Rise And Fall Of The British Empire

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Tudor had cheery news to impart, too. Not only could the Mandate be a “wonderful tourist country,” but prospectors had discovered vast sums’ worth of potash in the Dead Sea valley. Should Britain appropriate the resources and increase the policing budget, its difficulties in the region would “smooth out,” he told Churchill, assuring him that Palestinians would be easier to pacify than the Irish: “They are a different people, and it’s unlikely that the Arab if handled firmly will ever do much more than agitate and talk.” This book by Agnes Machar was compiled in 1914. It is really a collection of the important nation-building stages in British history and would have served as a text book to many. It has as many stories about Britain as it does the Empire, but it was all part of the glorification process to inspire young readers to service in the wider Empire and beyond. It would also be used to teach those growing up within the Empire, the history of the 'mother country' and her imperial expansion.

After that is a section on fiction writers who have written about The British Empire or an aspect of British imperialism in some way. It does not list all the books written by these authors but only those connected to The British Empire in some way. This volume of the series discusses various administrative, practical and legal issues surrounding governing such a vast empire. It includes such sections as education, defence, health, communications etc... It is quite a practical overview of issues of governance and coordination over such vast distances. Narrator: By 1913, the British had built an empire which ruled over 400 million people and covered a quarter of the Earth’s surface. The empire brought Britain wealth, power and influence. However, for the people that were colonised, it brought violence, disease and famine. 1838 was the second year of Queen Victoria’s reign. Looking at this single year, we can get a sense of the different experiences of life in the British Empire. An ex-soldier and journalist who has written on a wide variety of Imperial related fiction and non-fiction books. They are usually but not exclusively set in Asia or the Pacific Rim.Some may look at this and feel as though it’s too much,” Elkins said of her graphic descriptions. “I don’t want readers to feel like they just came away with a bunch of statistics. I want them to feel the lived experiences.” Dennis Judd has written a thematic overview of the British Empire although placing those themes within a chronological context. It gives a good overview of the political dimensions but does not spend as much time analysing fundamental issues as to the rationale or impact of empire either on the world or Britain itself. What the book does do is give a variety of flavours and issues to ponder and consider. Published in 1915 (at the height of the World War), this is a patriotic book designed to show why it was worth fighting for Britain and its illustrious Empire. It was something of a riposte to German criticisms and justification for the war in itself. The lectures cover the creation of the Empire and its development up to 1915. This is an interesting book from the 1880s that gives an overview of the forms of government of each of the colonies around the world. It is an analysis to provide some justification for more informal, federated style of Imperial government rather than an extension of British imposed government from the centre. The author, Sir George Campbell, was the MP for Kirkcaldy in Scotland but he was very widely travelled and even served as the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal in the 1870s. In the 1700s and 1800s, India experienced several devastating famines. These famines were partly caused by the weather, and the region had suffered from famine before British rule, but British policies often made the situation worse. Under British rule, Indians were pushed to produce crops, such as tea, that Britain could sell for high prices. Therefore when poor weather affected the harvests, there were food shortages resulting in famines across India. During many of these famines Britain did not organise a large enough relief effort, and millions died across India.

