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Post by Admin on Feb 20, 2014 2:37:52 GMT
British troops man a remote outpost during the Indian uprising of 1857. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty What is there still to know about the British empire? And what should you know? To some, the answers to both of these questions are clear-cut. Empires, generically, were evil creations of the past that have now been satisfactorily swept away by nation states. As for the empire that was hewn out over the course of three centuries by varieties of British and Irish actors, this was the biggest of its kind, affecting every continent. Consequently, these islands must bear a disproportionate share of imperial guilt, and all that is necessary now is mass British acknowledgment of this fact, and some attempts at reparation. This is an arguable point of view; and, if you hold it, John Darwin's books on empire may not be to your taste. Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain by John Darwin This is not because Darwin is out to offer exculpation or vindication – far from it. Rather, what distinguishes his work is a steady rejection of "thinking in monoliths". In this book, as in his earlier tomes, the award-winning After Tamerlane (2007) and The Empire Project (2009), Darwin draws on his long experience of teaching and studying imperial and world history at Oxford to set out, with great clarity and intelligence, and in a wry, un-illusioned style, the multiform meanings and manifestations of empire over time and geographical space. As he argues, empire was emphatically neither a peculiarly British nor only a European habit. Instead, and for much of human history, empire has been "the default mode of state organisation". Even today, all of the great powers, China, the United States, Brazil, India, Russia – and the EU, perhaps – either still exhibit some of the characteristics of empire, or have passed through imperial phases in the past, or are one-time overland empires that have managed (not always convincingly) to repackage and rebrand themselves as nation states. If, despite the ubiquity of modes of empire, Britain's own version of the beast nonetheless seems remarkable, this is partly because of the sharp contrast between the smallness of these damp islands, and the extremely large, diverse and far-flung territories the British and Irish managed for a while to invade and appropriate. Darwin outlines the story of how this came to happen in the initial chapters and at the end of his book, while devoting much of it to particular themes such as missions, commerce, settlement and war. Throughout, he stresses the huge role in this empire of "more or less organised violence", whether meted out to rival armies, or indigenous peoples, or ecosystems. Even when Britain's own troops were sparse – in India before 1770, or in the Caribbean because of disease levels – it often coped by hiring indigenous troops and slave soldiers to do the dirty work. The extreme smallness of British numbers in many overseas locations also tended to reinforce the use of racist distance as a tactic of rule. Keeping the "natives" (and women) out of certain clubs in imperial settlements was not just prejudice, but also an attempt to shore up the charisma of the local dominant white males. Yet, as Darwin makes clear, there was never an "imperial project" in the sense of a strategic and ideological master plan for Britain's empire. It was simply too large and various, and experienced over time in too many ways for that ever to be possible. London's influence was, anyway, always very limited. Even in 1914, the Colonial Office contained only 30 senior officials who were ostensibly in charge of 100 different colonial spaces, not to mention 600 quasi-autonomous Indian princely states that technically owed allegiance to the British crown. Given this administrative sparseness, much inevitably depended on the men on the spot, and they frequently complained how little London and the British people understood or appreciated them and their work. But it was not just limited reach, knowledge and interest at home that precluded any sort of imperial blueprint, but also successive "colossal explosions" that at intervals diverted the course of the empire, sometimes stopping it "dead in its tracks". The American revolution not only cost Britain the 13 colonies, but also forced it to rethink the slave trade and slavery, and influenced its power relations in Asia and the Pacific. The Canadian risings of the 1830s obliged the men in London to think much harder about settler self-government. The 1857 uprising in India did not free the subcontinent, but it changed the way the British viewed and sought to govern it. The so-called Boer war advertised British vulnerabilities; and these were confirmed by the Irish rising of 1916 and the subsequent creation of the Irish Free State, blows that attracted the notice and attention of colonial dissidents in Asia and Africa. As this catalogue of imperial rebellions suggests, and as Darwin points out, those in the colonies who caused the British empire the greatest trouble were very often men and women who were "white". Yet, despite all the problems and anxiety, the blood, the guilt and – crucially - deep uncertainty always about just how profitable the business actually was in monetary terms, leading Britons especially found it hard entirely to let go of the empire. Even in 1965, Harold Wilson was speaking wistfully of Britain's frontiers being on the Himalayas, while Margaret Thatcher still felt it necessary to devote treasure and lives to winning back the Falklands. And it has not just been the members of Britain's political class who have found adjusting to diminished power and reach challenging. It is sometimes argued that Britons "othered" their colonial subjects. Yet it would be more accurate to say that the British never succeeded in making up their minds, sometimes othering black and white colonial peoples, to be sure, but sometimes also viewing them as fellow British subjects, as an integral part of themselves. Empire's complex and long-drawn out impact on identities here – on the sense of who we are – helps to explain why adjustment to the EU has proved so hard. At some level, varieties of Britons still kick against being confined to Europe only, to a single continent. Consciously or not, many of them still yearn to be a global people, to be actors on a bigger stage. Darwin's new book is now the best single-volume guide as to why this is. • Linda Colley's The Ordeal of Elizabeth Marsh: A Woman in World History is published by HarperCollins.
