crossing of sub-Saharan
Africa from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
2. He discovered the Shire River and Lake Malawi but misjudged their potential as future European settlements.
3. He deplored the continuing slave trade, although his life was once saved by an Arab slave trader.
C. John Morton Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone in Ujiji in 1871 was one of the press sensations of the century;
Stanley worked for James Gordon Bennett, editor of the New York Herald.
D. After his meeting with Livingstone, Stanley traced the entire course of the Congo River (1874–1877).
II. Britain participated in the scramble for Africa partly to gain profitable colonies and partly to forestall its European rivals.
A. General Garnet Wolseley led a murderously efficient campaign against the Ashanti kingdom (Ghana) in 1874.
B. Britain made itself the dominant power in Egypt to protect its investment in the Suez Canal, its gateway to India.
C. General Gordon’s adventures in the Sudan turned him into a popular hero and prompted more campaigns far up the
Nile Valley.
D. The German chancellor Otto von Bismarck arranged a colonial conference in Berlin (1884–1885) in the hope of
preventing European wars over African colonies.
E. South Africa’s Boer republics became politically important after the discovery of gold on the Witwatersrand of the
Transvaal in 1886.
III. The British simultaneously justified their own colonial ventures and deplored those of unscrupulous rivals like King
Leopold of the Congo.
A. Slavery and massacre were integral to Leopold’s regime. The Congo became a byword for all the evils of
exploitative imperialism.
B. Cecil Rhodes, by contrast, regarded his own empire-building adventures as benign.
Suggested Reading:
Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost.
Jeal, David Livingston.
Pakenham, The Scramble for Africa.
Rice, Captian Sir Richard Francis Burton.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did David Livingstone become a popular hero despite being unsuccessful as a missionary and wrong in most of his
geographical claims?
2. Was Africa useful to Britain for itself, or were British concerns there always linked to other imperial questions?
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Lecture Twenty
Gold, Greed, and Geopolitics in Africa
Scope: The 1886 discovery of gold in the Witwatersrand near present-day Johannesburg transformed the Transvaal and the
Orange Free State from pastoral backwaters to centers of dynamic economic activity, especially mining and railroad
building. Afrikaner rulers taxed miners heavily and denied them political representation. Deterioration of BritishAfrikaner relations finally led to open war between 1899 and 1902. Two white minority populations fought in a
majority black country, and at first the highly mobile Boer cavalry dominated the battlefields. When a full-scale
British army arrived, however, it soon won the conventional phase of the war. It then had to spend another two years
tracking down militant Boer guerrillas. Its scorched-earth policy and its policy of crowding Boer farm families into
disease-ridden concentration camps, moreover, offered an ominous premonition of 20th-century warfare.
Outline
I.
Diamond and gold discoveries in Southern Africa made it the wealthiest and the most sharply disputed area of Africa.
A. Cecil Rhodes, later founder of the Rhodes Scholarships, achieved fabulous wealth and power, including his own
army, from his Kimberley diamond mines.
B. Gold was discovered in 1886 in the Transvaal, around which mines and the city of Johannesburg grew up rapidly.
1. The ore was not rich, and mining had to be highly capitalized from the beginning.
2. About 97,000 African laborers, living in compounds, were at work there by 1899.
C. “Uitlanders” (foreigners) brought capital and technical expertise.
1. Paul Kruger’s Boer republic taxed them but denied them all political rights.
2. The Boers built a railway to Delagoa Bay in Portuguese East Africa (Mozambique) to sidestep British
commercial control.
D. The Jameson Raid (1895–1896) failed to stimulate an Uitlander coup, denting British pride and prestige.
1. Boers, and British critics, believed that Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlain had authorized it.
2. Britain paid reparations for the raid, which Transvaal’s President Kruger used to buy modern weapons.
E. In 1898, a Boer policeman killed a British miner in Johannesburg, which led to a petition signed by 21,000 British
Uitlanders demanding equal rights.
II. The Boer War was fought between 1899 and 1902; it demonstrated the Boers’ skill and hinted at British vulnerability.
A. After a series of ultimatums, Britain declared war on the Boer republics in October 1899, claiming suzerainty.
B. The British endured a series of jarring reversals in the early months of the war.
1. Mafeking, Ladysmith, and Kimberley were besieged.
2. British forces lost three battles in one week, called Black Week, in December 1899.
3. The fighting at Spion Kop near Ladysmith led to heavy British losses.
C. General Buller was relieved of command after Black Week.
1. Winston Churchill and other observers on the scene realized that Britain had underestimated the Boers’ military
prowess.
2. Churchill himself was captured from an armored train but made a dramatic escape from Transvaal’s capital,
Pretoria.
D. Robert Baden-Powell’s defense of Mafeking became legendary and inspired him to found the Boy Scouts movement
after the war.
III. British reinforcements and a new commander, Lord Roberts, recovered the initiative and soon won the conventional
phase of the war, after which they faced two years of stubborn guerrilla resistance.
A. Roberts borrowed from the Boers’ methods and used high-speed cavalry, outflanking the besiegers to relieve
Kimberly, Ladysmith, and Mafeking. The relief of Mafeking on May 17, 1900, led to wild rejoicing in Britain.
B. Roberts’s army then marched on Pretoria.
C. Britain responded to the Boer guerrilla campaign with a scorched-earth policy in the countryside.
1. Civilians were placed in concentration camps.
2. The camps, like the armies, were swept by infectious diseases.
3. Emily Hobhouse, an English religious and humanitarian crusader, led protests against conditions in the camps.
D. The Treaty of Vereeniging ended the war in 1902.
1. Britain by then had 300,000 troops in South Africa.
2. Both sides agreed to maintain white supremacy.
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3.
One effect of the war was to make Britain appear militarily vulnerable.
Suggested Reading:
Farwell, The Great Anglo-Boer War.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Pakenham, The Boer War.
Reitz, Commando.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was Britain justified in its political claims over the Orange Free State and the Transvaal?
2. Why was it so difficult for British forces to win a decisive victory in South Africa?
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Lecture Twenty-One
The Empire in Literature
Scope: The empire influenced British literature just as it influenced British life as travelers’ tales of triumph and disaster, as
well as their newfound wealth, made their way back to England. The great themes of English literature are marriage,
money, and social class. Historically it was possible to buy your way to higher social status, but it often took more
than one generation—as when hard-driving tradesmen educated their sons to be gentlemen at the old universities of
Oxford and Cambridge. The colonies’ role in the history of English literature was to upset the order of things by
introducing new forms of wealth, by raising moral questions about the rights and wrongs of colonization, and even
by asking how the members of different races should interact.
Outline
I.
Literature from the earliest phase of the empire emphasizes the uncertainties of exploration and colonization and the
hazards of shipwreck.
A. Caliban, in Shakespeare’s The Tempest (1611) is a wild man enslaved by Prospero, an exiled European king.
1. Recent critics have compared him to Native Americans who first welcomed, then were dominated by, colonists.
2. The play may be seen as an allegory of imperialism just when it was beginning.
B. In the 1600s, British audiences enjoyed captivity tales, whose characters suffered shipwreck, mutiny, captivity, and
persecution for their religious faith.
C. Many critics regard Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) as the first real English novel.
1. Crusoe is a shipwreck survivor, alone on an island off Venezuela.
2. He creates a miniature England there, aided by his “Man Friday.”
3. The story was based partly on the true-life adventures of Alexander Selkirk and Henry Pitman.
D. Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722) includes scenes of deportation to colonial Virginia.
E. Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) is, outwardly, another shipwrecked sailor’s tale.
II. Nineteenth-century English fiction includes numerous characters and situations in which colonial and imperial affairs
affect characters in Britain even though they stay at home.
A. Jane Austen’s novels about the marriage prospects of genteel young ladies often refer to their suitors’ fortunes from
the colonies or from war.
1. In Persuasion (1817), Captain Frederick Wentworth’s eligibility to marry Anne Elliott increases when he makes
a fortune by capturing French ships.
2. In Mansfield Park (1814), Sir Thomas Bertram is forced to visit ailing sugar plantations in Antigua; he is a
slave owner.
B. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) is set entirely in England, but the plot depends on exotic colonial characters and
challenges.
1. The madwoman in the attic is a Jamaican creole.
2. Jane considers marrying a fanatical missionary who aims to convert the Hindus to Christianity.
3. Jean Rhys’s The Wide Sargasso Sea (1966) takes a postcolonial second look at the story.
C. Henry Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1848) also has a rich half-caste woman whose marriagability is debated. New foods
and a black servant are also featured.
D. The plot of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations (1861) pivots around Magwitch, a criminal who is transported for
life to the Australian prison colony.
III. In the later 19th century, early literature about colonial Africa emphasized its exoticism but later moved to a more serious
study of the effects of imperialism.
A. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines (1885) follows a group of English hunters to a lost African kingdom of
brutal but noble savages.
B. Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899) investigates African exoticism in a more grim and sober fashion. Based
on Conrad’s own experience in King Leopold’s Congo, it is an exploration of human greed, depravity, and the thin
veneer of civilization.
C. India-born Rudyard Kipling, the most celebrated of all Britain’s colonial writers, was the first English winner of the
Nobel Prize for Literature (1907). His work both celebrates the empire and warns of its demise.
D. Twentieth-century literature of empire would be far less confident but would enjoy growing contributions from
colonial peoples.
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Suggested Reading:
Conrad, Heart of Darkness.
Dickens, Great Expectations.
Haggard, King Solomon’s Mines.
Thackeray, Vanity Fair.
Questions to Consider:
1. Does it matter whether or not Shakespeare and Jane Austen were thinking about colonialism?
2. How do colonial figures upset the routine of British life, according to these novelists?
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Lecture Twenty-Two
Economics and Theories of Empire
Scope: Throughout the 19th century, advocates of the empire claimed they were bringing progress to backward peoples.
Above all, however, they were making money. At midcentury, Britain strongly favored international free trade and
abandoned the old Navigation Acts and nearly all other forms of protectionism. Once Germany and America began
to catch up with Britain industrially, however, the advantages of free trade diminished. A new generation argued for
strengthening the bonds of the empire, making it a single political unit, and perhaps even surrounding it with tariff
fences. Meanwhile, critics looked on imperialism as the decadent phase of a rapacious capitalist system. As the
world’s empires grew, so did speculation about the ethics and economics of imperialism, and for the first time
important sections of the nation began to doubt that Britain’s role in the world was beyond reproach.
Outline
I.
th
In the first half of the 19 century, Britain abandoned protectionism and promoted free trade.
A. As the world’s industrial pioneer, it stood to gain more than any other nation from monopolies and abolishing tariffs.
B. British manufactures were better in quality and lower in price than those of any rival, and their rail systems were
among the most extensive.
C. British financial services, including insurance, were the world’s most mature.
D. After 1840, ocean-going steamships increased the pace and volume of trade while reducing its cost.
1. They made emigration from Britain safer than ever before.
2. Their size and speed made it possible for Britain to import low-value bulk goods in place of the early empire’s
luxuries.
E. From the 1860s onward, submarine cables brought all parts of the empire into rapid communication with one
another.
1. They enabled the central government to increase its information about, and control over, events in the colonies.
2. They facilitated easy communication between merchants at both ends of long-term transactions.
II. Britain lost its industrial and commercial lead after 1870, when new industrial giants, particularly the United States and
the newly unified Germany, began to compete aggressively.
A. Self-governing white colonies wanted latitude of political action but also wanted British military protection.
B. The idea of a “Greater Britain” and the possibility of an imperial federation drew widespread interest in the 1870s
and 1880s.
C. John Seeley’s The Expansion of England (1883) urged a more unified and self-conscious imperial policy.
D. Pseudo-scientific ideas about the Anglo-Saxons as a distinct race destined to rule the world became popular.
E. Joseph Chamberlain, colonial minster from 1895, favored a policy of stronger imperial bonds.
1. He reversed the traditional policy of constant budget cutting.
2. He encouraged the building of African railroads.
3. His support for medical research contributed to the abatement of malaria and sleeping sickness, two of the
greatest killers in the tropical colonies.
4. He was unable to prevail in promoting a policy of imperial preference.
F. Newspaper editors and popular writers encouraged the idea of imperial unity. Alfred Harmsworth (Lord Northcliffe)
played the same role in creating the British popular press that Hearst and Pulitzer played in America.
III. Radical economic theorists condemned imperialism as a form of capitalist plundering and anticipated that it would
provoke great future wars.
A. John Hobson, a British anti-imperial economist, believed that the empire was essentially a sales operation for British
manufacturers who overproduced goods and underpaid their workers.
B. The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin saw competition for colonies as one of the causes of World War I.
C. Subsequent interpreters have cast doubt on these theories, which exaggerate the profitability of colonies.
D. Whether the empire was economically feasible, whether it was desirable, and whether it would persist were all open
to question.
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Suggested Reading:
Carrington, The British Overseas.
Ferguson, Empire.
Lloyd, The British Empire.
Smith, The Wealth of Nations.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did the idea of free trade become so popular and so persuasive?
2. Could Britain have prevented America and Germany from catching up industrially and economically?
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Lecture Twenty-Three
The British Empire Fights Imperial Germany
Scope: Alone, Britain’s armies could never have defeated Germany in World War I, but Britain’s command of the sea
enabled it to blockade German trade, while its empire provided supplies of all kinds. Thousands of colonial soldiers
fought on the Western Front, and thousands more fought in secondary campaigns in the Middle East and Africa.
