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took no notice at all.
    Most Englishmen, asked what it was all about, would probably have described it as a trading system, but this was only partly true. The trading instinct had led to the early settlements in India, and to the slave colonies of West Africa with their protective forts, but most of the British possessions were acquired either for Lebensraum or for strategy. In India the British were gradually forced into conquest to protect their original interests, rather than to extend them: first across the subcontinent itself, then beyond the perimeters of India—into Baluchistan in the west, Burma in the east, Sikkim and Bhutan in the north, and across the Indian Ocean into Aden, East Africa and Egypt.
    French Canada and many of the Caribbean Islands were acquired as a result of European wars. Ascension Island and Tristan da Cunha were occupied as garrison islands, to prevent a rescue of Napoleon when he was imprisoned upon St Helena (when Napoleon died and the troops were withdrawn three men, with a woman and two children, decided to stay on Tristan—their descendants formed its population still, and their settlement, officially Georgetown, wasalways known as Garrison). Cyprus was taken over from the Turks under a convention engaging Britain to help the Sultan defend his Asiatic possessions against Russia. Australia was glumly colonized when the loss of the American colonies deprived the British of a convict dumping-ground. The partition of Africa in the past two decades, which had given Britain a lion’s share of the continent, was largely a diplomatic or strategic exercise—less a matter of getting oneself in than of keeping others out.
    Often the causes of Empire were petty. Honduras became British because ships’ companies used to cut logs upon its beaches, and Bombay was part of Catherine of Braganza’s dowry when she married Charles II. Hong Kong fell into British hands in 1841 as a result of the Opium War, fought to protect the interests of British opium-growers in India. Perak became British ostensibly because of feuds there between rival groups of Chinese miners. Some territories were imperially acquired to rescue them from local empire-builders—New Zealand, for instance, which was plagued by lawless British adventurers, or Basutoland, whose King asked to be taken under imperial protection to forestall annexation by the British settlers of the Cape, and who later wrote to Queen Victoria that ‘my country is your blanket, and my people the lice upon it’.
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    So they were motley origins: but the British were generally able to rationalize the expansion of Greater Britain—if not the movement as a whole, at least each spasm of growth. This is how Sir F. W. R. Fryer, of the Indian Civil Service, explained the three invasions by which the British eventually acquired dominion over Burma. The first Burmese war, 1824, was ‘due to the encroachment of the King [of Burma] upon our borders’. The second war, 1852, was ‘due to a succession of outrages committed on British subjects by the Government of Burma’. The third war, 1885, was ‘due to the oppressive action of the King towards a British company, and to his advances towards a foreign Power’. Such an expansion of British boundaries, Fryer thought, was inevitable: oriental Powers were ‘sooner or later unable to appreciate the fact that it is for their own interest tomaintain peace and to abstain from provoking their European neighbours’.
    ‘Adjusting the relations between the two countries’ was a favourite euphemism for the process, and a whole vocabulary of evasive justification was devised to illustrate the strategies of Greater Britain, and define the blurred edges of the Empire. Frontiers were habitually rectified. Spheres of influence were established. Mutually friendly relations were arranged. River systems were opened to trade. Christian civilization was introduced to backward regions. One spoke vaguely of the confines of Egypt, the