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Post by Admin on Feb 26, 2014 6:02:50 GMT
The recent diplomatic storm in a teacup over the NSA's monitoring of Angela Merkel's cellphone was a reminder that in matters of intelligence, national self-interest trumps every other card. Equally striking, though, was the evident resentment of the Germans and French over the Anglosphere's "five eyes" intelligence-sharing arrangement, from which they are excluded and which enables the U.S. agency to use its British counterpart to spy on American citizens without breaking any federal laws. Barack Obama and David Cameron don't need to spy on each other because their agencies pool all significant intelligence anyway. Empire of Secrets By Calder Walton Overlook, 411 pages, $35 At the heart of Calder Walton's "Empire of Secrets: British Intelligence, the Cold War, and the Twilight of Empire," an important and highly original account of postwar British intelligence, is a history of the Anglo-American "special relationship." Dean Acheson was only partly right in 1962 when he declared that Great Britain had lost an empire but not yet found a role. Britain had lost an empire, but she had also become the indispensable partner of the U.S. in the Cold War. Now that the British government has opened many, though not all, of its secret-service archives, scholars such as Mr. Walton have discovered how far that new role depended on intelligence. "Empire of Secrets" covers the period from World War II, when Britain had the largest empire in history, to the 1967 withdrawal from Aden, the country's last Middle Eastern stronghold, which they left, Mr. Walton writes, in "a shameful manner, handing power over to a homicidal Marxist regime." "Empire of Secrets" is the first book on the twilight of empire to be based on declassified intelligence records and includes detailed case studies of Palestine, Malaya and Africa, with a more general overview of imperial security during the first two decades of the Cold War. There was nothing inevitable about the special relationship. At the end of World War II, Dwight Eisenhower personally congratulated the British intelligence services, which he felt had been "decisive" in the defeat off the Nazis. And the OSS, forerunner of the CIA, owed much to its British counterparts. As one OSS officer said: "The British taught us everything we knew but not everything they knew." Within a few months of peace in 1945, however, the relationship between the two intelligence communities had, in Mr. Walton's words, "almost completely broken down." The reason was the Cold War, with its sudden shifting of allegiances provoking subversion, defections and panic. Almost overnight, Washington cut its intelligence links with the British, who were seen as vulnerable to Soviet penetration. The Americans also had a distaste for the culture of "gentlemen amateurs" that prevailed in the higher reaches of the British secret service. This was the world we all know from James Bond. Ian Fleming created an archetype that still fascinates, and he himself exemplified Bond's milieu at its worst: snobbery, misogyny, anti-Semitism and an overweening sense of racial and cultural superiority. Mr. Walton offers a partial corrective to this abiding 007 stereotype. The British need to keep up with and reassure their American counterparts in addressing the Soviet threat quickly led to a more professional postwar intelligence service. This required "positive vetting," meaning active investigation of every official with access to intelligence—despite the postwar Labour government's protestations of hostility to a "police state." It also meant a vast extension of surveillance across the empire, especially as decolonization gathered speed. The more serious reason for American frustration was that it took the British some time after the war to refocus on the new Soviet threat. Mr. Walton shows that London's top priority was terrorism: specifically, the Zionists hostile to the British Mandate regime in Palestine, the Irgun and the "Stern Gang." Bizarre as it may sound today, there was justification for the fears of MI5, which in 1946 warned that every senior official from the prime minister downward was a target. In 1947, a young Irgun operative, Betty Knout, succeeded in planting a large bomb inside the Colonial Office in London. It failed to go off, but such audacious plots caused the British security services constant anxiety. Members of the Stern Gang claimed to have come close to assassinating Ernest Bevin, the foreign secretary, and their explosives expert, the "Dynamite Man" Yaacov Eliav, invented a new device: the letter bomb. They targeted the entire cabinet, and, though none of the bombs got through in the end, the future Prime Minister Anthony Eden unwittingly carried one around with him in his briefcase for a whole day. In Palestine itself the carnage caused by attacks such as the 1946 King David Hotel bombing provoked a draconian response from the British, which alienated the moderate Jewish population. The end of British rule was a shambles. When they left in May 1948, the chief secretary of the administration, Sir Henry Gurney, was asked to whom he would leave the keys to his office. "To nobody," he replied. "I shall leave them under the mat." As Mr. Walton notes: "Palestine was the intelligence war that Britain lost." The British, however, learned from this debacle. In Malaya and Kenya, they defeated insurgencies and kept the postcolonial regimes within the Western camp during the Cold War—not without violence that occasionally degenerated into barbarism. Mr. Walton shows how success eluded the British when local intelligence officials failed to place human agents among their enemies: "Then as now, torture was the last refuge of the ineffectual." The same Sir Henry Gurney, who re-emerged as Malayan high commissioner, admitted privately that the British army was breaking the law "almost every day." Intelligence, Mr. Walton shows, was crucial as the empire wound down. For example, close surveillance of two of the most radical African anti-colonial leaders, Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta of Ghana and Kenya, respectively, convinced MI5 that neither was likely to succumb to Soviet blandishments—thereby contradicting the received wisdom in Whitehall. By 1960, when Prime Minister Harold Macmillan spoke in South Africa of the "wind of change blowing through this continent," it had been accepted in Whitehall's intelligence agencies that there was little to fear from granting independence to Britain's African possessions but much from Soviet influence. The special relationship was in much better shape by the late 1960s, too, with the anti-colonialist Americans happy to benefit from Britain's imperial legacy. Mr. Walton concludes with the creation in 1974 of the main U.S. base in the Indian Ocean at Diego Garcia, where Britain first removed the inhabitants and then "allowed America to use the Chagos Islands effectively as its own colony." Mr. Walton's study does an excellent job of elucidating the part played by British intelligence in decolonization. It is not a glorious chapter in British history; the best that can be said is that most other European imperial powers—the French, the Belgians, the Portuguese—did considerably worse. An abiding image of the end of empire came after the Suez debacle in 1956. Abandoned by his American ally and forced to withdraw his troops from Egypt, Prime Minister Anthony Eden fled London to stay at the Jamaican home of Ian Fleming. His secretary, Evelyn Shuckburgh, confided to his diary: "The captain leaves the sinking ship which he had steered personally on to the rocks." Eden sought refuge with the creator of James Bond, just as the fiction of imperial power was confronted by the fact of post-imperial impotence. The irony is irresistible: The fantasy figure of James Bond is the last relic of the empire on which the sun never set.
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Post by Admin on Feb 27, 2014 22:25:50 GMT
The British Empire in the 19th century was the largest the world had ever seen, and one of the most idealistic. Simon Schama reveals how, disastrously, the liberal politics and free-market economics that drove it unravelled, resulting in the Irish Potato Famine, and mutiny in India. By the early 20th century, nationalist movements around the globe had turned their back on the British 'workshop of the world'.
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Post by Admin on Mar 11, 2014 7:41:26 GMT
In 1957 Sir Winston Churchill, who had visited east Africa fifty years earlier as a junior minister in the Colonial Office, provided a short prologue to a Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film about the Mau Mau revolt entitled Something of Value, starring Rock Hudson and Sidney Poitier. Churchill's message, that Kenya's current problems were the problems of the world, was innocuous. But he himself did not go down well at MGM, where a studio executive said: 'You have got to get rid of this fucking Englishman.' The director asked if he was referring to Sir Winston Churchill, the greatest statesman in the world. 'Whoever the fuck he is, I don't care!' came the reply. 'Out of the movie!' WHAT WINSTON REALLY WANTED Churchill's Empire: The World that Made Him and the World He Made By Richard Toye (Macmillan 484pp £25) This was crass even by the standards of Hollywood. Churchill had been famous on both sides of the Atlantic for most of his adult life - when he left on his 1907 safari, Punch asked who was going to govern England? And if he was best known in America for his opposition to fascism and communism, he was notorious for his defence of imperialism. 'We mean to hold our own,' he had memorably pronounced in 1942. 'I have not become the King's First Minister in order to preside over the liquidation of the British Empire.' Addressing the Indian Empire Society, 1930 The Empire, indeed, was the main bone of contention between Churchill and Roosevelt during the war. The President found it hard to believe that they were fighting Axis tyranny but not working to free people all over the world from colonial oppression. He openly disagreed with Churchill's assertion that the promises of self-government in the Atlantic Charter did not apply to the British Empire. The Prime Minister thought it was 'pretty good cheek' for the Americans, who had blood on their hands in the Philippines, to try 'to school-marm us into proper behaviour' in the Empire. And with the Empire behind him, he felt able to stand up to the Great Republic. According to Harry Hopkins, Roosevelt's plea that India should be allowed to rule itself wrung from Churchill a 'string of cuss words [that] lasted for two hours in the middle of the night'. Young Winston had vowed to devote his life to the maintenance of the British Empire. As warlord during the struggle against Hitler he fought to preserve it even though that meant testing the Anglo-American alliance, which he also championed. As an old man he lamented that his life had been for nothing: 'The Empire I believed in has gone.' In view of all that it is remarkable that no substantial scholarly work on this subject has hitherto appeared. There have been essays and a couple of partial studies, and the topic has been aired in some of the many volumes about Churchill published since the opening and electronic cataloguing of his papers. But Churchill's Empire is the