Already the effective rulers of Egypt, the British tried to extend their Middle Eastern influence with three campaigns
against Iraq and by harassing Turkish communications in Palestine. Most of the war’s colonial soldiers were
volunteers, as highly motivated at first as those from Britain itself, and they developed a reputation for bravery and
ferocity. But poor treatment by British officers, racial discrimination against Indians and West Indians, and a feeling
of being flung into a hopeless cause by blundering British officers—a feeling particularly strong among the
Australians at Gallipoli—angered many colonial peoples and contributed to their postwar disillusionment with the
idea of the empire itself.
Outline
I.
The European powers undertook a naval armaments race in the early years of the 20th century.
A. British dreadnought battleships were so much more advanced than any rivals that they made every other fighting
ship in the world instantly obsolete.
B. The reality and the mystique of the Royal Navy had underpinned the empire since the victory at Trafalgar, but they
had not fought a worthy adversary since. In World War I, they would face a new weapon: the submarine.
II. Even though World War I was fought over the issue of the balance of power in Europe, men from all over the British
Empire volunteered to fight.
A. Colonies vied with one another to send men and supplies to aid the war effort. More than a million soldiers from
India alone, all volunteers, fought in the war.
B. Food imports, especially from Canada, kept Britain and its armies fed.
C. Britain introduced conscription in 1916 in the face of high casualties, but most of the white dominions refused to
enlist their men.
III. The Middle East became an important theater of operations for British imperial forces.
A. First Lord of the Admiralty Winston Churchill’s hope of a quick victory over the Turks met unexpectedly fierce
resistance at Gallipoli.
1. A direct naval assault on the Dardanelles in March 1915 failed to open a direct passage to Constantinople.
2. The alternative, tried a month later, was invasion of the Gallipoli peninsula, from which the army could march
to Constantinople.
3. Some 30,000 Anzacs—Australian and New Zealand Army Corps—were among those who suffered severe
casualties in the unsuccessful invasion.
B. Early successes in Mesopotamia (Iraq) were followed by reverses when General Charles Townshend won a series of
easy victories but then, besieged in Kut for more than a year, was finally forced to surrender.
C. General Stanley Maude’s force finally seized Baghdad in March 1917.
D. General Edmund Allenby’s campaign in Palestine liberated Jerusalem in 1917, prefiguring the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire.
1. He commanded the last cavalry campaign in British history.
2. Among his troops was David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist leader who would later become the first prime minister of
Israel.
3. In 1918, Allenby won a shattering victory over the Turks at Megiddo, site of the biblical Battle of Armageddon.
4. His campaign was aided by the work of T. E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), who helped incite an Arab revolt
against the Turks.
IV. British forces also attacked, and eventually seized, German colonies in Africa.
A. Jan Smuts, one of the defeated Boer generals, led an Anglo–South African campaign to capture German South West
Africa (Namibia).
B. General Paul von Lettow-Vorbeck held out against superior British forces in German East Africa (Tanzania) for
three years. He was never defeated, but neither was he able to prevent British occupation of the “German East.”
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Suggested Reading:
Black, The British Seaborne Empire.
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Keegan, The First World War.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Questions to Consider:
1. Did the great powers’ greed for colonies make the First World War inevitable?
2. Why was Britain eventually able to seize so much of the old Ottoman Empire?
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Lecture Twenty-Four
Versailles and Disillusionment
Scope: Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points included self-determination for all peoples, an end to colonial empires, and a
move toward universal democracy, all supervised by a powerful League of Nations. The victorious leaders of Britain
and France, by contrast, wanted to seize as many colonies from their vanquished enemies as they could get. By the
actual terms of the Treaty of Versailles, Britain took over Germany’s African colonies and became the dominant
power in the formerly Turkish-ruled Middle East. The empire appeared to be both larger and stronger than ever
before. The war had, however, fostered a mood of disillusionment and loss of faith in the empire, especially among
the white dominions. The decline in British confidence in the imperial mission, which can be seen in the best
English literature of the era, was as significant in the decline of the empire as the independence movements
springing up in many colonies.
Outline
I.
Britain appeared to be stronger than ever by the terms of the Versailles treaty, but the territorial extension of the empire
masked a decline in imperial self-confidence.
A. Britain and France aimed to weaken Germany permanently through reparations and the carving up of its empire, so
that it would no longer be a threat.
B. The League of Nations, without American participation, was vitiated from the outset. The British Empire’s six votes
in the League—from Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and India—were a sign of division, not
unity.
C. Britain’s contradictory promises to Arab and Zionist forces in the Middle East sowed the seeds of later dilemmas.
D. The Washington Naval Treaty of 1922 brought British naval supremacy to an abrupt end. After the Battle of Jutland,
the German High Seas Fleet kept to its harbors.
II. A mood of disillusionment followed the war, evident in British literature and in popular attitudes, and auguring a decline
of imperial enthusiasm.
A. A spate of antiwar literature denigrated the idealism that had led to the catastrophes of the Western Front.
B. Robert Graves’s Goodbye to All That (1929) and Siegfried Sassoon’s Memoirs of an Infantry Officer (1930)
explored the futility, brutality, and trauma of war.
C. A new generation of novelists, such as E. M. Forster and George Orwell, poured cold water on the idea of Britain’s
civilizing mission overseas.
III. The political transformation of Britain and the rise of the Labour Party placed the future of the empire in jeopardy.
A. The Labour Party, created by the Trades Unions Congress in 1900, was pledged to parliamentary socialism but acted
chaotically on imperial questions.
B. The Russian Revolution had a polarizing effect on British and world politics, and its long-term implications for
colonial empires were also negative.
C. After 1917, the British Empire was opposed by both of the world’s rising superpowers.
Suggested Reading:
Crick, George Orwell.
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Macmillan, Paris 1919.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was President Wilson naïve to believe that Britain might put aside its imperial interests at the Versailles treaty?
2. Why did the Middle East emerge as a newly important area for the British Empire?
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Lecture Twenty-Five
Ireland Divided
Scope: The great Liberal prime minister, William Gladstone, tried to persuade British politicians to grant self-government
to Ireland, but both of his Home Rule bills (1886 and 1893) failed in Parliament. Home Rule members of Parliament
extorted a third bill from Herbert Asquith’s Liberal government in 1914, but the outbreak of World War I postponed
its implementation. In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood, a radical nationalist group, seized the Dublin General
Post Office and declared Ireland an independent republic. British troops and artillery battered them into submission
while the general population stood by and watched. Afterward, however, more and more Irish Catholics came to
admire the Dublin rising and to support independence. The Irish War of Independence ensued, complicated by the
fact that Ulster Protestants desperately wanted to avoid independence. When the Irish Free State came into existence
in 1922, a civil war broke out between those who accepted the partitioning of Ireland and those who rejected it.
Outline
I.
Prime Minister Gladstone came to believe in Irish Home Rule but was unable to convince his parliamentary colleagues.
A. Gladstone introduced Home Rule legislation in 1886, using Canada and Australia as models.
B. Speaking for the Conservative opposition, Lord Salisbury used the analogy of the Indian Mutiny.
C. Enough Liberals broke ranks to defeat the bill, which split the party into Home Rule and Unionist branches.
D. The six Ulster counties, Ireland’s only industrialized area and the only area with a majority Protestant population,
reacted to the crisis with displays of fierce pro-Unionism.
E. Gladstone introduced another Home Rule bill in 1893 that passed the House of Commons but was rejected by the
House of Lords.
F. Prime Minister Herbert Asquith’s Third Home Rule Bill passed in 1914.
1. Irish members of Parliament held the balance of power in the Commons and insisted on Home Rule as a quid
pro quo for supporting him.
2. The House of Lords’ veto power had been diminished to two years in 1910, so that the legislation, vetoed in
1912 and 1913, became law anyway in 1914.
3. However, implementation was suspended because of the outbreak of World War I.
G. Militant Ulster Protestants had been importing weapons to meet the threat of Home Rule, which they intended to
oppose by force. Catholic groups were also importing weapons of their own.
H. Large numbers from both sides fought for Britain in World War I.
II. The Dublin uprising of Easter 1916 failed to spark a general rebellion, but British persecution of its survivors led to a
great shift in popular opinion.
A. The Irish Republican Brotherhood (IRB) hoped to exploit Britain’s wartime vulnerability. Some of its leaders had
faith in the symbolic value even of a spectacular defeat.
B. The rising, though marked by poor planning, began on Easter Monday; 1,600 rebel men and women occupied the
General Post Office and other strategic points in Dublin.
C. British troops attacked the post office and in the space of a week bombarded it into rubble, forcing the survivors
to surrender.
D. Fifteen of the survivors were convicted of treason in wartime and were executed by firing squad in May 1916.
Irishmen who had not risen at Easter now came to regard them as martyrs.
1. British authority in southern Ireland gradually weakened, to the extent that the government did not try to
enforce its conscription statute in 1918.
2. Survivors of the uprising who had been deported to English prisons without trial were released in 1917 to
appease American public opinion.
E. At the general election of 1918, the Home Rule party shrank to insignificance while Sinn Féin rose and its members
pledged never to sit in the Westminster Parliament. Among its 76 constituency winners, 47 were in jail.
III. The Irish War of Independence, a civil and guerrilla conflict, took place amid scenes of extreme brutality, and its ending
sparked an even more savage conflict among the victors over whether Ireland could be partitioned.
A. Sinn Féin created a government and parliament of its own under Eamon de Valera and outlawed British authority
in 1919.
1. Its military force was the newly created Irish Republican Army (IRA).
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2.
B.
C.
D.
E.
De Valera toured the United States in 1919 and 1920, was greeted as a liberator and national hero by IrishAmericans, and raised $5 million.
Britain responded by recruiting former army men, survivors of the trench warfare of the last four years, whom the
Irish nicknamed the Black and Tans. They victimized innocents in retaliation for IRA attacks on the army and
police.
The Anglo-Irish Treaty of 1921, ratified by the Irish Parliament early in 1922, gave southern Ireland selfgovernment as the Irish Free State but preserved Ulster as part of the United Kingdom. Sinn Féin had made no
headway in Northern Ireland.
Antipartition diehards fought against the pragmatists for the next year but ultimately lost.
Irish independence is a persuasive point at which to date the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
Suggested Reading:
Edwards, Patrick Pearse.
Foster, Modern Ireland.
Key, The Green Flag.
Mansergh, The Irish Question.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why were so many of the English reluctant to acknowledge the Irish majority’s desire for Home Rule?
2. Might Home Rule have come about peacefully if the English had been more restrained in their reaction to the Dublin
uprising?
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Lecture Twenty-Six
Cricket and the British Empire
Scope: Cricket became the sport of the entire British Empire. Its origins are lost in the Middle Ages, but by the 18th century
a game quite similar to the modern one was already popular in England. In the 19th century, colonizing soldiers and
administrators took cricket to India, Australia, New Zealand, the West Indies, and South Africa, all of whose
peoples became enthusiasts. In fact, one of the easiest ways to find out whether a country was once part of the
British Empire is to see whether or not its people play cricket. Cricket taught British ideals of gentlemanliness to
colonial people and introduced the idea of an elaborate etiquette in addition to the formal rules. When colonies
began to struggle for independence, they often used cricket analogies to point out that Britain, when it resisted them,
was not living up to its own ideals of fair play. The expression “that’s just not cricket” is a fairly serious
condemnation of someone else’s conduct.
Outline
I.
Anyone who loves baseball will love cricket too, but it will not be love at first sight.
A. Both are bat and ball games that require split-second timing and are played in bursts of action followed by minutes
of inactivity, but they have many differences.
1. The batsman stands in the middle of the field and can hit in a 360-degree radius, rather than having to hit into a
fair zone of just 90 degrees.
2. He defends three vertical posts, called the wicket, rather than a home plate.
3. The bowler (pitcher) is allowed a run-up but must deliver the ball with an unbent elbow.
4. The batsman hits the ball as it rises after one bounce.
5. The fielders do not wear gloves and expect a catch to hurt.
6. The batsman, having hit the ball, does not have to run if he does not think he can reach the other wicket safely.
B. Cricket has just two innings, whereas baseball has nine.
1. Each innings (yes, “innings” is singular) requires 10 outs rather than 3, and an innings can sometimes last for
more than a day.
2. The length of games itself suggests a society in which leisure enjoys higher status than work.
3. It was more prestigious to play as an amateur than as a professional.
4. The British equivalent of the All-Stars game was called the Gentlemen versus the Players.
C. Cricket crossed all class boundaries, unlike most other sports, which were more class specific.
II. Playing cricket was one of the ways that settlers in the white colonies re-created some of the familiarity of home,
whereas in the nonwhite colonies it gave the indigenous people the chance to show how British they were, or were
capable of becoming.
A. The Australians became fierce and able players.
1. Teams from England and Australia compete for “the ashes,” a trophy that never actually leaves England.
2. A breach of etiquette by the visiting England team of 1932–1933 caused an Anglo-Australian diplomatic
incident.
