Piers brendon the decline and fall of the br 997 (v5 0)

CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 The World Turned Upside Down
The American Revolution and the Slave Trade
2 An English Barrack in the Oriental Seas
Britannia’s Indian Empire
3 Exempt from the Disaster of Caste
Australia, Canada and New Zealand
4 To Stop Is Dangerous, to Recede, Ruin
The Far East and Afghanistan
5 Sacred Wrath
Irish Famine and Indian Mutiny
6 Spread the Peaceful Gospel—with the Maxim Gun
Towards Conquest in Africa
7 A Magnificent Empire Under the British Flag
Cape to Cairo
8 Barbarians Thundering at the Frontiers
The Boer War and the Indian Raj
9 The Empire, Right or Wrong
Flanders, Iraq, Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge
10 Aflame with the Hope of Liberation
Ireland and the Middle East
11 Englishmen Like Posing as Gods
West and East
12 White Mates Black in a Very Few Moves

Kenya and the Sudan
13 Spinning the Destiny of India
The Route to Independence
14 That Is the End of the British Empire


Singapore and Burma
15 The Aim of Labour Is to Save the Empire
Ceylon and Malaya
16 A Golden Bowl Full of Scorpions
The Holy Land
17 The Destruction of National Will
Suez Invasion and Aden Evacuation
18 Renascent Africa
The Gold Coast and Nigeria
19 Uhuru—Freedom
Kenya and the Mau Mau
20 Kith and Kin
Rhodesia and the Central African Federation
21 Rocks and Islands
The West Indies and Cyprus
22 All Our Pomp of Yesterday
The Falklands and Hong Kong
Abbreviations
Notes
Sources
A Note About the Author
Also by Piers Brendon
Copyright

To
Vyvyen
With love and thanks


ILLUSTRATIONS
Section One
1 Missionary with Tahitian converts (Corbis); 2 Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion (Wilberforce
House, Hull City Museums and Art Galleries/Bridgeman Art Library); 3 Imperial interior, 1890
(Getty); 4 Lord and Lady Curzon hunt in Hyderabad, 1902 (AKG-London); 5 Hyderabad’s army polo
team (Corbis); 6 Sir James Grigg enters Simla, 1938 (Corbis); 7 Hong Kong Harbour seen from
Victoria Park (John Hillelson Collection); 8 The CPR’s Iron Horse (Vancouver Public Library,
Special Collections); 9 Indian Railway engraving by Indian School (Private Collection/Bridgeman);
10 Teatime in Ceylon (Corbis); 11 Ceylon tea harvest (Corbis); 12 King Thibaw and Queen
Supayalat of Burma (Corbis); 13 Christmas day in Burma, 1885 (Corbis); 14 Scottish troops beside
the Sphinx, 1882 (Corbis); 15 Tourists on the Great Pyramid, 1938 (Corbis); 16 Imperial stamps
(Private Collection)

Section Two
17 Sikh officers and men, 1858 (National Army Museum, London/Bridgeman); 18 Lucknow after the
Mutiny (Corbis); 19 British camp in Afghanistan (Corbis); 20 Afghan riflemen on the Khyber Pass
(Corbis); 21 Irish peasants in the 1880s (Corbis); 22 Dublin’s General Post Office after the Easter
Rising (Corbis); 23 The Rhodes Colossus (Getty); 24 Isandhlwana after the battle, 1879 (National
Army Museum/Bridgeman); 25 Gold miners in De Kaap, South Africa (Corbis); 26 Boers at Spion
Kop, 1900 (Corbis); 27 A meal during the siege of Ladysmith (Popperfoto); 28 Anzac Cove,
Gallipoli, 1915 (Corbis); 29 Indian military hospital, Brighton Pavilion (Corbis); 30 The Japanese
march on Rangoon, 1942 (Corbis); 31 Nigerian sergeant in Burma, 1944 (Imperial War Museum,
London, neg. no. IND3098); 32 Trade follows the flag, ephemera (Robert Opie Collection)

Section Three
33 The Imperial appeal, ephemera (Robert Opie Collection); 34 Gandhi’s Salt March, 1930 (Corbis);
35 Nehru and Jinnah, 1946 (Corbis); 36 The last Viceroy and Vicereine of India (Corbis); 37 The
refugees of Partition, 1947 (Corbis); 38 Jewish refugees arrive at Haifa, 1946 (Corbis); 39 The
exodus of Palestinian refugees to Gaza (Corbis); 40 British troops confront Cypriots, Nicosia, 1955
(Corbis); 41 The troopship Empire Ken at Port Said, November 1956 (Getty); 42 Detaining Mau Mau
suspects in Kenya, 1952 (Corbis); 43 Jomo Kenyatta is hailed as Prime Minister, 1963 (Corbis); 44
Queen Elizabeth II on her tour of Nigeria, 1956 (Corbis); 45 Kwame Nkrumah leads Ghana to
Independence, 1957 (Corbis); 46 The Union Jack is lowered in Hong Kong, 1997 (Onasia)

Front endpaper
Imperial Federation map of the world showing the extent of the British Empire in 1886 © Royal
Geographical Society, London

Back endpaper
World map showing shipping routes and the extent of the British Empire in 1927 © Royal


Geographical Society, London


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book ranges across five continents and more than two centuries, so the debts I have incurred
during the six years it took to write are correspondingly extensive.
I must first thank friends and colleagues at Churchill College, Cambridge, who have helped me in
countless ways. I am especially grateful to Allen Packwood, Director of the Churchill Archives
Centre, and to past and present members of his outstanding team, notably Natalie Adams, Louise
King, Andrew Riley and Katharine Thomson. Dr. Dick Whittaker provided me with indispensable
guidance on the Roman Empire. Hywel George gave me a unique insight into the workings of the
post-war British Empire. Dr. Alan and Judy Findlay arranged an illuminating tour of the Foreign and

Commonwealth Office, courtesy of their son Matthew. Lady Julia Boyd recalled experiencing the end
of the British Empire in person: after the handover in Hong Kong on 30 June 1997, she witnessed the
royal yacht Britannia, with the last Governor, the Prince of Wales and other dignitaries on board,
sailing into the darkness on her final voyage.
Most of my work was done at the Cambridge University Library, an incomparable resource for the
historian, and I owe thanks especially to Rachel Rowe, Godfrey Waller and Peter Meadows, the
Bible Society Librarian. Elsewhere librarians and archivists went out of their way to lighten my task.
I am under particular obligation to Dr. Gareth Griffith, Director of the British Empire and
Commonwealth Museum, who put a room at my disposal in Bristol, where I was also able to draw on
the expertise of Jo Duffy. Roderick Suddaby gave assistance at the Imperial War Museum. So did
Kevin Greenbank at the Cambridge Centre for South Asian Studies. Further afield, Dr. Saroja
Wettasinghe, Director of the National Archives of Sri Lanka, eased my path into her collections.
Suzanne Mallon took immense trouble to introduce me to manuscript material at the Mitchell Library
in Sydney.
In the course of my research I visited a number of ex-colonial clubs—the Tollygunge in Calcutta,
the Bangalore Club, the Hong Kong Club and so on—where I was most courteously received. I am
particularly grateful to Allan Oakley, Secretary of the High Range Club at Munnar in Kerala, and to
Stanley Gooneratne, Secretary of the Hill Club in Nuwara Eliya, who was kind enough to open his
records for me.
I have benefited from the aid and counsel of many individuals, among them Dan Burt, Professor
Martin Daunton, Dr. Richard Duncan-Jones, Bill Kirkman, Gamini Mendis, Professor James Muller,
Manus Nunan, Anthony Pemberton, Harold Rosenbaum, and Dr. Calder Walton. Sir Christopher Hum
generously shared his diplomatic memories of the Sino-British negotiations over Hong Kong. Sydney
Bolt reminisced with characteristic wit about Britain’s war-time Raj in India as well as commenting
on parts of my typescript. Michael Murphy performed the same office for my Irish sections,
decorating the text with sprightly marginalia. Rex Bloomstein devoted time he could ill afford to
perusing my chapter on Palestine. Richard Ingrams not only unearthed a fascinating vignette of
colonial Cyprus penned by Paul Foot soon after he left the school where we all three served time, but
he also sent me relevant books to review for The Oldie. So, with his unerring literary eye, did Jeremy
Lewis. Other friends contributed in different ways: Professor Christopher Andrew, my late and muchlamented literary agent Andrew Best, Professor Vic and Pam Gatrell, Tim Jeal, Sharon Maurice,

