Putting it in perspective

Some of us can remember the old pull-down World maps at the front of our classrooms, maps on which half the countries were colored pink.  Those pink lands made up the British Empire.

Empires aren't fashionable these days -- except, perhaps, with neo-cons like Dick Cheney -- but the British Empire has receded far enough into history to exert a nostalgic pull on our affections.  We think of explorers (like Dr. Livingston) opening up new areas in Africa and Asia.  We visualize military officers crisply dressed in red-coated uniforms, pioneer families in Canada and Australia, the invincible British fleet, Indian "durbars" presided over by Viceroys -- and, more generally, the entire Victorian aristocratic backdrop of boys' schools, overstuffed furniture, leather books, long letters home from the colonies, and London itself as the center of civilization.

My mind wanders thusly because I have just finished reading Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain, a new book by Oxford historian John Darwin.   In one readable volume, Dawson tells us all we ever thought we wanted to know about the British Empire -- but it's also made me want to learn even more.

As an American schoolboy, I was taught a specific point of view with respect to what we call the American Revolution.  Indoctrination in a national religion, I suppose.  Even in college, when I took a course analyzing the events leading up to 1776 from a nationally known expert in the field, the facts were studied in far greater detail, but their worldwide context was not notably broadened.  In all my course work, at whatever level, it was assumed that American Independence was a central event in world history. 

Professor Darwin's history is taught from a Briton's point of view.  It is not obviously biased, anymore than my college course was obvously biased.  But from Britain's viewpoint, the battle against the American colonists was merely one aspect of a dangerous period in British history.  After Britain's unexpected territorial gains at the Peace of Paris (1763), ending the Seven Years War with France, Spain, and Austria (which we parochially describe as the "French and Indian War"), she found herself overextended overseas, and faced with potentially dangerous forces on the European continent.  Desperate for money, Britain imposed the notorious Stamp Tax on the American colonies, forcing us to help pay for the British troops that had protected us against the French -- a tax that led to the Declaration of Independence.

While trying to reimpose order in the colonies by blockading its shipping, the British faced a renewed threat from France, Spain, and Holland.  These nations were joined by Russia in 1780, thus including virtually all of Europe in a demand that the British blockade against the colonies not affect neutral shipping. Britain's navy was greatly outnumbered by those of the allied nations, and the British Isles themselves were threatened.

[I]n 1782, [Britain] regained control of the Atlantic.  But for the American war, it was too little too late.  In the critical phase when its Atlantic lifeline was cut, Cornwallis's army, their main American strike-force, was squeezed into surrender at Yorktown [1781].  With no will to go on, the British went to the conference table desperate to break up the coalition against them.  Conceding American independence was the only sure way to end the colonies' alliance with France -- the worst of all worlds -- and preserve their commercial connection with Britain.

My American education never suppressed knowledge of the historical context in which independence occurred.  But we were taught history as perceived by our forebears living in Massachusetts and Virginia, for whom the European balance of power was of merely incidental interest -- not history as it might have been perceived by an interested Martian hovering overhead.  Darwin is no Martian, but his perception as an historian whose fascination lies with the development of the entire British Empire adds the necessary context.  From Britain's point of view, London had bent over backwards trying to placate the American colonists, at least insofar as possible without surrendering whatever advantage was derived from the colonies' status as imperial possessions.

The American war is but a minor theme in Dawson's story, a prelude to the later development of what now usually comes to mind when we hear the term, "British Empire" -- an amazing story of commercial and military success for which Britain's victories at Trafalgar (1805) and Waterloo (1815) were the necessary but not sufficient conditions.  But lessons learned in dealing with the American colonies affected Britain's policies in dealing with future colonies, especially those that Dawson calls "settler societies" -- Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa.  And the chapters dealing with India -- the jewel in the Crown -- could be read alone as a fascinating cautionary tale, a mixture of avarice and nobility, cruelty and compassion, recklessness and caution.

How the Empire developed after 1815 -- primarily as a means to protect  British commercial investment and exploitation -- and how a small island parlayed an early industrial revolution, supported by large domestic reserves of coal, into one of the largest and most successful empires, commerical, financial and governmental, the world has ever seen, is the primary story of Dawson's book.  As is the sobering -- to us on this side of the pond -- coda illustrating how Britain fell from world domination within not much more than a generation.

As an American, I like to recall the fable of the blind pygmies trying to understand their first encounter with an elephant.  Our history classes, perhaps, have taught us to inspect carefully the elephant's leg and conclude that an elephant is a form of hairy-barked tree.  Dawson's book shows us the entire beast.