B. West Indians also learned to play expertly.
1. Early West Indian teams visiting Britain had to learn how to play in shoes.
2. The West Indian Marxist revolutionary C. L. R. James was also a cricket journalist and an excellent player.
C. Indian princes saw analogues to the warrior virtues in the game.
1. Maharaja Kumar Shri Sir Ranjitsinghji was the greatest of the Indian Victorian players.
2. Different aspects of the game correspond to different attributes of the Hindu castes.
III. English public (i.e., private) schools regarded cricket as ideal preparation for imperial service.
A. Games, much more than academic achievement, conferred status.
B. Army officers and administrators explained their duties with the help of cricket metaphors, and ad hoc cricket
matches consoled English garrisons all over the world.
C. A subversive anticricket literature about schools developed at the turn of the century.
1. Rudyard Kipling’s Stalky and Co. (1899) makes imperial heroes out of boys who were bad at games.
2. C. S. Lewis’s Surprised by Joy (1955) tells of how he found school cricket much worse than service in the
World War I trenches.
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Suggested Reading:
Allitt, “English Cricket and Literature.”
Bowen, Cricket.
Green, A History of Cricket.
Nandy, The Tao of Cricket.
Questions to Consider:
1. Is it reasonable to believe that national characteristics can be embodied in a game, or is that idea just wishful thinking?
2. Why did cricket transcend social class barriers, whereas most other sports reinforced them?
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Lecture Twenty-Seven
British India between the World Wars
Scope: After the Amritsar Massacre of 1919, Mohandas Gandhi, leader of the Indian National Congress, intensified his
appeal for swaraj (complete independence). Gandhi was expert at appealing to British principles and standards. He,
like most of the British-educated Indian elite, was horrified by recurrent religious sectarian violence and wanted
malcontents to focus their attention on expelling the British through the peaceful methods of Satyagraha (truth
force). He foresaw that religious differences would impede Indian unity. The British tiptoed toward Indian selfgovernment, which they had conceded in principle during World War I. The Government of India Act of 1935
created a federation of Indian provinces, each with its own parliament. The predominantly Hindu Congress Party
won most of these elections, which intensified Muslims’ fears that independence would leave them a vulnerable,
despised, and persecuted minority. Muhammad Jinnah, leader of the Muslim League, resolved that if the British did
quit India, Muslims should have a country of their own: Pakistan.
Outline
I.
For nearly a century after the Indian Mutiny, a handful of Britons continued to rule India.
A. Strenuously educated at Haileybury, they were taught to be self-sacrificing and incorruptible.
B. Indians were theoretically entitled to take the Indian Civil Service exam but had to go to England to take it.
C. Young men, often from the British middle class, exercised immense power, sometimes over millions of people.
D. At the apex of the imperial pyramid sat the viceroy, the queen’s representative.
E. India industrialized slowly and remained vulnerable to famine.
II. In the late 19th century, educated Indians and their British sympathizers raised the question of Indian self-government.
A. The Congress movement, founded in 1885, began with the help of English sympathizers like Allan Octavian Hume
and William Wedderburn.
1. Congress boycotted English cloth imports in 1905 to protest the partitioning of Bengal.
2. In 1906, Congress voted in favor of the principle of self-government for India.
B. Mohandas Gandhi was the movement’s most luminous figure.
1. Educated in England, he was at first an anglicized lawyer.
2. His political formation came not in India but South Africa.
3. He hoped for British concessions as a quid pro quo for Indians’ sacrifice in World War I.
4. His turn to Indian dress was a symbolic repudiation of Britain and its civilization.
C. The Muslim League, founded in 1906, aimed to make sure that an independent India, if it came, would not be Hindu
dominated.
III. After World War I, the Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms and Gandhi’s noncooperation movement led to uneasy
fluctuations in British policy.
A. The Montagu-Chelmsford Reforms of 1919 accepted the principle of eventual self-government for India.
B. The Amritsar Massacre of 1919 was justified by its perpetrator, Reginald Dyer, a wounded World War I veteran.
1. The British political nation split as to the rights and wrongs of the massacre.
2. Twenty years later, Dyer’s commanding officer, Michael O’Dwyer, was assassinated in London by a Punjabi
radical in revenge.
C. Gandhi’s Satyagraha (truth force) aimed to use the Britons’ guilty consciences against them.
1. He was imprisoned for six years (released after two) for his leadership of the noncooperation movement.
2. Gandhi returned to leadership in 1930 with the Salt March.
3. In 1931, Gandhi had a long personal meeting with the viceroy, Lord Irwin, and came to terms, each man being
under pressure from extremists in his own camp.
D. Gandhi went to London as negotiator for the Congress Party to create Dominion status for India.
E. The Government of India Act of 1935 created a federation of Indian provinces, each with its own parliament, but the
question of Indian self-government was not yet settled.
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©2009 The Teaching Company.
Suggested Reading:
Gandhi, The History of My Experiments with Truth.
Mehta, Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Wolpert, A New History of India.
Questions to Consider:
1. What were the strengths and weaknesses of Gandhi as a leader of the Indian independence movement?
2. What motivated a variety of English men and women to support the Congress movement?
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Lecture Twenty-Eight
World War II—England Alone
Scope: Antiwar feeling was strong in the 1920s and early 1930s. Only as the menace of Nazism intensified did Britain make
an effort to build up its military. Early defeats in the war brought Winston Churchill to the premiership with a grim
determination to prevail. Churchill, unlike many other Conservatives, had never accepted that the entire empire
should eventually win independence; he regarded the colonies’ locations and resources as essential to Britain’s role
as a great power. He also recognized that Britain would never be able to liberate Europe from Hitler’s grasp without
American aid. He urged President Franklin Roosevelt to become directly involved in the war but found Roosevelt
cautious. Sympathetic to the plight of Britain, Roosevelt was also determined not to use American resources to
preserve the British Empire. When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, America entered the war. Almost at once, Britain
faced more mortifying reverses.
Outline
I.
In the 1930s, Winston Churchill seemed a relic of Victorian imperialism rather than a heroic leader awaiting his supreme
moment.
A. He believed war to be inevitable and therefore wanted Britain to prepare for the contingency.
B. He believed that the empire made Britain a great power, that it was morally defensible, and that its subject peoples
benefited from its existence.
C. Ironically, Hitler also admired the British Empire and speculated about preserving it through an Anglo-German
alliance.
D. The failure of appeasement discredited Neville Chamberlain and brought Churchill to the premiership in May 1940.
He presided over the Battle of Britain, which fought the Luftwaffe to a standstill.
E. Aware that Britain alone could not defeat Hitler, Churchill dedicated himself to winning American support.
F. He and President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signed the Atlantic Charter before the United States entered the war,
though its language had anticolonialist overtones.
II. World War II brought renewed declarations of loyalty from the colonies. Its early campaigns played out many of the old
imperial themes.
A. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa once again pledged to support Britain in the conflict.
1. In South Africa, pro-British sympathizers outnumbered pro-Hitler Afrikaners, and Jan Smuts once again
became prime minister.
2. In India, the National Congress protested against the viceroy’s declaration of war without consultation, but
more than 2 million Indians fought for Britain.
3. Even from the officially neutral Irish Free State, 43,000 men volunteered to fight for Britain.
4. Thousands of Canadian merchant seamen served on the hazardous Atlantic convoys.
B. Mussolini, Hitler’s ally, invaded the British colonies of Sudan and Kenya from Ethiopia. British counterattacks in
spring 1941 defeated the Italians and restored the deposed Ethiopian king Haile Sellasie.
C. Italian forces in Libya attacked the British in Egypt; British counterattacks beat them back easily in December 1940.
D. The desert campaign reached a climax at the Battle of El Alamein in fall 1942.
III. The early success of Japanese forces in the Far East damaged the empire’s reputation for omnipotence, which it never
entirely recovered.
A. On hearing the news of Pearl Harbor, Churchill realized that Britain and its empire would emerge from the war
victorious.
B. Britain sustained a jarring succession of reversals in late 1941 and early 1942, including the surrender of Hong Kong
and Singapore.
C. British forces fought a rearguard action through Burma, until Japanese troops threatened India itself.
1. The Burmese National Army under Aung San regarded Japanese forces as liberators rather than conquerors.
2. Many of the Indian troops taken prisoner at Singapore joined Subhas Chandra Bose, who proposed, with his
Indian National Army, to fight for Indian independence.
D. After decades of underestimating the Japanese, the British now began to fear that they were invincible.
E. Japanese mistreatment of British and imperial prisoners of war was, in part, a conscious policy to degrade British
and white men’s prestige in the Far East.
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Suggested Reading:
Dower, War Without Mercy.
Keegan, The Second World War.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Overy, Why the Allies Won.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was Churchill’s positive evaluation of the empire still justifiable in the 1940s?
2. What factors account for Japan’s overwhelming success in late 1941 and early 1942?
©2009 The Teaching Company.
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Lecture Twenty-Nine
World War II—The Pyrrhic Victory
Scope: The tide of the war turned in 1942 with a British victory over the Germans at El Alamein and an American victory
over the Japanese at Midway. The German offensive against Russia stalled at Stalingrad. Churchill and Roosevelt,
aware that the Soviet Union was confronting the full might of the Wehrmacht, planned and executed the invasion of
Italy in 1943 and France in 1944. With each passing month, the American role in the war effort grew, forcing Britain
into second place. By the time Germany and Japan surrendered, Britain was economically exhausted. A new prime
minister, Clement Attlee, told a new American president, Harry Truman, that Britain could no longer accept
worldwide responsibilities and that it intended to dismantle its colonial empire. It was not internal resistance that
brought the empire to an end so much as changing ideas about the justification for empires and the devastating
impact of two world wars.
Outline
I.
Churchill cautioned Roosevelt not to be too hasty in planning the second-front invasion of Europe.
A. Churchill persuaded the Americans to defer the invasion, first until 1943 and then until 1944.
B. Stalin felt betrayed by his allies, but they knew he had recently been allied with Hitler and might turn again.
C. Anglo-American interests were well served by having Stalin and Hitler weaken one another. At El Alamein the
British defeated 3 German divisions, whereas at Stalingrad the Russians defeated 190.
D. Britain was increasingly dependent on the United States for supplies and material, increasing friction between senior
British and American officials.
1. Friction between men of all social classes increased as the American buildup in England continued prior to
D-Day.
2. D-Day was ultimately led by an American general, Eisenhower.
II. American armies advanced across the Pacific against the Japanese in 1943–1945, while British forces advanced through
Burma.
A. Orde Wingate led the irregular Chindits against the Japanese in Burma.
B. Small British and Indian forces held Kohima and Imphal (Assam) in the spring of 1944 to prevent a Japanese
invasion of India, although ultimately a monsoon, not a battle, defeated the Japanese.
C. Lord Louis Mountbatten’s 1945 expedition coincided with the atomic bombs and was therefore unnecessary.
Unmistakably, Britain had recovered its Eastern possessions because of American power.
D. The war furthered the Australian tendency to seek aid from the United States rather than from Britain.
III. The Labour Party won a majority of seats in Parliament for the first time in the general election of 1945, following
victory in Europe.
A. The mood of ordinary Britons during World War II was one of impatience with “the old gang” and a determination
to undertake social transformation.
1. Colonel Blimp was the personification of everything old-fashioned, complacent, and out-of-date in Britain.
2. Press stories noted the laconic and snobbish attitude of the imperial elite and its remoteness from the colonized
majority in Asia.
3. The Beveridge Report (1942) created almost millennial expectations in Britain about a reformed, classless, and
socially just postwar society.
4. British military camps became centers for adult education and political debate.
B. Churchill was shocked to be ousted from the premiership. The election results were announced during the Potsdam
Conference, where the future of Communism was debated.
C. The new prime minister, Clement Attlee, nationalized major sectors of the economy.
IV. Britain under Attlee had to assess its position in a world dominated by the two new superpowers: the United States and
the Soviet Union.
A. Early hopes for conciliation with the Soviet Union soon vanished, and Britain became a founding member of NATO
in 1949.
B. Development of its own nuclear weapons gave Britain the ability to make great power claims throughout the 1950s.
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C. Attlee informed the new American president, Harry Truman, that Britain could no longer maintain its extensive
security operations throughout the world. The Truman Doctrine embodied the Americans’ determination to take
over these responsibilities, first in Greece and Turkey.
D. Cold War considerations, even more than the fate of the empire, dominated British foreign policy throughout the
postwar years.
Suggested Reading:
Jenkins, Churchill.
Overy, Why the Allies Won.
Schama, A History of Britain, vol. 3.
Slim, Defeat into Victory.
Questions to Consider:
1. How did Britain come to terms with its reduced power vis-à-vis the United States in the mid- and late 1940s?
2. Why did Winston Churchill’s Conservatives lose the general election of 1945?
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Lecture Thirty
Twilight of the Raj
Scope: Once Attlee’s government decided to give India independence, it moved quickly. Lord Louis Mountbatten, India’s
last viceroy, supervised the transition of power. He openly favored Jawaharlal Nehru’s predominantly Hindu
Congress Party, intensifying Muhammad Jinnah’s determination to create Muslim Pakistan. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a
British civil servant with no experience in India, had the all-but-impossible job of drawing a boundary through
northwestern India so the majority of Muslims would be west of it and the majority of Hindus east. Population
mingling over the preceding centuries meant that large minorities were left in the “wrong” place. Afraid of
victimization, they became refugees as the British departed. Sure enough, horrible sectarian massacres killed as
many as half a million people in 1947–1948, creating a legacy of bitterness between India and Pakistan that persists
up to the present. Gandhi was powerless to stop the killing. His assassination by a Hindu extremist who accused him
of making too many concessions to Muslims was an ominous symbol of the times.