Professor Richard Overy and John Tyler. Professor James Mayall allowed me to pick his brains over
long lunches.
I also enjoyed imperial lunches with Dr. Ronald Hyam, the leading British authority on the end of
Empire, to whom I owe more than I can say. He supervised me when I was an undergraduate at
Magdalene College, advised me subsequently and, despite seeing his own book through the press,
scrutinised every word of mine. His criticisms, corrections and suggestions were of inestimable
value. Needless to say, despite all this extraneous help, I alone bear the responsibility for any
mistakes that remain.
I acknowledge permission to quote copyright material from manuscript sources identified at the end
of this book. My thanks are especially due to the Syndics of Cambridge University Library, to
Matheson & Co. Ltd., to Curtis Brown Ltd., London, on behalf of the Estate of Sir Winston Churchill
(copyright Winston S. Churchill), and to the Master and Fellows of Churchill College, Cambridge.
Future editions will be corrected if any copyright has been inadvertently unacknowledged.
As ever, I am grateful to my publisher Dan Franklin, who commissioned this book, waited for it
with exemplary patience and welcomed it with heart-warming enthusiasm. He provided a team that
made the publication process both smooth and agreeable. It consisted of Ellah Allfrey, an
accomplished editor; Richard Collins, a meticulous copy editor; Lily Richards, an imaginative and
indefatigable picture researcher; and Anna Crone, who did a splendid job designing the cover of the
British edition. I have equal cause for gratitude to the superlative team at Knopf, who masterminded
the American edition: my editor Andrew Miller, his assistant Sara Sherbill, the jacket designer
Megan Wilson, and the production editor Kevin Bourke.
Two other people played key roles in the enterprise. My friend, former publisher and literary guru,
Tom Rosenthal, gave me constant encouragement and moral support. Despite being preoccupied with
her own book, Children of the Raj, my wife Vyvyen devoted endless attention to mine, acting more as
collaborator than assistant. She was vital to the genesis of this volume and, with love and gratitude, I
dedicate it to her.

INTRODUCTION
The title of this book, with its echoes of The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire,
needs an explanation—if not an apology. It was chosen not because I am setting up as a rival to
Edward Gibbon but because his work has a profound and hitherto unexplored relevance to my
subject. No historian in his senses would invite comparison with Gibbon. His masterpiece, sustained
by a prodigious intellect and an incomparable style, has no competitors. It filled the imagination of
readers for two centuries and it performed a unique function as a towering piece of literary
architecture. As Carlyle and others have observed, the book acts as a kind of bridge between the
ancient and modern worlds, and “how gorgeously does it swing across the gloomy and multitudinous
chasm of those barbarous centuries.”1 It satisfied a general desire, as its author said in his
autobiography, to increase the scope of human comprehension. Our lives are short. So we
stretch forwards beyond death with such hopes as Religion and Philosophy will suggest, and we
fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves with the authors of our
existence. We seem to have lived in the persons of our forefathers.2
However, Gibbon’s work exercised a peculiar fascination on his compatriots. If everyone looks back
to seek a way forward, the British looked back especially to Rome. Their rulers were educated in the
classics. Many of their elite had toured the scenes of antiquity. They lived in the light of the
Renaissance. Steeped in Gibbon’s tremendous drama (but ignoring his admonition about the danger of
comparing epochs remote from one another), they perceived striking analogies between the two
powers that dominated their respective worlds. The Decline and Fall became the essential guide for
Britons anxious to plot their own imperial trajectory. They found the key to understanding the British
Empire in the ruins of Rome.
Thus part of my purpose in this book is to assess the implications of that colossal wreck. It was
construed in countless ways. British imperialists exhumed a huge miscellany of signs and portents
from layer upon layer of archaeological remains. The Eternal City was a universal city, cosmic in
amplitude and Delphic in utterance. It embraced a galaxy of worlds, some contrasting, others
coinciding. There was republican Rome, pure, virtuous, heroic, the matrix of Macaulay’s Horatius
and Kipling’s Regulus. Allied to it was the Stoic Rome of noble Brutus and righteous Marcus
Aurelius, whose Meditations accompanied Cecil Rhodes on his treks across the veldt. Then there
was imperial Rome, an armed despotism bent on conquest and eventually used to justify the

“authoritarian politics”3 of imperial Britain—Thomas De Quincey praised virile Caesar for
deflowering Roman liberty. There was the Rome of the Antonines, who presided over a golden age of
civilisation and whose Pax Romana plainly anticipated the Pax Britannica. There was pagan Rome,
whose muses shed immortal lustre over the culture of the West. There was Catholic Rome, which
Gibbon pilloried for combining superstition, fanaticism and corruption. He also confirmed some of
the prejudices of Britain’s Protestant Empire, remarking that the rapist Pope John XII deterred
“female pilgrims from visiting the tomb of St. Peter, lest, in the devout act, they should be violated by
his successor.” 4 There was monumental Rome, imitated wherever British imperialists wished to


enshrine power in stone. Finally, though this by no means exhausts the catalogue, there was decadent
Rome. While aesthetes such as Swinburne and Wilde might celebrate its romantic degeneracy, stern
custodians of Greater Britain, whose goal was “a physically A1 nation,” 5 saw it as an augury of
racial deterioration and imperial decay.
Sigmund Freud was so impressed by all these separate but overlapping identities that he visualised
Rome as a model of the mind. He imagined a city where everything was preserved, like thoughts in
the unconscious, and new structures coexisted with old.
In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo
having been removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as
the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms
and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes. Where the Coliseum now stands we could at the
same time admire Nero’s vanished Golden House. On the piazza of the Pantheon we should not
only find the Pantheon of to-day, as it was bequeathed to us by Hadrian, but, on the same site, the
original edifice erected by Agrippa; indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the
Church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built.6
Freud checked himself, saying that he could not properly represent mental life in pictorial terms. Yet
his vision of Rome as a psychic entity is marvellously suggestive. It points to the way in which the
Roman past infuses the present and it shows how this multiple metropolis can be all things to all men.
Rome was a vast palimpsest of human experience, barely legible, hard to decipher, inveterately
oracular. The ambiguity of its messages was a positive advantage to those who were chiefly