This novel tells the story of Kimball O’ Hara (Kim), who is the orphaned son of a soldier in the Irish regiment stationed in India during the British Raj. It describes Kim’s life and adventures from street vagabond, to his adoption by his father’s regiment and recruitment into espionage. This is a wonderful series broadcast by the Imperial Broadcasting Service (aka the BBC). It makes fun of all the Nineteenth Century literary genres in a very witty manner. Suitably imperial in tone, they are laugh out loud funny! Cameron was right about the armbands. The creation of the British empire caused large portions of the global map to be tinted a rich vermilion, and the colour turned out to be peculiarly appropriate. Britain's empire was established, and maintained for more than two centuries, through bloodshed, violence, brutality, conquest and war. Not a year went by without large numbers of its inhabitants being obliged to suffer for their involuntary participation in the colonial experience. Slavery, famine, prison, battle, murder, extermination – these were their various fates. Please feel free to browse through this library about books and authors and any writings connected to the British Empire, colonies and colonial experiences of individuals. The library is split into distinct sections:No colony in their empire gave the British more trouble than the island of Ireland. No subject people proved more rebellious than the Irish. From misty start to unending finish, Irish revolt against colonial rule has been the leitmotif that runs through the entire history of empire, causing problems in Ireland, in England itself, and in the most distant parts of the British globe. The British affected to ignore or forget the Irish dimension to their empire, yet the Irish were always present within it, and wherever they landed and established themselves, they never forgot where they had come from. Yet “Legacy of Violence” goes further than detailing the depravities of empire; it has a larger thesis to advance, concerning liberal imperialism’s extraordinary resilience. The test of that thesis must be its ability to explain not only how the Empire endured but also how it ended. And it’s here that Elkins’s account runs into trouble. Written in 1899, Charles Dilke was a radical imperialist who thought that The British Empire was a force for good per se, but that within that empire, it should be a progressive agent of change to benefit the subject peoples. This book’s slimness is deceptive, because its thesis is huge and painfully compelling. In a travel diary of a journey through the Sahara by bus, the Swedish author reflects on the Joseph Conrad quote he uses as the title. “The Germans have been made sole scapegoats of [ideas of] extermination that are actually a common European heritage,” he argues, and suggests that all westerners, not just Hitler, “were soaked in the conviction that imperialism was a biologically necessary process, which, according to the laws of nature, leads to the inevitable destruction of the lower races.” Pax Britannica is actually a collection of three books charting the history of most of the British Imperial experience. The first book in the trilogy is entitled Heaven’s Command and charts the rise of the Victorian Empire. It documents the bravado, confidence, absent mindedness and cunning that led to the creation of the largest empire the world has ever seen. The second book is entitled Pax Britannica and is intended as a snapshot of the Imperial world at the apogee of its power in 1897. This is the year in which Queen Victoria held her Diamond Jubilee in truly imperial pomp and ceremony. The Final book is entitled Farewell the Trumpets and documents the final retreat from the great adventure.

Elkins, who was allowed access to these archives, knew her work on the Kenyan insurrection “was part of a much bigger story,” one about England’s broader use of “legalized lawlessness” to justify violent suppression of colonized populations across its vast empire and later to destroy or obscure the evidence. What lingering effects, Elkins wondered, did these tactics have on today’s world? Put another way, what is the British Empire’s legacy of violence?But before that could happen, Elkins said, bright light needed to be trained on the gauzy narrative of the success surrounding the Empire’s civilizing mission. “I’m trying to challenge these recent historiographical and particularly political defenses of British exceptionalism,” she said, “to puncture the myths of paternalism and progress and demonstrate liberalism’s perfidiousness across the Empire and at home.” Authors who argue that the First Empire of the 16th to 18th Century was distinctive from the Second Empire of the 19th and 20th Centuries

These points often rely on a naive distinction between purportedly high-minded policymakers in Whitehall and the assorted settlers, adventurers and soldiers who (to take one example) shot people in India from cannons to discourage rebellion. To those on the receiving end of such brutality, it mattered little that some board of inquiry in London might later tut-tut—as happened in the case of the Amritsar massacre of 1919 (pictured), in which 379 peaceful Indians were killed by a trigger-happy British unit and hundreds more were wounded. The aftermath of empire has rightly spawned a huge literature, and I found it excruciating to choose just 10. This author has taken the bully from Tom Brown's Schooldays and allowed him to mature into a cad and bounder who has adventures all over the Victorian Empire and beyond. PAY UP FOR THE BRITISH GULAG IN KENYA,” one sign read. It was 2011, and four elderly Kikuyu — once Kenya’s largest ethnic group — stood in a cold, April sun beneath the soaring arches of London’s Royal Courts of Justice. The four were seeking the right to sue the British government over torture they had suffered during the Mau Mau revolt against colonial rule. The group was quiet, but their signs were loud: “JUSTICE NOW FOR THE MAU MAU VICTIMS OF TORTURE!” This is one of his best. Crisply plotted across continents and never losing tight control of a complex story which repeatedly switches between the intimacies of love and the global politics of corporate power – in this case, international big pharma and its dastard deeds. As relevant as ever.The empire was not established, as some of the old histories liked to suggest, in virgin territory. Far from it. In some places that the British seized, they encountered resistance from local people who had lived there for centuries or, in some cases, since time began. In other regions, notably at the end of the 18th century, lands were wrenched out of the hands of other competing colonial powers that had already begun their self-imposed task of settlement. The British, as a result, were often involved in a three-sided contest. Battles for imperial survival had to be fought both with the native inhabitants and with already existing settlers – usually of French or Dutch origin. The opening volume of Morris’s “Pax Britannica Trilogy,” this richly detailed work traces the rise of the British Empire, from the accession of Queen Victoria to the throne in 1837 to the celebration of her Diamond Jubilee in 1897. An ex- and an unconventional soldier who was fascinated by the decline of the upper and officer class at the tail end of empire.