Outline
I.
India had never been a single political entity and remained diverse and decentralized in the late 1940s.
A. Its population was religiously and ethnically divided, and the majority of its nearly 400 million people lived as
subsistence farmers.
1. Hindus numbered around 250 million, divided into numerous castes, with about 60 million untouchables.
2. The second-largest population group was Muslims (around 90 million), but India also included minorities of
Sikhs, Christians, Buddhists, and other religious groups.
B. India has 23 principal languages and several hundred dialects.
C. About 500 semi-independent princes and Maharajas still ruled under British sufferance, and they feared losing
power.
D. The Western-educated political class to which Britain planned to hand over power understood Western politics but
was not representative of the Indian people.
E. Despite periodic disruptions and repression since World War I, Britain’s position in India had not become untenable,
but Britain had lost the will to rule.
II. The British set an early deadline for their departure, and Parliament passed the Indian Independence Act with little
opposition in July 1947.
A. Attlee appointed Lord Louis Mountbatten as India’s final viceroy.
1. He replaced General Archibald Wavell, who had been unable to get an agreement on maintaining Indian unity.
2. Winston Churchill, an opponent of Indian independence, deplored Mountbatten’s accelerated timetable.
B. Jawaharlal Nehru hoped to retain Indian unity. Congress’s largely Hindu character made the prospect unlikely.
C. Mohammad Ali Jinnah was determined to create a separate Pakistan for India’s Muslims, fearing that otherwise they
would be a permanent and persecuted minority.
1. Parliament agreed to partition in May 1947.
2. The assets of British India were shared: 82.5% to the new state of India, and 17.5% to Pakistan.
D. Sir Cyril Radcliffe, a conscientious civil servant but one with no prior experience in India, drew the India-Pakistan
boundary, but its exact path was kept secret until after independence.
1. Bengal and Kashmir were both divided.
2. Gandhi appealed in vain against communal strife and massacres.
III. August 15, 1947, the first day of India’s independence, was accompanied by chaos and violence far worse than any
during the previous two centuries of British occupation.
A. About 10 million people fled from their homes, keeping only what they could carry. Between 250,000 and 500,000
refugees were killed in sectarian massacres.
B. Nehru became prime minister of the new India and dominated its parliamentary system for the next 17 years.
C. When the Muslim head of the princely state of Hyderabad refused to join a united India in 1948, Nehru ordered
Indian troops to invade and conquer it.
D. Jinnah became governor-general of Pakistan.
1. One in 10 of Pakistan’s population from the outset were refugees.
2. Jinnah died in 1948 and was buried in a massive mausoleum in Karachi that became Pakistan’s national
monument.
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E. Gandhi, now 79 years old, was sickened by the bloodletting and by the new government’s persecution of Muslims.
1. He began a fast in January 1948 until the new Indian government promised a more conciliatory policy.
2. A few days later, a Hindu extremist, Naturam Godse, assassinated Gandhi at his New Delhi home.
IV. Historians continue to debate the pros and cons of the British Empire in India.
Suggested Reading:
Edwards, Nehru.
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Wolpert, Jinnah of Pakistan.
———, A New History of India.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was Indian independence inevitable at the end of World War II?
2. How might the massacres of Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims have been averted?
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Lecture Thirty-One
Israel, Egypt, and the Suez Canal
Scope: Zionists had been settling and working in Palestine since the turn of the 20th century, first under the Ottomans, then
under the British. The Holocaust created an immense wave of sympathy for Jews after World War II, and the idea of
an independent Israel gained more credibility among the world’s governments than ever before. In 1948, Britain
attempted to partition Israel and Palestine as it had Ireland and India. British forces, under attack from militant
Zionist militias, were again unable to prevent postcolonial warfare. Egypt, also newly liberated from British control,
led an attack on Israel but suffered a humiliating defeat. In 1952, Gamal Abd al-Nasser rose to power through an
officers’ coup. Eager to defy Britain and Israel, he seized the Suez Canal. Britain, France, and Israel drew up a secret
plan to recapture the canal and launched their campaign in fall 1956. American president Dwight Eisenhower,
furious at not being notified, ordered the British to stop. The fact that they did stop showed that Britain was no
longer a first-rate world power capable of unilateral imperial actions.
Outline
I.
Britain ruled Palestine after World War I through a League of Nations mandate but was unable to stop the escalation of
political tensions.
A. The Zionist movement, founded by Theodore Herzl in the late 19th century in response to rising anti-Semitism in
Europe, inspired thousands of European Jews to migrate to Palestine.
B. The Balfour Declaration of 1917 made support for an eventual state of Israel official British government policy.
1. The first British high commissioner of Palestine was Sir Herbert Samuel, a British Jew—the first Jew in 2,000
years to head a government in the Holy Land.
2. As Hitler’s persecution commenced after 1933, British policy began to discourage Jewish immigration, afraid it
would provoke conflict in Palestine.
C. British promises to Arab leaders during World War I appeared to contradict the Balfour Declaration.
1. In 1921, Samuel made Mohammad Amin al-Husseini the Mufti (senior judge) of Jerusalem.
2. Al-Husseini set about assassinating Arab moderates, making a peaceful solution to the issue much less likely.
3. Nine thousand British soldiers were sent to Palestine in 1936 to suppress an Arab revolt.
D. Britain created a Jewish brigade during World War II that became the nucleus of the Israel Defense Force. David
Ben-Gurion urged Zionists to fight with Britain against the Nazis but to be ready after that to fight for Israel—
against Britain, if necessary.
II. Sympathy for the surviving victims of Hitler’s anti-Jewish policies coincided with British determination to fold up the
empire in the late 1940s.
A. Holocaust survivors wanted to migrate to Palestine, but British policy was to limit and discourage them.
B. The Stern Gang and Irgun, Zionist extremist groups, attacked the British to hasten their departure.
1. Abraham Stern, a Polish Jew and Anglophobe, began attacks on the British but was killed in 1942.
2. Irgun, led by Menachem Begin (later to be prime minister), was a more powerful anti-British terrorist group,
attacking the infrastructure of British rule.
3. Irgun dynamited the King David Hotel in Jerusalem in July 1946, killing 100, including 17 Jews.
C. The United Nations devised a two-nation solution to the Israel-Palestine dilemma in November 1947 with the
support of President Truman.
1. The last British forces left on May 14, 1948, and on the same day Ben-Gurion read the Israeli Declaration of
Independence in Tel Aviv.
2. The Soviet Union initially favored Israel as a way to weaken British influence in the Middle East.
D. Israel’s Arab neighbors never recognized the new nation, which had to fight for its life right from the beginning.
1. Israel surprised the world by defeating a joint attack by Egyptians, Jordanians, Syrians, Iraqis, Lebanese,
and Palestinians.
2. Irgun terrorism at the village of Deir Yassin contributed to the panicked departure of thousands of Arabs from
Israeli territory.
3. More than half a million Palestinian refugees became the nucleus of an intractable political problem over the
ensuing decades.
4. A comparable number of Jews from the Arab countries fled to Israel and were integrated into the new
Jewish state.
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III. An Anglo-French-Israeli joint attack on Egypt in 1956 was thwarted by American intervention.
A. Gamal Abd al-Nasser overthrew King Farouk of Egypt in 1952 and hastened the exit of Britain from Suez.
B. He tried to play the United States and the Soviet Union against one another.
C. He declared that the Suez Canal was Egypt’s national asset and seized it in 1956.
D. Britain, France, and Israel designed and executed a campaign to retake the canal.
1. Britain could not prevent Egypt from blocking the canal and interrupting oil shipments.
2. American president Eisenhower, furious at not being consulted, threatened Britain with economic ruin if it did
not halt its forces.
3. Britain’s surrender to American pressure demonstrated the effective end of their ability to play the role of
imperial power.
E. Postempire Britons found the kibbutzim an inspiring example of democratic socialism in action.
Suggested Reading:
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Johnson, A History of the Jews.
Morris, Farewell the Trumpets.
Samuel, A History of Israel.
Questions to Consider:
1. Was there ever a possibility that Arabs and Israelis might have coexisted without friction in ex-British Palestine?
2. Why did Britain persist in attempting partition solutions after its experience in Ireland and India?
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Lecture Thirty-Two
The Decolonization of Africa
Scope: Immediately after World War II, it seemed possible that most of Britain’s African colonies would remain part of the
empire. The Colonial Office undertook various well-intentioned schemes to strengthen the colonies’ economies and
educate their elite, but few prospered. After the Suez Crisis of 1956, British policy shifted to offering early grants of
independence. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, accordingly, the British departed from all of their principal African
colonies, including Gold Coast, Nigeria, Kenya, Uganda, and Botswana. In numerous cases, the frail democracies
Britain had tried to construct collapsed, leaving charismatic strongmen in charge, such as Milton Obote in Uganda
and Kwame Nkrumah in Gold Coast. Rather than let the same thing happen to Southern Rhodesia, its prime
minister, Ian Smith, issued a Unilateral Declaration of Independence in 1965, hoping that he could maintain a whitedominated country. His experiment survived until 1980, while that of apartheid-based South Africa lasted until
1994.
Outline
I.
Between 1945 and 1956, British politicians believed the African colonies were not ready for independence.
A. Economic growth projects like the Tanganyika groundnut scheme were costly and embarrassing failures.
B. The Atlantic Charter and the Indian independence movement stimulated the growth of African nationalism. Most
Africans acknowledged tribal rather than national boundaries.
C. British forces suppressed the Mau-Mau uprising in Kenya between 1952 and 1956.
1. Jomo Kenyatta, educated in Moscow and London, was its charismatic leader.
2. The uprising terrified the minority white population.
3. White settlers began to leave rather than face the prospect of a black majority rule.
D. In 1960, Conservative prime minister Harold Macmillan told the South African parliament that “a wind of change”
was blowing through Africa. He intended to avoid the bitterness France suffered in its agonized withdrawal from
Vietnam and Algeria.
II. Failure at Suez and an unsympathetic international environment prompted an almost complete British departure from
Africa between 1956 and 1966.
A. Lack of an educated elite made the prospects of democracy in these new nations poor.
1. The transfer of power usually took place with the outward trappings of British civility.
2. Gold Coast (Ghana) led the way, becoming independent under the leadership of Kwame Nkrumah in 1957.
3. Nkrumah turned Ghana into a one-party state in 1964 and was overthrown in an army coup two years later.
4. Colonial-era boundaries often ignored tribal realities and augured civil wars, such as the Biafra War of 1967–
1969.
B. Each former colony became a potential American or Soviet client in the Cold War.
C. Political upheaval discouraged investment and inhibited economic growth.
1. Botswana alone of all the ex-British colonies in Africa has enjoyed an unbroken succession of free elections
since its independence in 1966.
2. Unstable dictators, notably Idi Amin of Uganda, destroyed the economic infrastructure of their countries, with
ruinous consequences.
III. White racial supremacists in South Africa and Rhodesia tried to prevent their countries from following the trend toward
unstable democracy followed by dictatorship.
A. The Afrikaner-dominated National Party won the South African election of 1948 and established apartheid.
1. The Bantustan system and the pass laws maintained high levels of white control over the African majority.
2. Atrocities like the Sharpeville massacre (1960) shocked the world.
B. In 1965, Ian Smith announced Rhodesia’s Unilateral Declaration of Independence rather than follow the fate of
Zambia. British sanctions did little to curb his regime.
C. After a prolonged and bitter racial conflict, Rhodesia became Zimbabwe in 1980. Its first African premier, Robert
Mugabe, preserved democracy and the rule of law at first but gradually degenerated into a tribal tyrant.
D. Nelson Mandela, as a political prisoner, became an inspirational figure to the South African freedom movement.
1. South African president F. W. de Klerk realized in the early 1990s that apartheid must yield to majority rule.
2. He and Mandela won joint Nobel Peace Prizes, and South Africa made the transition to democracy in 1993.
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Suggested Reading:
Dinesen, Out of Africa.
Lloyd, The British Empire.
Mandela, Long Walk to Freedom.
Meredith, The Fate of Africa.
Questions to Consider:
1. Why did so few postcolonial African countries develop stable political systems?
2. Would Britain have been able to stay longer in Africa with sufficient political will, or was its mission there doomed by
1960?
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Lecture Thirty-Three
The White Dominions
Scope: Australia’s and Canada’s bonds of trade, loyalty, and sentiment with Britain were strong, but for both countries, the
temptation to switch primary allegiance to America grew steadily stronger as the 20th century progressed. Canada’s
proximity to the United States led in practice to a high degree of Americanization, though Canadians maintained a
prickly resistance to the idea that they were really just a northern annex of the rising superpower. The possibility of a
politically independent Quebec complicated political life and kept Canada a bilingual society. Australia, meanwhile,
realizing during World War II that America was much more likely to rescue it from the Japanese than Britain was,
allied more closely with the United States. Its fear of the “yellow peril” intensifying with the rise of communism,
Australia even joined the unsuccessful American attempt to stop communism’s spread in Vietnam, in which Britain
refused to participate. Canada and Australia alike took pride in having achieved independence from the British
Empire peaceably, rather than through a revolutionary war.
Outline
I.
Australia became politically unified only in 1900.
A. Politicians from the principal colonies of New South Wales, Queensland, Victoria, and South Australia drafted a
constitution in 1900.