interested in the lessons that they could adduce from history. Needless to say, Britons were not alone
in validating their national mythology by reference to Rome. Tsar (the Russian form of Caesar) Ivan
the Great claimed Moscow as the Third Rome. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor with a laurel
wreath of gold in a ceremony based on the coronation of Charlemagne—it included the attendance of
twelve virgin maids, not easy to find in post-revolutionary Paris. Both Hitler and Mussolini drew on
the Roman model, the Nazis claiming that England was “the modern Carthage.”7 Yet it was the
British, masters of an Empire far larger than Trajan’s, who seemed to have the best claim to be the
“spiritual heirs of Rome.”8
They constantly identified themselves with their imperial precursors. J. A. Froude opened his
biography of Julius Caesar with the statement that “the English and the Romans essentially resemble
one another.” 9 Lord Bryce said that the men who won the Roman Empire and the British Raj
“triumphed through force of character.” 10 In his comparative study of Greater Rome and Greater
Britain, Sir Charles Lucas asserted that both peoples possessed “an innate capacity for ruling.”11
Such avowals were usually made to boost the confidence of British imperialists. Indeed, the modern
Empire was most often depicted as an advance on the ancient, especially in matters of liberty, probity
and science—Gibbon mocked the Emperor Heliogabalus’s attempt to discover the number of the
inhabitants of Rome from “the quantity of spiders’ webs.” 12 Yet, as appears below, the contrasts
were not all in Britain’s favour. Lord Cromer acknowledged that Rome, whose rulers frequently
came from provinces outside Italy, was far more advanced than any current power in assimilating
subject peoples. Despite endorsing the kind of racial discrimination that was deeply corrosive to the


British Empire, he went so far as to admit that his countrymen were “somewhat unduly exclusive.”13
Rome warned as well as taught. Indian civil servants nervous about the North-West Frontier
discussed the lessons of Roman provincial policy with W. D. Arnold, an Oxford don “haunted lest the
tragedy of the Roman Empire, whose extremities grew at the expense of its heart, should repeat
itself.”14 In an article about Roman ruins, a Victorian contributor to the Edinburgh Review tried to
imagine “how much of the topography of London will be recovered from the fragments of our own
literature which may be in existence a thousand years hence.”15
To avert the decline and fall of their own Empire some Britons contemplated inveigling the United

States into an Anglo-Saxon federation. John West, the mordant historian of Tasmania, even proposed
for membership the European ghost of Rome. “The American and British empires are seated on all
waters,” he wrote in 1852. “The lands conquered by Caesar, those discovered by Columbus, and
those explored by Cook, are now joined together in one destiny.” 16 Together they could dominate the
world. But Gibbon, though he could be interpreted optimistically, suggested a less auspicious fate.
When his first volume appeared (in 1776) the American colonies were already in revolt and the
British Empire was suffering from some of the ills that destroyed the Roman Empire, notably luxury,
corruption and overextension. Despite its revival and expansion over the next 150 years, Britons
continued to find in Gibbon (whose Byzantine conclusion covered a millennium) intimations of their
own imperial doom. After it was accomplished, classical echoes were sometimes still heard. When
Harold Macmillan visited India in 1958 his fellow student of Gibbon, Prime Minister Nehru, said to
him: “I wonder if the Romans ever went back to visit Britain.”17 Such reflections, which appear in
protean form throughout this book, provide a counterpoint to its central theme—the decline and fall of
the British Empire between 1781 and 1997.

Despite Gibbon’s long goodbye to the Roman Empire, it may seem paradoxical, even perverse, to
trace the collapse of the British Empire back to the revolt of the thirteen colonies. True, Washington’s
victory at Yorktown was a signal calamity for the mother country, foreshadowing future setbacks and
anticipating the rise of an almighty American empire. But Britain’s recovery was dramatic and its
sustained triumph in the East evidently compensated for the debacle in the West. And there is no
denying the spectacular growth of the Empire, which expanded willy-nilly throughout the Victorian
age and reached its territorial apogee between the two world wars. Nevertheless, as Fernand Braudel
says, the rise and fall of great powers can only be understood over an immense timescale. Without
succumbing to the teleological fallacy and reading their subject backwards, historians have already
detected mortal stresses inside the British Empire as early as the 1820s. Yet the evidence suggests—
and the American rebels proved—that it was physically weak from the start. Furthermore, the Empire
carried within it from birth an ideological bacillus that would prove fatal. This was Edmund Burke’s
paternalistic doctrine that colonial government was a trust. It was to be so exercised for the benefit of
subject people that they would eventually attain their birthright—freedom.
The British Empire had a small human and geographical base, remote from its overseas

possessions. In the late eighteenth century it gained fortuitous industrial, commercial and naval
advantages that rivals were bound to erode. Having such a limited capacity to coerce, it sought
accord and found local collaborators. But imperial domination, by its very nature, sapped their
loyalty. Gibbon made the point with the first sentence he ever published, in his Essay on the Study of


Literature, whereby, as he put it, he lost his “literary maidenhead.” 18 “The history of empires,” he
wrote, “is the history of human misery.” This is because the initial subjugation is invariably savage
and the subsequent occupation is usually repressive. Imperial powers lack legitimacy and govern
irresponsibly, relying on arms, diplomacy and propaganda. But no vindication can eradicate the
instinctive hostility to alien control. Gibbon, himself wedded to liberty, went to the heart of the
matter: “A more unjust and absurd constitution cannot be devised than that which condemns the
natives of a country to perpetual servitude, under the arbitrary dominion of strangers.”19 Resistance to
such dominion provoked vicious reprisals, such as the British inflicted after the Indian Mutiny, thus
embedding ineradicable antagonism. Yet Britain’s Empire, much better than any other, as even
George Orwell acknowledged, was a liberal empire. Its functionaries claimed that a commitment to
freedom was fundamental to their civilising mission. In this respect, Lloyd George told the Imperial
Conference in 1921, their Empire was unique: “Liberty is its binding principle.”20 To people under
the imperial yoke such affirmations must have seemed brazen instances of British hypocrisy. But this
was, at least, the tribute that vice pays to virtue. And in the twentieth century, facing adverse
circumstances almost everywhere, the British grudgingly put their principles into practice. They
fulfilled their duty as trustees, giving their brown and black colonies the independence (mostly within
the Commonwealth) long enjoyed by the white dominions. The British Empire thus realised its longcherished ideal of becoming what The Times called in 1942 “a self-liquidating concern.”21
Long before this Victorians had hoped that “some future Gibbon” would write “the history of the
British Empire.”22 Failing that, modern historians may at least draw inspiration from his achievement
and instruction from his method. Gibbon teaches, first of all, that chronology is the logic of history.
This is not to say that he felt anything but contempt for mere chroniclers. He did, though, favour a
narrative that relies on “the order of time, that infallible touchstone of truth.”23 Then, he is a model of
irony and scepticism. Gibbon shunned universal systems. He regarded philosophical history much as
he regarded rational theology, “a strange centaur!”24 He offered lofty moral and political explanations

for the disintegration of the Roman Empire, not all of them consistent. But his abstractions, including
the abstract quality of his prose, reflected a sublime understanding of the concrete. Gibbon’s great
tapestry is distinguished by its threads. It is a theatrical representation of the past, full of character
and action, both tragic and comic, set against a richly embroidered background. But the daemon was
in the detail. Where Voltaire damned details as the vermin that kill masterpieces, Gibbon saw the
universe in a grain of sand and captured the macrocosm in the microcosm. His history is a
constellation of brilliant particulars. Often they complicated his story but he criticised simple-minded
historians “who in avoiding details have avoided difficulties.”25 Walter Bagehot joked that Gibbon
could never write about Asia Minor because he always wrote in a major key. On the contrary, he
rejoiced in minutiae and advocated the preservation of trivia. The Decline and Fall includes
recondite information about everything from silk to marble, from canals to windmills, from Russian
sturgeon to Bologna sausage, “said to be made of ass flesh.”26 Above all, it captures the spirit of
places, notably Rome in its state of eloquent ruin, through sharp circumstantial description. Thus
Gibbon vividly conveys the colour, tone and texture of human life during the long span of years he
covers.
This is my aim, for a shorter period, in the following pages. I endeavour to give the big picture
vitality through abundance of detail, telling the imperial story in terms of people, places and events;
through brief lives, significant vistas and key episodes. My stage is thronged with the British


