002: The Rise & Fall Of The British Empire - What People Get Wrong

Um, I mean, this is obviously a huge subject when we talk about the, the, the British Empire.

But I think probably the, the best place to start is to try and get a sense of what was the British Empire.

How did it...

You know, how was it different from maybe empires that had gone before? How would you tell people, as a starting point, before we go into the history of it, uh, how they should really perhaps think of it?

Yeah, that's a great question, James.

Thank you.

And I spent really the first sort of five years or so of my academic career pondering exactly that question, how to think of an entity as enormous, as diverse, and as long-lasting as the British Empire holistically and, and how to portray it in, in relatively few words.

So without wasting more words, [chuckles] I'll get on and say I, I think the best way of viewing it is a set of projects.

A set of projects pursued by initially English people and then Scots as well as English, and then Irish and Welsh and Scots and English together, people from the British Isles, pursued abroad.

Now, some of those projects were complementary.

They reinforced one another.

Uh, so at times, for instance, the projects of the monarchy, which were about gaining subjects, gaining stature, fighting wars with rivals in Europe, coincided and reinforced the projects of businessmen and businesswomen, but mainly businessmen in the t- period we're talking about.

Joint stock company investors and the monarchy sometimes converged in their colonizing projects.

But there were other projects that were often contradictory, uh, and the relationships could wax and wane through time.

So there were also missionary evangelical projects to harvest Christian souls and, as they saw it, to provide salvation for heathens around the world.

And quite often, they came into conflict with the projects being pursued by another set of, of, um, uh, of colonists, settlers, colonial settlers, people who left the British Isles to find a better life and some land and some capital for themselves.

So that, that's an- another project in its own right is, is settlement, colonial settlement.

So they're all to do with people from the British Isles pursuing various projects overseas, sometimes in tension and sometimes complementary, um, which involved, and each of these projects involved then, uh, encounters with indigenous peoples, with colonized peoples.

So each project developed different sets of relations with colonized peoples.

They contested how Britons should relate to colonized peoples.

So in the example I gave of missionaries, the purpose of empire for them was to Christianize and to, as they saw it, civilize indigenous peoples.

That clashed with the settler project of dispossessing indigenous peoples and taking their, their land.

So you have these clashes in relationships with indigenous peoples, and then you have different projects engaging with indigenous peoples, um, in different ways, uh, inculcating them as partners and collaborators, which many British business interests and the East India Company did in India, for instance, cultivating an elite class of Indians with whom they could do business and securing consent, right the way through to, I guess, the other extreme would be settler colonists engaging in, um, in indigenous people hunts to clear people from the land as they saw it, and massacres, essentially, um, and everything in between those sets of relationships.

So it's a, a long-winded answer, but essentially, I think the best way is to see it as a, a set of projects which were sometimes complementary and sometimes in tension, and each of which had different relations cultivated with indigenous peoples.