1. It had a senate rather than a house of lords, and both houses of the legislature were elected democratically.
2. Australia’s voters supported it in a referendum.
3. The Westminster Parliament approved it the same year.
B. A new capital would be created between the principal cities of Melbourne and Sydney.
1. The site of Canberra was chosen in 1908, and construction began in 1913, with a pair of American architects as
chief designers.
2. The government and parliament moved there in 1927.
C. Australian women were given the vote in 1909, earlier than in the United States or Britain.
D. New Zealand declined to unite with the Australian colonies and achieved its own political union in 1876.
1. In 1894, it became the first nation to grant women’s suffrage.
2. It pioneered in the building of a social democratic Labour movement and the kind of welfare state that was later
common in Europe.
II. Australia and Canada supported Britain in the world wars but gradually recognized that America was becoming the
world’s dominant power—and that it might be of more use to them.
A. A bitter referendum over conscription in 1917 laid bare fault lines in Australian politics. Many former soldiers were
offered farms after the war, but the hostile environment meant that few prospered.
B. By the Statute of Westminster, passed in 1931, the dominions became fully independent sovereign nations. Australia
and New Zealand hesitated to ratify the statute, however, because it might have left them undefended.
C. During World War II, Australian prime minister John Curtin infuriated Churchill by insisting that the Australian
Imperial Force be returned from Africa in early 1942 to defend Australia against the Japanese.
D. Canada made vital contributions to allied success in World War II.
1. Its sailors served on merchant ships and convoy-protection vessels.
2. Its soldiers served in the great European campaigns, including D-Day.
3. Its prairies provided the food supplies Britain could not grow itself.
4. Its vast mineral deposits of oil and iron ore were developed during the war.
E. Canada in World War II, like Australia in World War I, experienced a bitter debate over conscription.
III. British links continued to diminish in significance for Australia, New Zealand, and Canada after World War II, while
those to America increased.
A. Australia attracted immigrants not just from Britain but from displaced persons camps all over postwar Europe.
1. The Australian government regarded more population as necessary for national welfare and thus subsidized
migrants’ passage.
2. Not until 1967 did Australia permit the immigration of Asians.
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B. Australia’s postwar government aligned itself closely with the United States.
1. A passionate anti-Communist, Prime Minister Robert Menzies tried to ban the Communist Party but was
narrowly defeated in a referendum.
2. He committed Australian troops to fight in Korea and then Vietnam.
C. In Canada, Pierre Trudeau balanced the internal needs of English and French speakers with the external issues of
Britain and the United States. As prime minister, he introduced bilingualism throughout Canada as official policy,
while stoutly resisting Quebec nationalism.
D. The achievements of British Commonwealth citizens remained symbolically, rather than politically, significant.
News that Edmund Hillary, a New Zealander, had reached the summit of Mount Everest in 1953 made him an
empire-wide hero.
Suggested Reading:
Brebner, Canada.
Clarke, The History of Australia.
Knightley, Australia.
Lower, Colony to Nation.
Questions to Consider:
1. Did Canada and Australia act rationally in reorienting themselves toward America?
2. Did they benefit or suffer from not having made a clean break from Britain earlier?
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Lecture Thirty-Four
Britain after the Empire
Scope: In the decades after 1945, Britain appeared to have three choices of primary ally: its colonies, the United States, or
the rest of Europe. By 1965, the colonies were no longer an option; only the British Commonwealth remained, more
a cultural and sentimental union than one of political significance. The United States, the leading power in NATO,
seemed the logical choice during the Cold War, but this alliance also dwindled in importance after the collapse of
Soviet Communism in 1990. In the long run, Britain recognized the need to take its place in a Europe that was
becoming commercially and politically united and that had also gone through a rapid and drastic decolonization
process since World War II. Britain also faced large-scale immigration from former colonies in the West Indies,
India, Pakistan, and Africa. After centuries as a racially homogeneous society, Britain quickly became multiracial,
with immigrant communities raising unfamiliar issues.
Outline
I.
The Cold War and the European Union, not the empire, dominated Britain’s foreign policy after World War II.
A. America maintained air and submarine bases in Britain as part of its NATO commitment.
1. British politicians nourished the idea of an Anglo-American “special relationship.”
2. American bases were the focus of antinuclear demonstrations in the early 1960s and the late 1980s.
3. Britain retained its own independent nuclear deterrent.
4. The end of the Cold War diminished America’s presence and intensified Britain’s commitment to Europe.
B. Britain was slow to join the European Common Market, but by the late 1960s it had recognized the need to do so.
1. The Common Market began as the European Coal and Steel Community in 1951.
2. It became the European Economic Community (EEC) by the Treaty of Rome in 1957.
3. Britain joined, along with Ireland and Denmark, in 1973.
4. The Maastricht Treaty of 1992 created the European Union.
C. British enthusiasm for the 2003 Iraq venture suggested, perhaps, a nostalgia for imperial adventures, even under
Tony Blair’s Labour government.
II. Large-scale immigration from former colonies created a multiracial society in Britain after 1950.
A. Labor shortages in the 1950s prompted government agencies to attract West Indian immigrants.
B. Indians and Pakistanis were attracted by the prospect of higher standards of living.
C. Refugees, such as the Ugandan Asians, further diversified the British population.
D. Conservative politicians such as Enoch Powell, and then a fringe party called the National Front, argued for drastic
immigration restrictions.
E. Vulnerable to unemployment and poverty, inner-city racial minorities could be politically volatile, as the Brixton
race riots of 1981, 1995, and 2001 bore witness.
F. The rise of militant Islam among disaffected English Muslims contributed to the bomb attack on the London
Underground in July 2005 (the 7/7 attacks).
III. Margaret Thatcher, Conservative prime minister from 1979 to 1990, undertook a last imperial venture in the Falkland
Islands from March to June 1982.
A. An unpopular Argentinean junta gambled that seizing the islands would not provoke British retaliation and lost.
B. The British fleet included requisitioned ocean liners and cruise ships.
C. American efforts to prevent the conflict failed, and the war ended in a decisive British victory.
D. After the war, Thatcher won reelection from an enthusiastic British population, which showed a residual imperial
enthusiasm.
IV. The movement for devolution within Britain led in the 1990s to the creation of separate Welsh and Scottish assemblies.
A. The Scottish parliament building has been as controversial as the work done within it: It cost 10 times as much to
build as predicted and was four years late.
B. The development of both local and European political influence has diminished the significance of Westminster, the
traditional heart of imperial Britain.
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C. Britain itself remains sharply divided between rich and poor communities.
1. Areas that thrived on the empire and its commerce endured a long and bitter decline afterwards.
2. Strong local loyalties made adaptation to changed economic circumstances slow and difficult.
D. Despite the survival of the monarchy, Britain is a less hierarchical society than ever before.
Suggested Reading:
Clarke, Hope and Glory.
Johnson, A History of the English People.
Levin, The Pendulum Years.
Schama, A History of Britain, vol. 3.
Questions to Consider:
1. How did the changing world situation affect postimperial Britain?
2. Was Britain right to dedicate itself chiefly to its membership in Europe?
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Lecture Thirty-Five
Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
Scope: The literature of the empire in the 20th century dealt in dramatic contrasts, passionate extremes, ideas about
exoticism, and questions of divided loyalty. British Africa in particular gave rise to a succession of excellent
novelists, all of whom struggled with questions of racial and national identity: Nadine Gordimer, the South African
Nobel Prize winner whose fiction explores the lives of white South Africans and their role in the anti-apartheid
movement; Alan Paton, whose Cry the Beloved Country (1948) is probably the single most widely read book about
Africa of the century; and Chinua Achebe, whose Things Fall Apart (1958) evokes the arrival of the empire from an
African point of view. Another Nobel laureate from the old empire is V. S. Naipaul, born to an Indian family in
Trinidad, whose superb novel A Bend in the River (1979) describes the deterioration of central Africa after the
colonialists depart. Among the many great novelists from India whose work was influenced by empire and
aftermath, none may be greater than Salman Rushdie.
Outline
I.
The literature of the former British colonies deals in questions of wealth and poverty, blackness and whiteness, and
divided loyalties.
A. All of these novels are political, and the characters in all of them ask, What should my loyalties be, and why?
B. In British novels, only Britain matters; in colonial fiction, decisions made far away affect the characters’ lives.
C. Colonial peoples began adapting English literary forms in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.
1. Thomas Mfolo’s Chaka (1915), about the Zulu chief, is one of the first black African novels.
2. Sol Plaatje’s Muhdi (1918) expresses a common ambivalence about whether the old tribal life or the new
European one is superior.
II. The absence of the British from former colonies, and the situations they left behind, also provoked much excellent
fiction.
A. South African literature of the past half century has been exceptionally rich and profound in its examination of
questions of racial justice. Alan Paton’s Cry the Beloved Country (1948) is probably the most widely read book
about the entire apartheid period.
B. Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe imagined the beginnings of colonialism and its impact on a farmer in Things Fall
Apart (1958). No Longer At Ease (1960) follows the farmer’s grandson to the modern city of Lagos and explores his
divided loyalties.
C. Nadine Gordimer, the Nobel laureate, developed Paton’s themes from the white perspective in Burger’s Daughter
(1980) and A Sport of Nature (1988).
D. Andre Brink’s A Dry White Season (1979) looks at the same problems from the point of view of a naïve Afrikaner
who gradually learns the truth of his government.
III. Novelists from different traditions and different points on the political compass agree that decolonization did not solve
the problems of colonialism.
A. Zakes Mda explores the bitter aftermath of apartheid in the South African townships and the continuing power of
tribalism in Ways of Dying (1995) and Heart of Redness (2002).
B. Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul, from an Indian-descended family in Trinidad, depicts the ruinous decline of central
Africa in A Bend in the River (1979).
C. Salman Rushdie, greatest of the recent Indian novelists, mixes magic realism with political and religious satire.
1. Educated in England, Rushdie explores the sense of being uprooted felt by Indians in England in The Satanic
Verses (1989).
2. Shame (1983) is an allegorical history of Pakistan since 1947.
Suggested Reading:
Gordimer, A Sport of Nature.
Mda, The Heart of Redness.
Paton, Cry the Beloved Country.
Rushdie, The Satanic Verses.
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Questions to Consider:
1. In what ways can fiction raise moral questions about imperialism that conventional histories cannot reach?
2. What factors made South Africa particularly rich as a fictional setting?
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Lecture Thirty-Six
Epitaph and Legacy
Scope: Historians disagree radically in their judgment of the British Empire. For some it represents greed, exploitation,
racism, and hypocrisy. For others it represents an unmatched advancement of civilization. This course has tried to
take a middle position, recognizing that some of Britain’s traders, soldiers, and politicians were often unscrupulous
and narrowly self-interested, but also that others, with the widest array of motives, brought education, medicine,
technology, and the possibility of political stability to remote parts of the world. The moral balance sheet is
complicated partly because some of the worst conflicts today can be traced back to questions Britain failed to
answer, even when its intentions were benign. Whatever one’s moral judgment, it is difficult to deny that the effects
of the British Empire are immense and contributed to what might be called the Anglicization of the entire Earth.
Ironically, the experience of the British Empire and its ending have made it much less likely that future empires of
the same kind will ever recur.
Outline
I.
Empire building is central to world history, and it is not surprising that Britain wanted to build an empire of its own.
A. Compare the British Empire to other historic empires.
1. The British, like the Romans, saw themselves as the bringers of civilization to backward peoples.
2. The British Empire achieved far greater stability and humanity than those of Napoleon, Hitler, and Stalin.
3. It learned from its mistakes, especially the experience of the American Revolution.
4. For much of its history, its rulers appreciated the need to tolerate diverse religions and customs.
5. It pioneered the abolition of slavery.
6. It conceded the principle of eventual self-government for all of its colonies.
B. The British Empire proved more durable than its European rivals.
1. It encountered Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French rivals and overmastered all of them.
2. Sea power was central to its success.
3. Early on, Britain developed sophisticated forms of banking and insurance.
C. Imperial service and emigration opportunities gave a stake in the empire to a large part of the British population.
1. The ideal of lifelong service inspired generations of Indian Civil Servants, who believed in the essential
rightness of their mission.
2. Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa offered the opportunity for a better life to generations of
poor emigrants from Britain, especially from Scotland and Ireland.
II. Britain’s role as the world’s first industrial nation enabled it to preserve and enlarge the empire despite the setback of the
American Revolution.
A. Adam Smith explained why the division of labor, mechanization, and free trade were making Britain wealthy.
B. By the 1840s, Britain had abandoned protectionism almost completely and adopted free trade, which stimulated
further rapid economic growth.
C. Through the late 19th century, railways, steamships, and marine cables accelerated communications and greatly
diminished risks and uncertainties.
III. Britain’s inability to maintain its industrial supremacy presaged its eventual imperial decline.
A. Germany and the United States caught up with Britain as industrial powers in the 1880s and had surpassed it by
1900.
B. The highest rewards in British life did not go to industrialists but to “gentlemen,” who were educated as landowners,
not businessmen.
C. In the short term, the empire could shelter Britain from the effects of its uncompetitiveness.
D. Class conflict in Britain led to the rise of the Labour Party, whose leaders were antagonistic to the idealism of
empire.
IV. The two world wars and the rise of the nuclear superpowers—both nominally anti-imperialist—left no space in the world
for an independent British Empire.
A. President Roosevelt was determined that the United States would not fight World War II to preserve Britain’s
colonies.