dramatis personae of the Empire, from the Iron Duke to the Iron Lady. There are politicians,
proconsuls, officials, soldiers, traders, writers, explorers, adventurers, entrepreneurs, prospectors,
missionaries, heroes and villains. But the cast list is not exhausted by the likes of Palmerston,
Salisbury, Joseph Chamberlain, Churchill, Curzon, Kitchener, T. E. Lawrence, Livingstone and
Rhodes. For the Empire is seen from the viewpoint of colonies as well as colonialists. So suitable
parts are allotted to statesmen from the dominions (such as Laurier and Hughes), Irish leaders (such
as Parnell and de Valera), white minority Prime Ministers (such as Welensky and Ian Smith), and a
host of indigenous nationalists, among them Kruger, Zaghlul, Nasser, Gandhi, Nehru, Jinnah,
Bandaranaike, Ba Maw, Aung San, Tunku Abdul Rahman, Makarios, Nkrumah, Azikiwe, Kenyatta
and Mugabe. The characters appear against the backcloth of their circumstances, small as well as

great. I trace the warp and weft of imperial existence. And some strands come under particularly
close scrutiny: the food and drink empire-builders consumed, the clothes they wore, the homes they
built, the clubs they joined, the struggles they endured, the loot they acquired, the jubilees, durbars
and exhibitions they attended. Also observed are their trimmed moustaches and clipped foreskins,
their addiction to games and work, their low-brow ideas and high-minded attitudes, their curious
blend of honesty and hypocrisy, their preoccupation with protocol and prestige, their racial
prejudices and the extent to which they lived in symbiosis with their charges.
Imperial settings provide a crucial dimension to this book. It surveys the vegetable Eden of the
West Indies, horribly scarred by slavery. It inspects the pristine, topsy-turvy world of Australia and
the idyllic wilderness of New Zealand, apparently a once and future Britain in the southern
hemisphere. It visits the jungles of Asia and Africa, which became a breathing presence in so much
imperial life and literature. It gauges the impact of nature on man and vice versa. And it considers
especially the collision between topography and technology: the passage of steam-driven, screwpowered, iron leviathans through the Suez Canal; the railroad, stretching across prairies, mountains,
forests and plains, that bound together land masses the size of Canada and India; the Maxim gun by
which “civilisation” subdued “savagery.” The book also explores imperial cities—London, Dublin,
Jerusalem, Ottawa, Kingston, Lagos, Nairobi, Cairo, Delhi, Rangoon, Singapore and Hong Kong. It
contrasts white palaces and coloured slums. It decodes the messages conveyed by imperial
architecture. These were often mixed. Government House in Melbourne was modelled on Osborne,
Queen Victoria’s Italianate mansion on the Isle of Wight, whereas Government House in Poona was
apparently “a blend of the Renaissance, the Romanesque and the Hindu styles.”27 Lutyens’s New
Delhi, though, resembled Rome as an unmistakable symbol of might—completed, ironically, just as
the Raj entered its terminal stage of decay. Here and elsewhere I dwell on statues, memorials and
edifices of all kinds, relics of the past and ruins of the future.
Against this background unfolds a narrative that bridges the gulf between the foundation of the
American republic and its emergence as the sole superpower—a situation from which some now
descry its own decline. The presence of the United States is ubiquitous, though it is sometimes
unspoken. Indeed, I lack the space, not to mention the knowledge, to treat all aspects of the history of
the British Empire. Like Gibbon, I have had to represent some happenings with others. The
development of the dominions, for example, is only a sketch, not least because they attained virtual
independence so early and so easily. The text is lightly burdened with economics. The characters are,

alas, predominantly male. Little is said about the colonial masses, who feature in what are now oddly
called “subaltern studies.” Little is said, too, about the “official mind” of the Empire as it functioned
in Whitehall. Clerks talked to other clerks interminably and often contradictorily; and in any case


their latter-day deliberations are comprehensively embodied in the many volumes of the
indispensable British Documents on the End of Empire Project. I rely mainly on printed sources
and, although most chapters are fleshed out with manuscript material, I could only sample the archival
wealth available. Other omissions are not hard to detect.
Naturally I hope that the book will be judged by the story it does tell. This story contains many
exciting episodes, though less emphasis is placed here on triumphs than on the disasters that
undermined the fabric of the Empire. Among the topics covered are the slave trade, the Opium Wars,
the Indian Mutiny, the Irish Famine, the Boer War, Gallipoli and Vimy Ridge, defeat in the Far East,
the struggles for Irish and Indian independence, the morass in the Middle East, the Palestine
imbroglio, the retreat from Suez, the Mau Mau uprising, the flight from Africa, and the imperial
epilogue in the Falklands and Hong Kong. The deeds that won the Empire, and even those that lost it,
were sometimes valiant. But I do not shrink from also dealing with the seamy side of the enterprise,
especially as it is apt to be played down in the unhealthy neo-imperialist climate of today. Just as the
collapse of Rome has a perennial relevance, so too has the decline and fall of (to employ the
inescapable cliché) the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. In this book, above all, I try to
convey the full fascination of that momentous saga.
Piers Brendon
Cambridge


1
The World Turned Upside Down
The American Revolution and the Slave Trade
At about ten o’clock in the bright morning of 17 October 1781, a lone drummer boy dressed in shabby
bearskin and red coat scrambled on to the ruined earthworks outside Yorktown and beat for a parley.

From their trenches, which encircled the little tobacco port like a noose, George Washington’s forces
could see him through the smoke of battle. But they could not hear him because of the thunder of their
hundred guns. Firing incessantly were 24-pound siege pieces which smashed the fortifications, 8-inch
howitzers which dismembered their defenders, lighter cannon whose balls splintered the clapboard
houses along the bluff overlooking Chesapeake Bay and sometimes skipped over the water like flat
stones, and heavy French mortars whose 200-pound projectiles—black bombshells clearly visible in
daylight, blazing meteors after dark—made the whole peninsula shake. Then, behind the boy, a British
officer appeared, waving a white handkerchief. He bore a message from Lord Cornwallis, whose
battered army had no means of escape, proposing to end the bloodshed. The barrage ceased, the
emissary was blindfolded and the terms of the British surrender were negotiated. Washington,
unbending in his role as the noblest republican of them all, administered a severe blow to imperial
pride. Cornwallis’s 7,200 troops were to become prisoners of war. They were to march, flags furled,
between the ranks of their foes drawn up along the road from Yorktown, which passed through fields
white with ripe cotton bolls, and lay down their arms.
It was a “humiliating scene,”1 watched in dead silence by the Americans, clad in ragged homespun,
some “almost barefoot,”2 and their French allies, plumed and often mustachioed, immaculate in white
uniforms and black gaiters, their pastel silk banners decorated with silver fleurs-de-lis. King George
III’s German mercenaries marched past steadily but the British “lobsters” 3 (as the Americans called
them) were less dignified. Some were the worse for rum—the largest single item of expenditure
borne by the British Army during the war. Others were disdainful, others defiant. A few flung down
their heavy, smooth-bored Brown Bess muskets as though to smash them. Lieutenant-Colonel
Abercromby, who had led the only serious sortie from Yorktown, chewed his sword in impotent rage.
According to an American witness, the British officers behaved like whipped schoolboys. “Some bit
their lips, some pouted, others cried,”4 hiding such emotions beneath their round, broad-brimmed
hats. Cornwallis himself remained in Yorktown, pleading indisposition but perhaps unable to face the
triumph of revolution. Meanwhile, the bandsmen of his captive army played a “melancholy” tune on
drums and fifes. It was the dirge of the British Empire in America, “The World Turned Upside
Down.”5
The Old World did regard the New World’s victory as an ominous inversion of the established
order. It was an unbeaten revolt of children against parental authority—the first successful rebellion

of colonial subjects against sovereign power in modern history. How could a rabble of farmers in
thirteen poor appendages, with a population of only 2.5 million, defeat the trained might of the mother
country? Americans were divided among themselves and thinly spread along an underdeveloped
eastern seaboard which shaded gradually into isolated pioneer settlements and virgin wilderness.


