Pax Britannica Read Online Free PDF

territory of the unoccupied globe the British had moved—only in Latin America had they been irrevocably forestalled. Full-scale British nations flourished in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and South Africa. Lesser settlements were implanted in the Falkland Islands, the sugar islands of the Caribbean, Bermuda, Fiji, Ceylon and India. Hundreds of thousands of Englishmen had settled in Ireland. The first emigrants were prospecting the farming country of the East African highlands, and out-spanning their ox-wagons in the Rhodesian veldt. Wherever there was White Man’s country vacant, the British had seized and occupied it, filling in the empty spaces of the world, and setting up their own kind of society wherever they went. Such was, so the romantic idealists thought, the manifest destiny of the Empire.

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    All this the British people surveyed, as they thumbed through the Jubilee souvenirs, or wondered at the sweep of red on the schoolroom map. It was an extraordinary estate. Disraeli had called its character ‘peculiar—I know no example of it, either in ancient or modern history’. An inventor had to take out thirty-five separate patents if he wished to protect his device throughout the Queen’s possessions. The Roman Empire in its prime comprised perhaps 120 million people in an area of 2½ million square miles: the British Empire, now that it had reached ‘the limits set by nature’, comprised some 372 million people in 11 million square miles—ninety-one times the area of Great Britain. Throughout this immense dominion, this quarter of the globe, the British enjoyed rights of suzerainty, shading away from automatic citizenship in Canada or Australia to a very probable invitation to the New Year Durbar at the British Residence in Bahrein, 1 or a distinctly better chance than most of getting a room with a bath at Shepheard’s.
    The acquisition of it all had been a jerky process. Absence of mind it never was, but it had happened so obscurely that to the ordinary Briton the rise of the Empire must have seemed more like some organic movement than the conscious result of national policies. There seemed no deliberation to it. One thing simply led to another. There had been a British Empire for nearly three hundred years, and though colonies had come and gone since then, there were distant parts of the world which had been British for twice as long as the United States of America had been in existence. Greater Britain was born in 1583, when Sir Humphrey Gilbert took nominal possession of Newfoundland, and by 1609 the first imperial settlers, a company of castaways, had been washed up on Bermuda—to inspire the first imperial work of art, The Tempest. Later in the seventeenth century the British implanted their authority in severalCaribbean islands, in North America, in Honduras, West Africa and India. In the eighteenth century they extended themselves in Canada and India, took over Ceylon and the Cape of Good Hope and sent their first convict settlers to Australia. In the nineteenth century they had acquired a vast new empire in Africa, besides New Zealand, Fiji, North Borneo and much of Malaya. And through all these centuries they had been picking up islands, forts and spheres of influence along the way, St Helena (1651) to Cyprus (1878), and what the Colonial Office List described as ‘countless smaller possessions and nearly all the isolated rocks and islands of the ocean’. The Empire had never been static, and would never be complete. The Romans honoured a God of frontiers, Terminus, who used to be represented as a very large stone. A comparable British deity would be symbolized by something far more portable, for their Empire grew in jumps, sometimes leapfrogging a continent to possess a further island, sometimes by-passing a river basin, sometimes swapping one territory for another, sometimes even refusing one—the Dualla chiefs of the Cameroons repeatedly asked to be annexed, but the British either declined or