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B. Stalin, though he built an empire in Eastern Europe, was implacably hostile to the “capitalist imperialism” of
Britain.
C. The Suez Crisis of 1956 showed that Britain could no longer undertake significant imperial ventures in sensitive
parts of the world.
D. The empire unraveled rapidly, but it left an indelible mark on our world, in which ideals of representative
government, the rule of law, and the English language are almost universal.
Suggested Reading:
James, The Rise and Fall of the British Empire.
Johnson, A History of the English People.
Lloyd, The British Empire.
Marshall, The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire.
Questions to Consider:
1. Is it appropriate to moralize over the meaning of historical events?
2. What were the greatest strengths and weaknesses of the British Empire?
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Timeline
1588 ................................................ English defeat of the Spanish Armada indicates the maturing of English sea power.
1600 ................................................ The Honourable East India Company is founded, with its monopoly on English trade to
India and the Indian Ocean.
1607 ................................................ First permanent English settlement is established at Jamestown, Virginia.
1620 ................................................ Pilgrims make landfall at Cape Cod.
1642–1645 ...................................... The English Civil War.
1648 ................................................ Taj Mahal is completed by Shah Jahan.
1649 ................................................ Parliament orders the execution of King Charles I.
1652–1654 ...................................... First Anglo-Dutch naval war forces the Dutch to accept English monopoly of its own
colonial trade.
1655 ................................................ British expedition captures Jamaica from Spain.
1659–1660 ...................................... Death of Oliver Cromwell, Lord Protector, and restoration of the monarchy (King
Charles II).
1660/1663 ....................................... Parliament passes the Navigation Acts, confining all British and British colonial trade to
British ships.
1682 ................................................ William Penn founds Pennsylvania and the city of Philadelphia.
1707 ................................................ Act of Union between England and Scotland.
1745 ................................................ First siege of Louisbourg.
1755 ................................................ George Washington accompanies General Edward Braddock on a failed expedition to
Fort Duquesne (Pittsburgh).
1757 ................................................ Robert Clive’s victory at the Battle of Plassey makes Britain the dominant power in
Bengal.
1759 ................................................ English victory at the Battle of the Heights of Abraham ensures the British conquest of
Canada, despite the death of General James Wolfe.
1763 ................................................ Treaty of Paris ends the French and Indian War (the Seven Years’ War); Stamp Act
Crisis begins in the American colonies.
1770 ................................................ Captain James Cook’s Endeavour visits New Zealand and Botany Bay, Australia; Cook
claims New South Wales for Britain.
1773 ................................................ The Boston Tea Party.
1775 ................................................ Outbreak of the American Revolution at Lexington and Concord.
1776 ................................................ American colonists issue the Declaration of Independence.
1778 ................................................ American victory at the Battle of Saratoga prompts France to join the American cause
against Britain.
1781 ................................................ Battle of Yorktown and the surrender of General Charles Cornwallis.
1783 ................................................ Anglo-Amerian Treaty of Paris acknowledges American independence.
1788 ................................................ First convict ships arrive at Sydney, Australia.
1789 ................................................ The French Revolution begins.
1800 ................................................ Anglo-Irish Act of Union.
1807 ................................................ British abolish their trans-Atlantic slave trade.
1805 ................................................ Nelson’s victory at the Battle of Trafalgar secures British naval supremacy over France.
1812–1815 ...................................... Anglo-American War of 1812.
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1815 ................................................ Napoleon is defeated at the Battle of Waterloo.
1833 ................................................ Slavery is abolished throughout the British Empire.
1837–1840 ...................................... Great Trek of the Boer “Voortrekkers” away from the British-dominated Cape Colony of
South Africa.
1839 ................................................ Durham Report recommends self-government for Canada (implemented in 1847).
1839–1842 ...................................... First Anglo-Chinese Opium War (to force China to import opium from British India);
British invasion of Afghanistan ends in annihilation of all but one man in a column of
17,000.
1846–1849 ...................................... Irish potato crop failure leads to mass famine and migration.
1851 ................................................ Australian gold rush begins.
1857 ................................................ Indian Mutiny.
1867 ................................................ Unification of Canada.
1869 ................................................ Completion of the Suez Canal; discovery of diamonds at Kimberley, South Africa.
1873–1874 ...................................... General Garnet Wolseley defeats the Ashanti empire in West Africa.
1874 ................................................ Birth of Winston Churchill.
1879 ................................................ Zulu War: Battles of Isandhlwana, Rorke’s Drift, and Ulundi.
1881 ................................................ Boer force defeats the British army at Majuba Hill.
1882 ................................................ British gain dominance in Egypt through a victory at Tel el Kebir.
1884–1885 ...................................... Berlin Conference, supervised by Bismarck, divides Africa among the colonial powers.
1885 ................................................ Death of General Charles George Gordon at Khartoum, Sudan; completion of the transCanadian railroad; founding of the Indian National Congress by Scotsman Allan
Octavian Hume.
1893 ................................................ Mohandas Gandhi, lawyer, arrives in South Africa.
1896 ................................................ Jameson Raid fails to provoke an uprising among Uitlander gold miners in Johannesberg.
1897 ................................................ Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee, celebrating her 60 years on the throne.
1899–1902 ...................................... Boer War: Early British embarrassments are avenged with a scorched-earth policy and
civilian concentration camps.
1914 ................................................ Outbreak of World War I.
1915 ................................................ Failure of the Gallipoli campaign against Turkey.
1916 ................................................ Easter Rising in Dublin by the Irish Republican Brotherhood.
1917 ................................................ General Edmund Allenby enters Jerusalem.
1918 ................................................ Armistice in November ends fighting in World War I.
1919 ................................................ Amritsar massacre arouses controversy over the morality of empire in India.
1922–1923 ...................................... Anglo-Irish Treaty leads to the Irish Civil War.
1930 ................................................ Gandhi leads the Salt March.
1931 ................................................ Statute of Westminster establishes the principle of full equality between the government
of Britain and those of the white dominions (Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and South
Africa).
1939 ................................................ World War II begins.
1940 ................................................ Winston Churchill becomes prime minister of a coalition government.
1942 ................................................ Japanese seize Singapore and destroy British battleships Prince of Wales and Repulse.
1944 ................................................ Anglo-Indian force halts the Japanese advance into India at Kohima.
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1945 ................................................ Defeat of Nazi Germany; the election of Clement Attlee’s Labour government.
1947 ................................................ Indian partition, independence, and mutual massacres of Hindus and Muslims.
1948 ................................................ British departure from Palestine and the creation of Israel; National Party in South Africa
wins the election and establishes formal apartheid.
1956 ................................................ Failure of the Anglo-French-Israeli Suez campaign marks the end of effective British
imperial ventures.
1960 ................................................ Harold Macmillan’s “Wind of Change” speech emphasizes rapid British decolonization
of Africa.
1965 ................................................ Ian Smith of Southern Rhodesia declares independence to prevent the creation of a
multiracial postimperial Rhodesia.
1982 ................................................ Margaret Thatcher’s Falkland Islands War sounds the echo of former imperial
adventures.
1994 ................................................ Britain supervises transition of South Africa to a multiracial democracy: Nelson Mandela
wins its first election.
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Glossary
Act of Union: The legislation uniting England and Scotland (1707); alternatively, the act disbanding the Irish parliament
(1801).
apartheid: The systematic separation of whites, blacks, Indians, and coloreds (South African legal term for people of mixed
race) in South Africa after the National Party’s election victory in 1948.
benign neglect: Historians’ name for Britain’s policy toward its colonies in much of the 18th century, which sees a lack of
close regulation as desirable.
Black Hole of Calcutta: A dungeon in which 146 English prisoners were confined by the Indian prince Siraj ud-Daulah in
1756, leading to the deaths of 123—an atrocity that served as a pretext for Robert Clive’s war to conquer Bengal.
chronometer: An extremely accurate clock that, used in conjunction with celestial navigation, could tell blue-water captains
their approximate longitude.
commando: Originally, a mobile light cavalry unit in the Boer War of the kind that embarrassed Britain’s much slower units.
free trade: The policy of removing tariff barriers to encourage unimpeded trade between countries; it was the dominant
British trade policy of the mid- to late 19th century.
Glorious Revolution: The abdication of the Catholic King James II and his replacement by the Protestant King William III
and his wife Queen Mary II. It was called glorious because it was bloodless and ensured Britain a Protestant future.
Great Game: Politicians’ nickname for the Anglo-Russian rivalry of the mid-19th century, played out in Afghanistan, Persia,
and northwestern India.
Hobson-Lenin thesis: The theory that imperialism is a decadent stage of industrial capitalism.
Home Rule: The controversial policy, proposed by Prime Minister William Gladstone in 1886, of permitting Ireland to
become a self-governing country within the empire. The proposal was defeated in Parliament.
imperial preference: British policy that created a free-trade area inside the empire but imposed high tariffs on imports from
other nations.
impressment: The Royal Navy custom of kidnapping landsmen or seizing merchant seamen from other ships to serve on
warships—a contributory cause of the Anglo-American War of 1812.
indentured servants: Men and women whose passage to America or the West Indies in the 17th century was paid for by their
employers in return for a specified number of years’ service. The system was gradually replaced by slavery.
indirect rule: The policy, widely employed by the British in India, of leaving old elites in nominal control, so long as they
cooperated with British policies.
Maroons: Runaway slaves in Jamaica (and in Spanish Latin America) who created communities of their own and sometimes
raided colonial settlements.
mercantilism: The theory, strongly held in 17th- and 18th-century Britain, that the nation’s trade policy should by designed to
increase its share of world trade and the acquisition of a gold bullion surplus.
Mughal Empire: The Muslim empire that dominated India before the coming of the British; its most famous monuments are
the Red Fort in Delhi and the Taj Mahal in Agra.
nabobs: British traders and administrators in 18th-century India who created great fortunes, not always honestly. Warren
Hastings was a notorious example.
nation of shopkeepers: Napoleon’s dismissive name for Britain, whose commercial and imperial power eventually
contributed to his downfall.
Navigation Acts: Parliamentary legislation beginning in 1651 and strengthened in 1660 and 1663 to ensure that all trade to
and from Britain’s colonies was carried in British or British-colonial ships.
nawab: An Indian prince.
Nelson touch: The custom, among British naval captains, of unwavering aggression, engaging the enemy at all costs, in
emulation of Admiral Nelson.
no peace beyond the line: The English practice, common in the 16th and 17th centuries, of making war against Spain in the
Americas even when the two countries were at peace in Europe.
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Northwest Passage: A sea route to Asia north of the Americas. Numerous British expeditions sought it but always ran into
impassable ice.
partition: The practice of dividing a country because of ethnic or religious differences when releasing it from the empire; this
was British policy in Ireland, India, and Palestine.
pass laws: South African laws under the apartheid system that regulated movements and residence patterns of Africans.
prison colony: A colony founded as a place to which criminals could be sent out of England (first Georgia, later Australia).
privateer: A ship’s captain licensed by his government to attack the ships of another nation even when the two are not
formally at war. Sir Francis Drake is a well-known example.
protectionism: The levying of tariffs against another nation’s trade goods to protect one’s own, or one’s colonies’,
manufacturers.
raj: A widely used term for the British Empire in India.
sati: The high-caste Hindu custom of widow burning. British missionaries’ and administrators’ attempts to suppress it in the
early 19th century contributed to the Indian Mutiny.
Satyagraha: The Hindu idea of “soul force,” adapted by Gandhi to the nonviolent movement against the empire.
scramble for Africa: The period when the European powers all competed to build colonial empires in Africa (c. 1870–
1895).
scurvy: An illness contracted by blue-water sailors due to vitamin C deficiency; remedied in the 1770s by Captain James
Cook, who gave lime juice to his sailors daily.
sepoy: An Indian soldier in the service of the East India Company’s army (pre-1858) or the British Indian Army.
swaraj: Self-government; the objective of the Indian National Congress in the early 20th century.
tariffs: Taxes levied against other nations’ imports.
triangular trade: The profitable Atlantic trade in the 17th and 18th centuries, in which British ships took goods from England
to Africa, exchanging them for slaves; shipped the slaves to the New World; and then brought home tobacco, sugar, and so
forth.
two-power standard: The British Admiralty’s objective in the late 19th and early 20th centuries that the Royal Navy ought to
be strong enough to defeat a combination of the world’s next two strongest navies.
UDI (a.k.a. Unilateral Declaration of Independence): The declaration of independence from Britain by Ian Smith, prime
minister of Southern Rhodesia, and the Rhodesian Front party in 1965. Its aim was to prevent Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe)
from becoming a multiracial democracy like most of the other former colonies of Britain in Africa.
virgin-soil epidemic: An epidemic whose victims have no prior exposure to the disease and to whom it is usually extremely
deadly (as in the case of European diseases contracted by American, Australian, and New Zealand natives).
Voortrekkers: Dutch-descended Boer farmers in South Africa who marched into the interior during the 1830s to get away
from the Cape Colony, where slavery had been abolished in 1833.
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Biographical Notes
Banks, Joseph (1743–1820): British scientist who accompanied Captain James Cook on his first voyage, naming and
identifying dozens of new species of plants. He sailed with Cook’s Endeavour in 1768 and helped in the exploration and
mapping of New Zealand and Australia. He was one of the first Englishmen to see and to write a description of kangaroos,
and he catalogued, drew, and identified many new species. He was elected president of the Royal Society in 1778 and held
the post almost until his death more than 40 years later. He was also head of the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew, which
gathered arboreal specimens from all of Britain’s colonies.