They were opposed not only by white loyalists but by black slaves and “Red Indians.” Washington’s
recruits, in a spirit of democratic “licentiousness”6 (his word), were disinclined to take orders
without discussion: as one senior officer complained, “The privates are all generals.”7 Their
auxiliaries, until the advent of the French, were wholly undisciplined. The militia consisted of
summer foot soldiers on furlough from the plough and, wrote one witness, a cavalry of round-wigged
tailors and apothecaries mounted on “bad nags” who looked “like a flock of ducks in cross-belts.”8
These were supported at times by tattooed and buckskinned frontiersmen with tomahawks in their
belts, bear grease in their hair and coonskin hats on their heads.
Yet this motley array often proved effective, particularly in guerrilla fighting. After the “shot heard
round the world”9 which had opened hostilities at Lexington in 1775, the redcoats made such a
“vigorous retreat,” quipped Benjamin Franklin, that the “feeble Americans could scarce keep up with
them.”10 On other occasions British generals proved dauntlessly incompetent. “Gentleman Johnny”
Burgoyne distinguished himself less as a professional soldier than an amateur dramatist—when his
play The Bloodbath of Boston was performed the audience at first thought that American shelling was
part of the show—and in 1777 his histrionic recklessness led to the British capitulation at Saratoga.
By contrast, George Washington, though by no means a military genius, was a great leader. Tall and
stately in his familiar buff and blue uniform, with a long pallid face dominated by a jutting nose, a
broad mouth and steely grey-blue eyes, he looked the part. And he played it with courage and
canniness. Formidably self-possessed, ruthlessly single-minded, incomparably tenacious, he made
small gains and avoided large losses, staving off defeat until he could achieve victory.
Before Yorktown, after six years of war, that outcome still appeared remote, despite the support of
Spain and Holland as well as France, which the Earl of Chatham described as a “vulture hovering
over the British Empire.”11 Redcoat bayonets dominated the battlefield and Britannia still ruled the
waves. General Clinton had an iron grip on New York. From there he wrote to Cornwallis in March

1781:
Discontent runs high in Connecticut. In short, my Lord, there seems little wanting to give a mortal
stab to Rebellion but a proper Reinforcement, and a permanent superiority at Sea for the next
Campaign without which any Enterprize depending on Water Movements must certainly run great
Risk.12
Cornwallis himself was subjugating the south. He was assisted by Colonel Banastre Tarleton, who
boasted of having “butchered more men and lain with more women than anybody”—he should have
said ravished, remarked the playwright Sheridan, since “rapes are the relaxation of murder.” 13
Washington’s forces had scarcely recovered from their winter agonies at Valley Forge and
Morristown, where, as one soldier wrote, “It has been amazing cold to such a Degree that I who
never flinched to old Boreas had t’other day one of my Ears froze as hard as a Pine gnut.”14 In the
spring of 1781 Washington wrote,
our Troops are approaching fast to nakedness and…we have nothing to cloath them with…our
hospitals are without medicines, and our Sick without Nutriment…all our public works are at a


stand…we are at the end of our tether…now or never our deliverance must come.15
It came with French men-of-war.
In August, Washington heard that Admiral de Grasse was sailing with a fleet of twenty-eight ships
of the line and bringing three thousand more regular soldiers to reinforce the five thousand
commanded by the Comte de Rochambeau. Washington seized his opportunity. In great secrecy he
disengaged from Clinton and marched his army south through New Jersey. When he heard that de
Grasse had reached Chesapeake Bay, cutting Cornwallis off from outside help, Washington
abandoned his usual reserve. He capered about on the quay at Chester, waving his hat and his
handkerchief, and embraced Rochambeau as he arrived. The young Marquis de Lafayette was even
more effusive when he met Washington at Williamsburg. He leapt off his horse, “caught the General
round his body, hugged him as close as it was possible and absolutely kissed him from ear to ear.” 16
The news was a tonic to the whole army—it even cured General Steuben’s gout. For everyone except
the British believed that Cornwallis would be “completely Burgoyned.”17 “We have got him
handsomely in a pudding bag,” wrote General Weedon. “I am all on fire. By the Great God of War, I

think we may all hand up our swords by the last of the year in perfect peace and security!”18
Washington personally ensured that his “mouse-trap” 19 snapped shut. He made meticulous
preparations, even going so far as to pay his troops (with French gold). He surveyed Yorktown’s
defences from an exposed position where “shot seemed flying almost as thick as hail.”20 With a
pickaxe he broke the ground for the opening trench and he put a match to the first gun in the
cannonade. Washington pressed forward fast, puzzled by the sluggishness of the enemy. Although
erratic, Cornwallis was an able commander. He was brave, tactically adept and adored by his men,
whose hardships he shared. But apart from shooting starving horses and expelling hungry slaves
(many of them ill with malaria, smallpox and dysentery), he took few initiatives at Yorktown. This
was because, as he told Clinton, his army could only be saved by a successful naval action. However,
de Grasse had seen off the British fleet in an indecisive battle on 5 September and Washington
persuaded him to remain on guard. By the end of the month Clinton informed Cornwallis: “I am doing
everything in my power to relieve you by a direct move and I have reason to hope from the assurance
given me this day by Admiral Graves that we may pass the Bar by the 12 October if the winds permit
and no unforeseen accident happens.”21 But the Royal Navy was in no state to break the French hold
on Chesapeake Bay.
It was ill led by Lord Sandwich, First Lord of the Admiralty, who, the philosopher David Hume
complained, spent several weeks trout-fishing at Newbury with “two or three Ladies of Pleasure…at
a time when the Fate of the British Empire is in dependance, and in dependance on him.”22 It lacked
necessities: in the West Indies Admiral “Foul-weather Jack” Byron had “a fleet to equip without
stores, to victual without provisions, to man without men.”23 It also suffered from less obvious
defects. Among them was a hidden canker caused by the new system of sheathing the bottoms of
wooden vessels in copper. This eliminated marine growth, crustacea and plants which slowed ships
down, and the teredo worm which honeycombed their oaken keels in tropical waters. However, until
a technical solution was found to the problem (as it was in time to defeat the French during the
1790s), the copper rapidly corroded underwater iron fastenings. This sometimes led to sudden
disasters: merely by firing her seventy-four guns during the action against de Grasse, the Terrible


almost shook herself to pieces and the following day she had to be scuttled. So for a time England

was evicted from “the throne of Neptune.”24
The naval situation determined both the fate of the thirteen colonies and the shape of the British
Empire. If Cornwallis had been evacuated the French and perhaps even the Americans might have
sued for peace on George III’s terms. As it was, his First Minister, Lord North, spoke for nearly
everyone in Britain, except the contumacious King himself, when he exclaimed on hearing the news of
Yorktown: “Oh God! it is all over!” He repeated the words many times, throwing his arms about and
pacing his Downing Street room “under emotions of the deepest agitation and distress.”25 In relative
terms Yorktown was a small defeat but its significance was great: it threatened to eclipse “the empire
on which the sun never set.”26 The famous phrase was apparently first coined by Sir George
Macartney in 1773 and down the years endless variations were played on it, often with gloomy
emphasis on the final stage of the solar trajectory. Lord Shelburne, long a fierce opponent of coercing
the colonies, feared that their independence would end imperial greatness and “the sun of England
might be said to have set.”27 In his first comment on Cornwallis’s debacle he adorned the image.
Shelburne told parliament that the King had “seen his empire, from a pitch of glory and splendour
perfectly astonishing and dazzling, tumbled down to disgrace and ruin which no previous history
could parallel.”28