first book to cover all the ground. It does so in a masterly fashion, drawing on much fresh evidence, teasing out the nuances of Churchill's attitudes and providing a marvellously illuminating appraisal. Lord Beaverbrook once said that Churchill had held every opinion on every subject and what Richard Toye demonstrates above all is that his opinions on the British Empire were anything but simple or consistent. Of course, Churchill was a Victorian - especially during the 1930s, when Baldwin said that he had reverted to being a subaltern of hussars (which he had joined in 1895). But many Victorians were more liberal than Churchill, particularly regarding racial prejudice and military ruthlessness. On the other hand, Churchill genuinely believed that British rule - benevolent, humane and just - would bring progress, commerce and civilisation to backward countries. He condemned abuses: the killing of wounded Dervishes at Omdurman; the exploitation of Africans by European settlers; and 'the disgusting butchery of natives' in Natal, which he dubbed 'the hooligan of the Empire'. He warned that the gap between conquest and dominion was being filled by 'the greedy trader, the inopportune missionary, the ambitious soldier and the lying speculator'. He appeased the Boers, conciliated the Irish and denounced the Amritsar massacre. He sometimes opposed imperial expansion. Moreover, he issued a caveat of profound contemporary relevance: the North-West Frontier was ideal guerrilla territory since regular troops were sitting ducks and could not 'catch or kill an impalpable cloud of skirmishers'. Paradoxically, Churchill's fight to save the Empire led to its loss. As Toye shows, he was as pragmatic and as contradictory about the imperial sunset as about the high noon. After the war he acknowledged that India 'must go' and did not oppose its going; but he occasionally condemned the 'cowardly abandonment of our duties'. He showed surprising sympathy for Mau Mau rebels and criticised the 'execution of men who fight to defend their native land'; but he disliked Macmillan's 'wind of change' speech. He embraced the Commonwealth, though without marked enthusiasm. He was ambivalent about Egypt but he became reconciled to Eire and to India, which he called 'The Light of Asia'. Toye traces Churchill's shifts and velleities with impressive skill and erudition, using a vast range of contemporary newspapers to particularly good effect. He might perhaps have dwelt on the rhetorical and psychological importance of the Empire to Churchill. The great man's real tyrant, as Sir Robert Menzies said, was the glittering phrase; and the greatest Empire in history not only inspired him to flights of oratory but gave him the opportunity to declaim on a global stage. Vitally, too, the Empire helped to invest him with the copper-bottomed confidence and armour-plated toughness he needed to combat the Third Reich. Nevertheless, Richard Toye deserves all credit for producing such an important and original book. Piers Brendon's 'The Decline and Fall of the British Empire, 1781-1997' is published in paperback by Vintage.
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Post by Admin on Mar 24, 2014 21:45:33 GMT
THE WHITE PRINCESS by Philippa Gregory Among the writers of historical romance novels Philippa Gregory is the crème de la crème. She, more than any other author in this genre, seems able to combine the fictional with the historical and make it a winning combination. This is shown clearly in her new novel THE WHITE PRINCESS. She relates the basic details of the history of England in the late fifteenth century and then takes literary license with some key characters in order to create an enthralling story. The focus of this story is Elizabeth of York. She is the lover of King Richard III who is defeated by the usurper Henry of Tudor. Once Henry becomes King of England he requires Elizabeth to marry him in order to give unity to the throne. Since she is a York and he is a Tudor this is a perfect arrangement except.....Elizabeth's brother Richard is rumored to have fled England and is alive somewhere. Throughout the book the threat of Richard is one that follows Henry, and makes him suspicious of any and all Yorks, including Elizabeth. No matter how often she swears her allegiance he does not believe her. He is even more suspicious of her mother who lives with them. He thinks she is in secret communication with her son and plotting with him to reclaim the throne for the Yorks. These plots against the King, both real and imagined, give the book its dramatic impact. Then when you add in Elizabeth's quandary of whether to be aligned with the King or with her family, you have real conflict. Elizabeth is conflicted primarily because of her sons who will one day rule England if Henry keeps his crown. The license Gregory takes with these characters is believable as they fit in with the overall pattern of England's history at this time. Henry did defeat Richard and take the crown; there was a pretender who claimed to be the lost Prince Richard and sought to overthrow Henry; and the prophecy made by Elizabeth in a curse did come true. All of this makes for fascinating reading as the story flows from a loveless marriage to a glimmer of love between Henry and Elizabeth. The couple faces countless conflicts within the family and without as Henry tries to hold on to his reign and Elizabeth tries to hold on to her marriage. Nothing is certain so the suspense is constant. For entertainment reading that is also educational, THE WHITE PRINCESS should be your next book to read. You may not think you would like this type of fiction but THE WHITE PRINCESS could surprise you.
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