Chamberlain, Joseph (1836–1914): Birmingham hardware manufacturer turned reforming politician. As a radical, Liberal
member of Parliament, he campaigned for universal free education. He split with Gladstone over Home Rule in 1886 and
joined the Conservative Party. He was colonial secretary in the 1890s, favoring close cooperation—perhaps even a formal
federation—among the white settler colonies. He declared “the British race is the greatest of the governing races that the
world has ever seen.” He invested heavily in Britain’s African colonies and organized research into the understanding and
remedy of tropical diseases. His last campaign, for tariff reform and imperial preference, marked his recognition that free
trade was no longer an entirely favorable policy for Britain. One of his sons, Neville, was prime minister in the late 1930s
and was discredited for his appeasement of Hitler.
Churchill, Winston (1874–1965): Prime minister and probably the most famous Briton of the 20th century. Churchill trained
as an army officer and served in India, where he also made a reputation as a military writer. Turning to politics, he rose
rapidly in the Liberal Party and was First Lord of the Admiralty during World War I. The failure of the Gallipoli campaign
led to his resignation and to service on the Western Front. Recalled to politics in the Lloyd George coalition government, he
became a Conservative. Discredited in the 1930s for his warnings about Hitler’s rise to power, he was vindicated by later
events, leading to his appointment as prime minister of a coalition government. Popular for stirring speeches and wartime
leadership, he was nevertheless voted out of office when the war ended. He became prime minister again in 1950 but could
not prevent the breakup of the empire and eventually resigned due to poor health.
Clive, Robert (1725–1774): Military leader and politician. Clive went to India as a teenager as a clerk in the East India
Company. His brave escape from the French siege of Madras in 1746 won him an army commission. In 1751, he achieved
fame by seizing and holding Arcot against enemy counterattack. After the notorious Black Hole of Calcutta incident, Clive
led a force against Siraj ud-Daulah and won a decisive victory at the Battle of Plassey. Suddenly dominant in Bengal politics,
he received “gifts” of treasure that enabled him to buy political influence at home. During a third sojourn in India, he
demonstrated that a sepoy army under British officers, using British drills and weapons, could take on the declining Mughal
Empire. Criticized for his immense wealth, he riposted that, in view of the temptations to which he had been exposed in
India, “I stand amazed at my own moderation.” Intermittently depressed throughout his life and dependent on opium in later
years, he committed suicide in 1774.
Drake, Sir Francis (c. 1540–1595): English sea captain and adventurer, and hero to generations of patriotic English
Protestants. Licensed as a privateer by Queen Elizabeth I, he made a daring voyage around the world in the Pelican (later
renamed Golden Hind), gathering plunder en route and being knighted on his return in 1581. He was second in command of
the Royal Navy fleet that prepared to resist the Spanish Armada in 1587. Before it set sail, he took a fleet into Cadiz harbor
and set fire to 37 Spanish ships, causing the Armada a year’s delay. The rebuilt Armada was defeated at the Battle of
Gravelines, despite outnumbering the English fleet. In 1595, Drake, on a raid in the Spanish Caribbean, suffered a series of
defeats, then contracted dysentery and died off the coast of Panama.
Gandhi, Mohandas (1869–1948): The spiritual leader of the Indian independence movement. Born to a prosperous family in
Gujarat, he studied law in England and as a young man was highly westernized in dress and outlook. Ejected from a train in
South Africa because of his race, he devoted himself to redressing the evil of racial discrimination. He first experimented
with civil disobedience in South Africa. Returning to India, he became involved in the Indian National Congress. He
abandoned Western dress, advocated voluntary poverty, and opposed industrialization for India. His leadership of the Salt
March (1930) and the Quit India Movement (1942) kept him in the news, as did periodic imprisonment. When Indian
independence became imminent after World War II, he hoped to avoid an India-Pakistan split, but the Muslim leader
Muhammad Ali Jinnah was equally determined to achieve it. Gandhi’s sympathy for the victims of sectarian violence and his
eagerness for conciliation in part led Hindu extremist Nathuram Godse to assassinate him in January 1948.
Gordon, Charles G. (1833–1885): British army officer who believed he enjoyed direct communication with God and who
became a hero and martyr for his death at Khartoum in 1885. An engineer and cartographer, his first military experience was
the Crimea. He became famous during the Second Chinese Opium War and the Taiping Rebellion as commander of the EverVictorious Army; for the rest of his life, he was known as Chinese Gordon. After service in England, he accepted a post with
the Khedive of Egypt, who was attempting to extend Egyptian influence into the Sudan. Four years after resigning this
position, the prime minister, William Gladstone, ordered him back to the Sudan to evacuate British and Egyptian forces.
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Disobeying these orders, he fortified Khartoum against an expected siege that began in March 1884. The British government,
under pressure of public opinion because of Gordon’s popularity, sent an expedition to rescue him under General Garnet
Wolseley. It arrived just two days too late.
Lambton, John, Earl of Durham (1792–1840): British Whig politician sent to Canada in 1837 to investigate the causes of
two colonial rebellions. He reported that the separation between French-speaking Lower Canada (Quebec) and Englishspeaking Upper Canada (Ontario) was unwise, that Upper Canada was politically corrupt, and that the two should be unified
and entrusted with self-government. His 1839 report in effect established the principle that Britain’s white settler colonies
would all take on the responsibility of self-government. Lambton was dismissive of French Canadians and hoped that
unification would gradually cause their distinctive culture to die out.
Livingstone, David (1813–1873): One of the great British explorers of Africa. Born into a poor Scottish family, he was a
factory worker as a child but determined to improve himself through education. He found life as a doctor on an African
mission station unendurably boring and so began to explore. He became the first white man to cross tropical south central
Africa from coast to coast and the first white man to discover the Victoria Falls, which he named. His writing and speaking
tours of Britain made him a popular hero even though he was often mistaken in his geographical judgments. Intolerant of
weakness, he refused to admit that unless remedies could be found for deadly tropical diseases, the area would never be
settled by whites. Exploring alone, and convinced (wrongly) that the Nile did not flow from Lake Victoria, he disappeared for
four years; he was discovered by the Welsh-American explorer Henry Morton Stanley. A passionate enemy of the Arab slave
trade in Africa, Livingstone helped direct British political energy to its suppression.
Rhodes, Cecil (1853–1902): Entrepreneur of the Kimberley diamond business and the Johannesburg gold mines who
conquered parts of south central Africa and named two countries after himself (Northern and Southern Rhodesia). Son of a
country clergyman, he went to Africa as a teenager and began to organize the chaotically decentralized diamond miners. He
founded the DeBeers Company, which has dominated the world’s diamond business ever since. He became prime minister of
the Cape Colony while the private army of his British South Africa Company (founded 1889) carved out new territories north
of the Limpopo River in the 1890s. Rhodes was discredited over the 1895 Jameson Raid, an attempt to provoke an uprising
among British miners in Johannesburg against Boer policies. He remained politically influential until his death in 1902, not
least because he was one of the richest men in the world and one of the most knowledgeable about Africa. The Rhodes
Scholarships, funded by his will, were designed to bring together Anglo-Saxon leaders from all over the world at Oxford.
Victoria (1819–1901): The most durable monarch in British history, who ascended the throne in 1837 at the age of 18 and
reigned for 63 years. Her marriage to the strong-minded Prince Albert contributed to the royal family’s reputation for
earnestness and an upright, somewhat puritanical morality (whereas under her predecessors George IV and William IV, it had
been notorious for moral laxity). “Victorianism” was the outlook of many senior imperial figures who aimed to establish its
principles throughout the world. Benjamin Disraeli, her adored Conservative prime minister, made her empress of India in
1876, and she took an increasing interest in the spread of the British Empire. In her final years, she was inseparable from an
Indian servant, Abdul Karim, known as “The Munshi,” who became influential at her court after 1887 despite the opposition
of most white courtiers, even giving her lessons in Urdu and Hindi. During the early days of the Boer War, she sent every
man serving in Africa a box of chocolates to celebrate the dawn of the 20th century and told them, in a New Year’s message,
that defeat was inconceivable.
Wilberforce, William (1759–1833): British evangelical Christian and political campaigner from Yorkshire who achieved the
abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade (1807) and then the abolition of slavery itself throughout the British Empire (1833).
Wilberforce had a profound religious conversion experience in 1785 and dedicated himself to the parliamentary management
of antislavery legislation. West India’s merchants were well represented in Parliament and fought hard against him, alleging
the inability of Africans to manage their own freedom and insisting that abolition would destroy the Caribbean sugar
plantation system. Wilberforce countered with powerful moral rhetoric and skilful political maneuvering. He also favored
evangelical missions to India to convert the natives, a policy later historians—and some East India Company officials at the
time—saw as contributing to the Indian Mutiny of 1857. He is in many ways a paradoxical figure, deeply conservative and
even favoring repressive policies at home despite his antislavery views.
Wolfe, James (1727–1759): British general whose victory at the Battle of the Heights of Abraham in 1759 ensured the
British conquest of Canada in the Seven Years’ War. Son of an army officer, Wolfe joined the army as a teenager and went
into action for the first time at the Battle of Dettingen—the last battle in which a king of England, George II, led his own
army into combat. Recalled to Britain on the invasion of Bonnie Prince Charlie, he participated in the counterattack that
culminated in English victory at the Battle of Culloden. He was second in command of the British force that captured
Louisbourg, the French fortress on Cape Breton Island. King George II admired his aggressive spirit and scoffed at rumors
that Wolfe was mentally unstable: “Mad is he? Then I wish he would bite some of my other generals!” He was appointed
commander of the British force that sailed upriver to Quebec, where his daring won a shattering victory against General
Montcalm, the French commander. Wolfe and Montcalm both died in the battle.
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Bibliography
Adkins, Roy. Nelson’s Trafalgar: The Battle That Changed the World. New York: Viking, 2005.
Alexander, Caroline. The Bounty. New York: Viking Penguin, 2003.
Allitt, Patrick. “English Cricket and Literature.” South Atlantic Quarterly 95 (Spring 1996), 385–436.
Andrews, Kenneth. Drake’s Voyages: A Reassessment of Their Place in Elizabethan Maritime Expansion. New York:
Scribner, 1967. The great swashbuckler is placed firmly in historical context, in a book that explains why Britain developed
as a sea power in the 16th century.
Ashton, T. S., and Pat Hudson. The Industrial Revolution, 1760–1830. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.
Bayly, C. A. The New Cambridge History of India. Vol. 2, Indian Society and the Making of the British Empire. Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988.
Beck, Roger. The History of South Africa. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2000. A useful short introduction to the Boers, the
Zulus, and the British, and how they found each other mutually intolerable.
Bernstein, Jeremy. Dawning of the Raj: The Life and Trials of Warren Hastings. Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2000. A sympathetic
account of the first governor-general of India, who became spectacularly wealthy, and his impeachment and trial before
Parliament in the 1780s and 1790s.
Berton, Pierre. The Invasion of Canada. Boston: Little, Brown/Atlantic Monthly, 1980. Canada’s best popular historian
describes the failed U.S. attempt to conquer his country during the War of 1812.
———. The National Dream and the Last Spike. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1974. How the Canadian railroad
builders overcame astonishing difficulties to build their line, connect the provinces, and create a nation.
Black, Jeremy. The British Seaborne Empire. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004. A wonderfully readable
summary of British naval history and its inextricable connection with the empire.
Bowen, Roland. Cricket: A History of its Growth and Development Throughout the World. London: Eyre and Spottiswoode,
1970.
Bowle, John. The Imperial Achievement: The Rise and Transformation of the British Empire. Boston: Little, Brown, 1974.
An Oxford professor’s even-handed survey the whole story and the different stages of the empire.
Brebner, J. Bartlet. Canada: A Modern History. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. Rather too solid for most
readers’ tastes, but at least Brebner writes with a non-Canadian audience in mind and tries to make complicated issues clear.
Burley, Edith. Servants of the Honourable Company: Work, Discipline and Conflict in the Hudson’s Bay Company. Toronto:
Oxford University Press, 1997. A glimpse into the brutally demanding way of life of Canadian voyageurs and trappers.
Burn, W. L. The British West Indies. London: Hutchinson House, 1951. A spare and economical account of British ventures
in the Caribbean, with an emphasis on sugar plantations, slavery, greed, and fever.
Carrington, C. E. The British Overseas: Exploits of a Nation of Shopkeepers. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1950. The author, himself an old buffer of the imperial type, takes Napoleon’s insult about England being a nation of
shopkeepers and runs all over the world with it. Often unintentionally amusing.
Chua, Amy. Day of Empire: How Hyperpowers Rise to Global Dominance—and Why They Fall. New York: Doubleday,
2007. A Chinese-American historian puts the British Empire side by side with its great rivals and praises it for its high degree
of tolerance.
Clarke, Frank G. The History of Australia. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2002.
Clarke, Peter. Hope and Glory: Britain 1900–1990. London: Allen Lane, 1996.
Colley, Linda. Captives: Britain, Empire, and World. New York: Random House, 2002. A reminder that Britons abroad were
often vulnerable and that hundreds of them spent time as slaves and prisoners in alien societies.
Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. 1899.
Craton, Michael. Sinews of Empire. Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1974.
Crick, Bernard. George Orwell: A Life. Boston: Little, Brown, 1980.
Crosby, Alfred. Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Cruickshank, E. A. The Life of Sir Henry Morgan: With an Account of the English Settlement of the Island of Jamaica (1655–
1688). London: Macmillan, 1935.
Cullen, L. M. An Economic History of Ireland Since 1660. London: Batsford, 1972.
Dickens, Charles. Great Expectations. 1861.
Dinesen, Isak. Out of Africa. 1937. New York: Random House, 1970.
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Dower, John W. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986.
Dunn, Richard S. Sugar and Slaves: The Rise of the Planter Class in the English West Indies, 1624–1713. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1972. The British West India slave owners were an unlovely crowd by this telling, but
they certainly had plenty to worry about and lived lives of chronic insecurity.
Edwardes, Michael. Red Year: The Indian Rebellion of 1857. London: Hamilton, 1973.
Edwards, Michael. Nehru: A Political Biography. New York: Praeger, 1972.
Edwards, R. Dudley. Patrick Pearse: The Triumph of Failure. London: Gollancz, 1977.
Embree, Ainslie. 1857 in India: Mutiny or War of Independence? Boston: Heath, 1963.
Etherington, Norman. The Great Trekds: The Transformation of Southern Africa, 1815–1954. New York: Longman, 2001.
Farrington, Anthony. Trading Places: The East India Company and Asia, 1600–1834. London: British Library, 2002.
Farwell, Byron. The Great Anglo-Boer War. New York: Norton, 1990.
Ferguson, Niall. Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. London: Allen Lane, 2003. No historian alive today enjoys a
better reputation than Ferguson, whose writing glitters with wonderful insight and good ideas. If you only ever read one book
on the history of the British Empire, let it be this one.
Foster, R. F. Modern Ireland: 1600–1972. New York: Penguin, 1989. The best one-volume history of the tormented and
luckless island.
Gandhi, Mohandas. The History of My Experiments with Truth. Washington DC: Public Affairs Press, 1948.
Gelber, Harry G. Opium, Soldiers and Evangelicals: England’s 1840–42 War with China and its Aftermath. New York:
Palgrave, 2004.
Glazebrook, G. P. A Short History of Canada. Oxford, UK: Clarendon Press, 1950. A basic narrative, as told by an historian
who had an exaggerated sense of his subject’s importance. Its very first sentence begins, “The growth of Canada as a world
power. … ”
Gordimer, Nadine. A Sport of Nature. New York: Penguin, 1988.
Gough, Barry. First Across the Continent: Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.
Mackenzie crossed North America 12 years earlier than Lewis and Clark, over even more difficult terrain, but no one seems
to have heard of him south of the 49th parallel.
Green, Benny. A History of Cricket. London, Barrie & Jenkins, 1988.
Gump, James. The Dust Rose Like Smoke: The Subjugation of the Zulu and the Sioux. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska
Press, 1994.
Haggard, H. Rider. King Solomon’s Mines. 1885.
Harvey, Robert. Clive: the Life and Death of a British Emperor. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1998.
———. The War of Wars: The Epic Struggle Between Britain and France: 1789–1815. London: Carroll and Graf, 2006.
Herman, Arthur. How the Scots Invented the Modern World. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2001. Special pleading of the
sort made popular in Thomas Cahill’s How the Irish Saved Civilization. Still, it is hard not to be struck by the sheer number
of Scotsmen who played vital roles in British expansion worldwide, each of whom gets his due here.
Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin/Mariner, 1998. The real horrors of the Belgian Congo in a brilliant nonfiction book that can hold its head high beside
the immortal fictional version, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
Hoppen, K. Theodore. The Mid Victorian Generation, 1846–1886. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1998. A meaty
summary of everything that took place in Britain over those four decades. Informative, but by no means a light read.
Horwitz, Tony. Blue Latitudes: Boldly Going Where Captain Cook Has Gone Before. New York: Henry Holt/Picador, 2002.
In this delightful and informative work, the author revisits the places Cook visited on his voyages of exploration more than
200 years earlier and compares them then and now.
Hughes, Robert. The Fatal Shore. New York: Vintage, 1986. By far the best one-volume history of Australia ever written, by
the Australian writer and broadcaster who made his name with The Shock of the New on the history of modern art.
Inglis, Brian. The Opium War. London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1976.
James, Lawrence. Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Superb one-volume
history of the British Empire in India.
———. The Rise and Fall of the British Empire. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1994. More thorough than Ferguson’s, and
also excellent, though lacking some of his sparkle.
Jeal, Tim. David Livingston. London: Heinemann, 1973.
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Jenkins, Roy. Churchill: A Biography. New York: Penguin/Plume, 2001. A veteran British parliamentarian manages to cram
all you need to know about the great man into just a shade less than 1,000 pages. Compulsively readable.
Johnson, Paul. A History of the English People. New York: Harper and Row, 1985. A famously quirky public intellectual
turns his laser intellect onto the history of his own country and makes everything familiar seem slightly strange. Brilliant!
———. A History of the Jews. New York: Harper and Row, 1987.
———. Modern Times: The World From the 1920s to the 1980s. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. A slashing attack on
conventional wisdom, but never boring, and excellent for putting Churchill, Gandhi, and others in the context of their
contemporaries around the world.
Keegan, John. The First World War. New York: Vintage, 1998. Our generation’s very best military historian explains the
convulsion that marked the beginning of the end of the British Empire.
———. The Second World War. London: Penguin, 1989. The same author on the second and even more traumatic conflict
that sealed the empire’s fate.
Kelsey, Harry. Sir Francis Drake: The Queen’s Pirate. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998.
Kenneally, Thomas. Commonwealth of Thieves: The Improbable Birth of Australia. New York: Nan Talese, 2006.
Kennedy, Paul M. The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000. New
York: Vintage Books, 1989. A warning that empires often fall when they try too hard to expand beyond their logical limits.
Key, Robert. The Green Flag: A History of Irish Nationalism. New York: Penguin, 1972.
Klein, Herbert S. The Middle Passage: Comparative Studies in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 1978.
Knightley, Philip. Australia: A Biography of a Nation. London: Jonathan Cape, 2000. This book concentrates on a series of
revealing episodes in Australia’s history, such as cricket controversies and the Gallipoli campaign, rather than trying to tell
the entire story.
Lacour-Gayet, Robert. A History of South Africa. (London: Cassell, 1977). A French historian’s-eye view of British southern
Africa, the good and the evil. One of few fine British Empire histories by a nonnative English speaker.
Levin, Bernard. The Pendulum Years: Britain and the Sixties. London: Cape, 1970.
Levine, Philippa. The British Empire: Sunrise to Sunset. Harlow, UK: Pearson, 2007. This concise and businesslike onevolume history is compact but rather bloodless, especially by comparison with Ferguson.
Lloyd, T. O. The British Empire: 1558–1995. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1996.
Louis, William Roger, Alaine M. Low, Nicholas P. Canny, and P. J. Marshall. The Oxford History of the British Empire. 5
vols. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 1986–1999. Massive, comprehensive, and often slightly more than you wanted to
know, but unrivaled for detailed explanation of the whole empire.
Lower, Arthur. Colony to Nation: A History of Canada. Toronto: Longman’s Green, 1946. Not among the sprightliest books
ever written, but then neither is any of the other general histories of Canada.
Macmillan, Margaret O. Paris 1919: Six Months that Changed the World. New York: Random House, 2002.
Mandela, Nelson. Long Walk to Freedom. Boston: Little, Brown, 1994.
Mansergh, Nicholas. The Irish Question, 1840–1921. 3rd ed. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975.
Marshall, P. J., ed. The Cambridge Illustrated History of the British Empire. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
1996. A variety of historical specialists analyze the various stages of the empire in dispassionate, academic prose.
Martin, S. I. Britain’s Slave Trade. London: Macmillan/Channel Four, 1999. A simplified but straightforward history of the
British slave trade and plantations that would make a good introduction to the topic for teenage readers.
Mason, Philip. The Men Who Ruled India. London: Jonathan Cape, 1985. The airs and graces of men who were ordinary in
Britain but magnificent in remote imperial India.
McLynn, Frank. 1759: The Year Britain Became Master of the World. London: Jonathan Cape, 2004.
Mda, Zakes. The Heart of Redness. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002.
Mead, Walter Russell. God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World. New York: Knopf, 2007.
Explains the value of sophisticated banking systems in building a powerful nation and empire.
Mehta, Ved. Mahatma Gandhi and His Apostles. New York: Penguin, 1977.
Meredith, Martin. The Fate of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2005. An
unflinching account of the wretchedness and failure of postcolonial Africa by a journalist who has spent most of his life
there.
Mills, James H. Drugs and Empires: Essays in Modern Imperialism and Intoxication. New York: Palgrave, 2007.
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Mokyr, Joel, Why Ireland Starved. London: Allen and Unwin, 1983.
Morgan, Edmund. The Birth of the Republic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956.
Morris, Donald. The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation. 1965. Reprint, New York: Simon and
Schuster, 1986. A classic on the Anglo-Zulu wars of the 1870s.
Morris, James. Farewell the Trumpets. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978. This and the following two books
comprise a three-volume history of the empire from about 1830 until about 1945, crammed with interesting details about the
empire’s exotic people and places. Affectionate but never uncritical.
———. Heaven’s Command: An Imperial Progress. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1973.
———. Pax Britannica: The Climax of an Empire. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1968.
Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Viking, 1989.
O’Brian, Patrick. Joseph Banks. London: Collins, 1987. Excellent intellectual biography of the naturalist by an author who is
famous for the Master and Commander novels about the Royal Navy in the era of Nelson and Napoleon.
Overy, Richard. Why the Allies Won. London: Random House/Pimlico, 1985.
Pakenham, Thomas. The Boer War New York: Random House, 1979.
———. The Scramble for Africa: White Man’s Conquest of the Dark Continent from 1876–1912. London: Avon, 1992.
Paton, Alan. Cry the Beloved Country. New York: Scribner’s, 1948.
Pine, Stephen. World Fire: The Culture of Fire on Earth. New York: Henry Holt, 1995.
Prittie, Terence. Israel: Miracle in the Desert. New York: Praeger, 1967. As the title suggests, a slightly starry-eyed view of
Israel, but good on the end of the empire in Palestine.
Read, Anthony, and David Fisher. The Proudest Day: India’s Long Road to Independence. New York: Norton, 1998.
Reitz, Deneys. Commando: A Boer Journal of the Boer War. London: Penguin, 1929. One of the greatest war books ever
written, the tale of a brave 17-year-old irregular cavalryman taking on the might of the British Empire. Superb!
Rice, Edward. Captian Sir Richard Francis Burton. New York: Harper Collins, 1991.
Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1989.
Samuel, Rinna. A History of Israel. London: Widenfeld and Nicolson, 1989.
Schama, Simon. A History of Britain. 3 vols. New York: Hyperion, 2002. Written to accompany his rightly acclaimed BBC
TV series; vivid, colorful, and full of insight into British history.
Schwartz, Seymour. The French and Indian War, 1754–1763: The Imperial Struggle for North America. New York: Simon
and Schuster, 1994. Excellent maps and illustrations enhance this explanation of why France was destined, sooner or later, to
lose its grip on Canada to the British.
Shy, John. A People Numerous and Armed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.
Slim, William. Defeat into Victory. New York: D. McKay, 1961.
Smith, Adam. The Wealth of Nations. 1776. Reprint, New York: Penguin, 1982.
Spear, Percival. Master of Bengal: Clive and His India. London: Thames and Hudson, 1975. An attractively illustrated
history of the moody, suicidal teenager who grew up to conquer India for Britain, by a veteran historian of British India.
Thackeray, Henry Makepeace. Vanity Fair. 1848.
Thompson, Leonard M. A History of South Africa. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.
Vaughan, Alden T. American Genesis: Captain John Smith and the Founding of Virginia. Boston: Little, Brown, 1975.
Waley, Arthur. The Opium War Through Chinese Eyes. London: Allen and Unwin, 1958.
Walvin, James. An African’s Life: The Life and Times of Olaudah Equiano, 1745–1797. London: Cassell, 1998.
———. Britain’s Slave Empire. Stroud, UK: Tempus, 2000. A matter-of-fact account about the slave trade and its role in
stimulating imperial growth, with a good section of slave writings of the 18th and early 19th centuries.
Warner, Oliver. With Wolfe to Quebec. Toronto: Collins, 1972. A detailed account of the troubled military genius who gave
his life at the moment of victory and conquered Canada for Britain.
Wolpert, Stanley. Jinnah of Pakistan. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.
———. A New History of India. 4th ed. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Wolpert keeps his eyes fixed on India
itself and shows how it adapted to, and ultimately rejected, the British presence over four centuries.
Wood, Gordon. The Creation of the American Republic: 1776–1787. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press,
1969.
Woodham-Smith, C. The Great Hunger: Ireland, 1845–1849. London: Penguin, 1991.
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Useful Web Sites
The British Empire. http://www.britishempire.co.uk/. Originally created for British schoolchildren but run by enthusiasts who
have gathered an immense and fascinating array of materials.
The Hakluyt Society. http://www.hakluyt.com/index.htm/. A history of British exploration, named after the pioneer author
who commemorated the exploits of the great Elizabethan sea-dogs.
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