Yet in truth the ramshackle imperial edifice had never been securely based. From the first, when the
English began haphazardly planting colonies and setting up trading posts overseas during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, the mother country’s sway had been challenged. Settlers, traders,
conquerors, dissenters, preachers, trappers, explorers, freebooters, treasure-hunters, lawbreakers and
others who ventured abroad were obviously wedded to independence. Moreover they carried its seed
with them. At least as warmly as their kith and kin at home, they cherished the ideal of “English
liberty.”29 And they cited natural law, scriptural authority, ancient precedent and modern philosophy
(notably that of James Harrington, John Locke and David Hume) in defence of their freedom. They
also worked for it, electing assemblies to control the purse strings and to rival the mother of
parliaments in London. These “little Westminsters” 30 sought to dominate colonial Governors, who
were disparaged as grasping rogues—here a “needy Court-Dangler” or “a hearty, rattling wild young
Dog of an officer,” 31 there an “excellent buffoon” or a fellow who had distinguished himself “in the
profession of pimping.”32 Bad government or no government at all—known as “salutary neglect”—

the Americans could endure. But after 1765 the conviction that they had become the victims of tyranny
overcame their instinctive feelings of loyalty to the old country and its King, dubbed by Tom Paine in
his celebrated pamphlet Common Sense, “the Royal Brute of Great Britain.”33 The Stamp Act, which
Boston greeted with flags flown at half mast and muffled peals of bells, was viewed less as a fiscal
imposition than as a measure of political oppression. “No taxation without representation” became
the rallying cry of Americans determined to enjoy “the rights of Englishmen.” 34 Many at Westminster
concurred, among them Chatham, Edmund Burke and Charles James Fox, who appeared in what
looked like an American uniform, toasted Washington’s forces as “our army” and spoke of an English
victory as “terrible news.”35 Fox’s quasi-treasonable vehemence reflected his commitment to a
“tradition of liberty”36 which led to “the final undoing of the entire colonial project in


America.”37Imperium et libertas later became the watchword of British imperialists and the motto of
the Primrose League; but as W. E. Gladstone would famously point out, the phrase was a
contradiction in terms. In the last resort, liberty was at odds with empire, its ultimate solvent.
There were other reasons for anticipating imperial decline and fall. Like the sunset, it seemed a
natural phenomenon. It was part of a process of individual and cosmic decay that had been regarded
as inevitable since the fall of Babylon, perhaps since the fall of Adam. Hesiod had even visualised
that in the old age of the world babies would be “born with greying temples.”38 The logic of the
process was confirmed by the recurring metaphor of maturity: Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes and
many others had said colonies were “children” which, as they grew up, might expect to separate from
their parent kingdom.39 In similar vein, the French economist Turgot compared colonies to fruits
which detach themselves from a tree when they are ripe, as provinces did from Rome. Both Joseph
Addison and James Thomson compared ancient Rome and modern Britain, contrasting their glories
with the decadence of contemporary Italy. Empires clearly evolved, vigorous new growth replacing
rotten old fabric. What is more, as Bishop Berkeley memorably prophesied, “Westward the Course of
Empire takes its way.” 40 It advanced from corrupt Europe to pristine America—where, in a reverse
version of the conceit, Thomas Jefferson said that a journey eastward from the frontier to the coast
was “equivalent to a survey, in time, of the progress of man from the infancy of creation to the present
day.”41 The idea that progress followed Apollo’s chariot was heard from “Horace to Horace

Greeley.”42 And its transatlantic course was dramatised in a futuristic jeu d’esprit published by
Lloyd’s Evening Post in 1774. It was set in 1974 and featured two visitors from “the empire of
America” touring the ruins of London. These resembled Piranesi prints of Roman ruins—empty,
rubble-strewn streets, a single broken wall where parliament once stood, Whitehall a turnip field,
Westminster Abbey a stable, the Inns of Court a pile of stones “possessed by hawks and rooks,” and
St. Paul’s, its dome collapsed, open to the sky. The sun had set on British greatness and, thanks to the
exodus of merchants, artisans and workers, it had risen over “Imperial America.” 43 After the loss of
the thirteen colonies, the British did indeed fear that their Empire, however wide its bounds, was
vulnerable to expanding America. They looked with apprehension and fascination at the Great
Republic, seeing it as the wave of the future. That astute gossip Horace Walpole pronounced that
“The next Augustan Age will dawn the other side of the Atlantic.” Casting “horoscopes of empires”
in the manner of Rousseau, he forecast that travellers from the New World would “visit England and
give a description of the ruins of St Paul’s.”44
By far the most authoritative harbinger of imperial doom, though, was Edward Gibbon. According
to his famous account, he was inspired to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman
Empire while musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol and listening to barefoot friars singing vespers in
the Temple of Jupiter. No stones in history were more eloquent than those of the Eternal City,
recalling as they did the melancholy evanescence of imperial power, and no book was more imbued
with the genius loci, the spirit of the place. Here, on the seven hills beside the Tiber, lay the
sepulchre of Roman greatness. The Palatine, cradle of Rome and imperial precinct, was now a rank
wilderness of scattered pillars and crumbled masonry. The monumental Septizonium was an empty
graveyard, its bones resurrected in the fabric of St. Peter’s basilica.45 The Forum, where senators had
made laws and emperors had become gods, was a dung-filled corral for “swine and buffaloes.”46 The
Colosseum, where gladiators had fought and Christians were thrown to lions, was now a stupendous
carcass. Other scenes of ancient grandeur, the Temple of Apollo, the Baths of Caracalla, the Theatre


of Marcellus, the Tomb of Romulus, were reduced to sublime remnants. A few noble edifices did
survive, some utterly transformed: the Pantheon, Hadrian’s Mausoleum, Trajan’s Column, the Arch of
Constantine. But Gibbon, reflecting on the disappearance of gold palaces, marble statues, porphyry

altars, bronze tablets, jasper pavements and granite obelisks, foresaw the final annihilation of “all the
monuments of antiquity.”47 No one projected this Ozymandian vision with such might and majesty.
To be sure, Gibbon did say that Europe had so advanced by the eighteenth century that it was
probably secure from the kind of catastrophe visited on Rome. Arnold Toynbee, chronicler of the
cyclical rise and fall of civilisations, even depicted Gibbon as a kind of Pangloss who thought that his
own age was the fulfilment of history. In an extraordinary waking dream Toynbee saw Gibbon, an
ungainly figure in “silver-buckled shoes, knee-breeches, tie-wig, and tricorne,”48 gazing at damned
souls swept into hell before the Georgian era of equipoise. But his assault does ill justice to Gibbon,
whose work reflects a magisterial breadth of vision. Gibbon himself warned that future foes might
appear who would carry desolation to the verges of the Atlantic. After all, when the Prophet breathed
the soul of fanaticism into the bodies of the long-despised Arabs they “spread their conquests from
India to Spain.”49 More to the point, Gibbon showed remarkably good timing for a man said to
believe that time had come to an end. He published the third volume of his magnum opus, which
described the collapse of the Roman Empire in the west (and might have concluded the whole work
had he not decided to add the thousand-year-long Byzantine epilogue), a few months before
Yorktown. There were many passages in the book which implied that the British Empire—
overextended, given to luxury, attacked by barbarians, employing mercenaries—would follow suit.
Most piquantly, Gibbon described the revolt of the “Armoricans”—inhabitants of Brittany—
against Rome. “Imperial ministers,” he wrote, “pursued with proscriptive laws, and ineffectual arms,
the rebels whom they had made.” As a result the Armoricans achieved “a state of disorderly
independence,” while the Romans lost freedom, virtue and honour, as well as empire.50 Gibbon could
not resist the pun but this probably represented his true view of the American crisis. However, the
vain little historian, with his chubby cheeks (which a blind woman literally confused with a baby’s
bottom) and his weakness for puce-coloured velvet suits and orange zigzag dimity waistcoats, was no
less susceptible to patronage than were most Augustan gentlemen. In return for a sinecure from Lord
North, he penned a pamphlet denouncing the colonists’ bid for independence as a “criminal
enterprize.”51 It outraged Horace Walpole, who damned Gibbon as a “toad-eater.” 52 And it prompted
Fox to assert that Gibbon, who had described the corruption which overthrew the Roman Empire,
exemplified the corruption which would overthrow the British Empire. The comparison had become
a commonplace. When Gibbon had politely refused an invitation to dine with Benjamin Franklin in

Paris because he could not consort with the ambassador of an enemy country, the American
apparently offered “to furnish materials to so excellent a writer for the Decline and Fall of the British
Empire.”53
Franklin had helped to give the British “empire” its new meaning—political and territorial
dominion rather than seaborne commercial mastery—but he thought that the structure was as delicate
as a “China Vase.” 54 And Britons, proud to see themselves as latter-day Romans, were always
conscious of imperial fragility. Classical education so reinforced the lesson that every setback
suffered by their Empire seemed to augur its ultimate dissolution along Roman lines. Yorktown was
especially portentous because it occurred at a time when cracks were everywhere appearing in the
veneer. The Crown’s power was under assault at home and its other possessions were menaced


abroad. Constitutional reformers were active and only the previous year the anti-Catholic Gordon
Riots had inflicted more devastation on London in a week than Paris would suffer (the demolition of
the Bastille excepted) during the entire course of the French Revolution. Ireland was in ferment as its
people proceeded on the long march towards nationhood. The Mediterranean was unsafe, with
Minorca and Gibraltar besieged—the former fell and the latter came so close to falling that its
capture was celebrated on the French stage and pictured on the fans of Parisian ladies. In the
Caribbean only Jamaica, Barbados and Antigua would remain under the Union Jack. France was
sweeping Britain from its forts and trading “factories” in Africa. In India Hyder Ali, ruler of Mysore,
had invaded the Carnatic, routing British armies and burning villages within sight of Madras. The
Empire, wrote one observer, “seemed everywhere to be collapsing by its own weight or yielding to
external attack.”55 King George himself subscribed to an early version of the “domino theory”: if
Britain lost the thirteen colonies, “the West Indies must follow them,” Ireland would soon become a
separate state, and the Empire would be annihilated.56
Many shared his fears when the Americans inflicted such grievous wounds on the imperial body
politic. The consequences, some immediate and others long term, were traumatic. Yorktown
destroyed the North ministry, tearing apart what Dr. Johnson called that “bundle of imbecility.” 57 The
King’s eventual choice as Prime Minister and First Lord of the Treasury, William Pitt the Younger,
who remained in power from 1783 until 1801, was obliged to ratify a peace treaty by which the

British Empire lost a quarter of its white subjects. To avoid further dismemberment, the remaining
parts of the “shattered empire” must be united, Pitt told the House of Commons, “by bonds of
affection and reciprocity.” 58 But such bonds looked tenuous in the light of the American experience.
The measures taken to pacify Ireland—parliamentary independence, trade concessions and the repeal
of penal laws against Roman Catholics—whetted the nationalist appetite for complete self-rule on the
transatlantic model. Canada, despite British attempts to conciliate its majority French population,
seemed set for disintegration—with the United States eager to pick up the pieces. The white
inhabitants of the West Indies, though dependent on the mother country in the vital matters of sugar
and slaves, were “Americans by connexion and by interest,” observed Captain Horatio Nelson from
his Caribbean station in 1785, and “as great rebels as ever were in America.”59
India—“the brightest jewel that now remained in his Majesty’s crown,” 60 to quote Fox’s metaphor,
later the dullest cliché in the imperial lexicon—should no longer be plundered by “the greatest
tyranny that was ever exercised.”61 Once the East India Company’s mercantile despotism was brought
to an end, the subcontinent could be governed in the interests of its people. This ideal was advocated
with Ciceronian power and Jeffersonian polish by Edmund Burke—whom Gibbon described as “the
most eloquent and rational madman that I ever knew.” 62 But it was an ideal that would cut at the root
of the British Raj. Even the convict colony of New South Wales—the first fleet arrived at Botany Bay
in 1788—would soon produce “a fresh set of Washingtons and Franklins” to wrest their emancipation
from the mother country, forecast Sydney Smith in the Edinburgh Review. He gave a darkly comical
account of Britain’s future struggle in the Antipodes:
Endless blood and treasure will be exhausted to support a tax on kangaroos’ skins; faithful
Commons will go on voting fresh supplies to support a just and necessary war; and Newgate
[Prison], then become a quarter of the world, will evince a heroism, not unworthy of the great


characters by whom she was originally peopled.63
In short, as Smith further suggested, after the escape of the American tiger Britain was doubtful about
breeding colonial cubs which might grow up to be equally savage.
British doubts were reinforced when American trade actually expanded after the loss of the thirteen
colonies. Indeed, the astonishing growth in commercial activity called the entire imperial enterprise

into question. According to the prevailing economic theory of the time, the purpose of colonies was to
supply the mother country with raw materials and to provide a market for her manufactured goods, all
on an exclusive basis. The mercantilist system was given legal form by the Navigation Acts, which
barred foreign vessels and thus promoted imperial shipping, securing the wooden walls of the
sceptr’d isle. Gibbon called these laws “the Palladium of Britain.”64 Yet the United States, which had
broken free of the restrictions, now played an increasingly vital role in the mother country’s industrial
revolution, providing most of the raw cotton, for example, which enabled Britain to become the loom
of the world. And by the 1790s Britain was supplying four-fifths of America’s imports while taking
half its exports. The extraordinary boom in transatlantic traffic supported the case which Adam Smith
advanced with dazzling cogency in The Wealth of Nations (1776), that protection was altogether less
profitable than free trade. Smith asserted that colonies were “a cause rather of weakness than of
strength” to Britain. They provided no tax revenue, cost blood and treasure to defend, and diverted
investment from more fruitful domestic channels. They were, in fact, a huge cartel set up for the
benefit of the mercantile classes, an Empire of customers suited to “a nation whose government is
influenced by shopkeepers.” The Empire might have worked if the Americans had sent members of
parliament to Westminster. They could thus have put into practice a representative principle which
Rome had lacked, to its ultimate ruin. And they could have enjoyed the bonus of winning big “prizes
from the wheel of the great state lottery of British politics” instead of “piddling for little prizes in…
the paltry raffle of colony faction.”65 In the absence of an imperial elected assembly, said Smith, the
old monopolistic order should be replaced by an “obvious and simple system of natural liberty.” 66
What he wanted was an open market in which capital and labour would gain their due reward through
the unimpeded operation of the competitive mechanism—the fair dealing of Smith’s famous “invisible
hand.” Here was a gospel which spread like pentecostal fire and was to form the basis of a new
world order.
Pitt venerated Smith’s work and it affected his policies. Fox paid it an even more telling tribute: he
quoted from Smith’s “excellent book” 67 in the Commons but confessed privately that he had not read
it and could never understand the subject. It is almost impossible to overestimate the influence of The
Wealth of Nations. The argument that Britain should restrict itself to commercial dominance, costeffective, humane, immune to rebellion, was to recur again and again. Jeremy Bentham, the champion
of utilitarianism, elaborated it with characteristic vigour when urging France to
give up your colonies—because you have no right to govern them, because they had rather not be

governed by you, because it is against their interest to be governed by you, because you get
nothing by governing them, because you cannot keep them, because the expense of trying to keep
them would be ruinous, because your constitution would suffer by your keeping them, because
your principles forbid your keeping them, and because you would do good to all the world by


parting with them.68
Smith gained a host of converts as Britain became the world’s workshop, with a vested interest in
free trade. But from the moment his book appeared it began to sap the theoretical foundations of the
colonial Empire, and this was the very time when the structure itself was being shaken by the
American cataclysm. Of course, the British Empire did not disintegrate when the thirteen colonies
broke away. Nor were the fears of pessimists such as Lord Sandwich justified: “We shall never again
figure as a leading power in Europe, but think ourselves happy if we can drag on for some years as a
contemptible existence as a commercial state.”69 In fact the American war, reported throughout by the
Annual Register under the heading “History of Europe,” was to prove more immediately disastrous to
France, which was virtually bankrupted by it. Pitt’s effort to consolidate his country’s position was
largely successful and the wars against the French between 1793 and 1815 saw a colossal
augmentation of British power and possession.

In the mother country reactions to the American Revolution were by no means uniform. They ranged
from liberal to authoritarian, reflecting the huge complexity of the event. The Revolution was
conservative as well as radical. It asserted the equality of men but ignored the rights of women. It
was magnanimous yet murderous, especially towards native Americans. And nothing about it was
more paradoxical than the fact that the land which had fought for freedom was also a land of slavery.
Many Americans were profoundly troubled by the inconsistency between the exalted ideals of the
Declaration of Independence and the cruel realities of the “peculiar institution.” Quizzed about it in
France, the slave-owning champion of liberty Thomas Jefferson could only exclaim: “What a
stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man.”70 Less stupendous men were less equivocal.
“Blush ye pretended votaries for freedom!” cried one, excoriating the “trifling patriots” who trampled
on “the sacred natural rights of Africans.” 71 The white monopoly of rights, it was said, meant that

American blacks got less protection from the magistrate than Roman slaves got from the emperor.
Adam Smith himself noted:
When Vedius Pollio, in the presence of Augustus, ordered one of his slaves, who had committed
a slight fault, to be cut into pieces and thrown into his fish pond to feed his fishes, the emperor
commanded him, with indignation, to emancipate immediately, not only that slave, but all others
that belonged to him.72
In the matter of slavery even the British could claim to be more enlightened than the Americans.
Whereas the colonists’ wartime banners had borne Patrick Henry’s famous slogan “Liberty or Death,”
Lord Dunmore had dressed his “Ethiopian Regiment” in uniforms emblazoned with the motto “Liberty
to Slaves.”73 And when the British departed they took thirty thousand slaves, about 5 per cent of the
colonies’ black population, out of bondage.
As the Americans were quick to point out, all this was brazen hypocrisy. The British West Indies,
which relied on slave labour to fill their argosies with muscovado, the raw brown sugar that fed the
European sweet tooth, were the most prized of all imperial possessions—in 1763 George III’s


government had almost swapped the whole of Canada for Guadeloupe. Moreover, Britain had been
chiefly responsible for making African-Americans slaves in the first place. It dominated the slave
trade, carrying more “black ivory,” so-called, than all other countries combined. In 1781, indeed, the
captain of the English slave ship Zong had perpetrated one of the worst atrocities in the annals of this
human traffic. Bound from West Africa to Jamaica, he ran short of water and threw 132 slaves
overboard so that their insurance value could be claimed, as it could not if they had died a “natural
death.”74 At the time this instance of mass murder caused no outcry. When the insurers took their case
to court (they lost) it turned entirely on the subject of property and Chief Justice Mansfield said that,
although the case was a shocking one, in law killing slaves was no different from killing horses.
However, the episode—its horror is memorably evoked in Turner’s painting Slave Ship—nagged at
the national conscience. It helped give the mother country a new will “to convince the world that the
throne of the British empire is established in righteousness.”75 Faced with republicans and
democrats, George III’s realm needed to occupy the moral high ground. Surely Britain, with its wellestablished social hierarchy, its constitution dating back to Magna Carta, its Christian polity
embracing the globe, was the country best fitted to preserve human rights in the age of the American

(and, still more, the French) Revolution. Now was the time for Britain to show that, despite its huge
vested interest in slavery and the slave trade, Burke’s professions were worth more than Jefferson’s.
The Irishman had famously proclaimed, “The British Empire must be governed on a plan of freedom,
for it will be governed by no other.”76
It was governed by no plan, of course, but at its heart lay the “trade in human blood.”77 As soon as
the American war ended slave trafficking revived and by the time of its abolition in 1807 half
Britain’s long-distance shipping was engaged in it. The human freight borne across the Atlantic was a
vital component in a commercial network that stretched around the planet. For not only did English
captains buy slaves with home-made manufactures—cloth, guns, metal-ware, glass, paper—they also
traded in foreign merchandise—Indian silks, French wines, Virginia tobacco, gold from Brazil,
cowrie shells from the Maldives. Furthermore, slaves in the West Indies (whose native populations
had been virtually wiped out by Europeans and their diseases) produced what was until the 1820s
Britain’s largest import, sugar. A spicy luxury in 1700, this addictive substance had become a sweet
necessity by 1800. During the century consumption increased five-fold, to nearly twenty pounds a
head—compared to two pounds a head in France. Sugar was an essential complement to the imported
tea, coffee and chocolate, drunk from imported porcelain. It transformed puddings, converting them
from savoury dishes to sweets and justifying their promotion to a separate course at the climax of a
meal. “Hot puddings, cold puddings, steamed puddings, baked puddings, pies, tarts, creams, moulds,
charlottes and bettys, trifles and fools, syllabubs and tansys, junkets and ices, milk puddings, suet
puddings”78—John Bull ate them all, distending his belly and rotting his teeth. Sugar changed patterns
of behaviour in other ways, making porridge more palatable and encouraging a taste for
confectionery. Sugar gave energy to workers and its profits helped to fuel Britain’s phenomenal
economic growth.
This is not to say that the industrial revolution relied crucially on slavery. But Liverpool did
become the pre-eminent slaving port, adorning its Nelson monument with the figures of chained
Africans and its town hall with “busts of blackamoors and elephants,”79 because it was close to
Britain’s manufacturing hub. And the exploitation of the West Indies, by means of the slave trade,
amounted to “a massive injection of resources into the British economy.” 80 It is difficult to grasp the