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Acknowledgements
I have been very fortunate indeed in the people who have helped me. Jillian Taylor is the best researcher a writer could wish for – conscientious, imaginative and astonishingly industrious: I no sooner asked a question than had it answered, wherever she happened to be in the world at that moment. The book was commissioned by Tom Weldon, but on his departure to metadata wonderland it was Mary Mount who steered the thing from manuscript to book, without ever seeming to get agitated when things were not as she was expecting. The appearance of the book is entirely her work. Peter James, king of copy-editors, did his usual impeccable job.
Staff at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, the National Archives, British Library Newspapers at Colindale, the Imperial War Museum (Collections) and the London Library were all tremendously helpful. That magnificent place the British Library at St Pancras deserves special mention, as an example of a largely unsung, quietly efficient institution where it is a delight to work. In various one-time imperial territories, members of the Foreign Office were generous with their thoughts and hospitality – Dominic and Louise Asquith in Cairo, Howard and Gill Drake in Kingston and Richard and Arabella Stagg in Delhi in particular.
The television series which will follow this book was a bold commission by Jay Hunt, then Controller of BBC One, and was later supported by her successor, Danny Cohen. It was overseen by Basil Comely and was researched by the queen of television researchers, Jane Mayes, whose enormous suitcase of ancient maps, books and diarrhoea pills followed us around the world, with the exception of the Middle East, where Suniti Somaiya looked after us. Cameraman Mike Garner and sound recordist Dave Williams put up with incessant travel and inconvenience with immense good humour, even though endless hours in endless airports were never quite long enough to get us all to understand the simple challenge of a child’s card game called Newmarket. Like replacement subalterns in 1916, four directors – John Hay, Roger Parsons, Robin Dashwood and David Vincent – led our forays in different continents. We were helped in India by Shernaz Italia, Neelima Goel, Abhra Bhattacharya and Iqbal Kidwai; in Israel by Noam Shalev; in Kenya by Andrew Nightingale; in Malawi by Chris Badger; in Hong Kong by Mark Roberts; in Jamaica by Susan Henzell; in Egypt by Ramy Romany; in Sudan by George and Makis Pagoulatos; in South Africa by Rick Matthews and in Canada by Pat Mestern. The series was worried over, chiselled and polished by series producer Julian Birkett and edited with great flair by Andrea ‘Swoopy’ Carnevali.
So many other people helped at one time or another that it seems unfair to mention only a few, but among them are Nicholas Utechin of the Sherlock Holmes Society; Melanie Jones, Education Manager of the Historical Association; Daniel Scott-Davies, at the Scout Association; Neil Griffiths, with the Royal British Legion Scotland; Lucy McCann, at the Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House; Malcolm Barres-Baker, of the Brent Archives; Ian Bushnell, Chief Librarian for the Office of National Statistics; Rosemary Taylor, of the Office of National Statistics; Adrian Watkins, of the Church Missionary Society; Parwez Samuel Kaul, Principal of the Tyndale-Biscoe and Mallinson Schools in Kashmir; West Lothian Councillor Willie Dunn; Emma Davidson, of the Royal Society; Frank Kelly and Clare Kitcat at Christ’s College, Cambridge; Ros Jemmett at Ardross Castle; the Wembley local history society; Gordon’s School in Woking; Thomas Woodcock, Garter Principal King of Arms; Anna Beveridge at Marks and Spencer; Ranjit and Namita Mathrani of Veeraswamy; and Frank Savage, Matt Thoume, Helen Nellthorpe and Professor Patrick Salmon at the Foreign Office. I am very grateful to that legend in the world of in
dexing, Douglas Matthews, for his work in producing the final pages of the book. Ronald Hyam, doyen of imperial historians, was kind enough to read the manuscript for factual accuracy: any remaining howlers are mine alone, and he can’t be blamed for bias or blind spots.
VIKING
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The chapter epigraph on page 270 is taken from The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell, published by W&N Fiction, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, London. Reproduced with permission
ISBN: 978-0-67-091960-4
* In February 2006, the Archbishop of Canterbury apologized for the ‘shame and sinfulness of our predecessors’, explaining that ‘the body of Christ is not just a body that exists at any one time, it exists across history’. The previous year he had apologized for the sinfulness of missionaries in imposing Hymns Ancient and Modern on the people of Africa. The empire is very much alive in the Anglican Church. Indeed, the tensions between its different overseas sections may well be the death of it.
* And compare the language of political leaders. Martin Luther King has a dream in 1963 that ‘one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers’. In 2006, Tony Blair mumbles about ‘how we express our deep sorrow that it [slavery] could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today’.
* The explorer John Cabot, who had sailed to the New World on behalf of a group of Bristol merchants in 1497, had been dumbstruck by the quantities of fish, which seemed so abundant he wondered that his ship could move through them. The bounty lasted until the late twentieth century, when industrial fishing sucked the sea empty.
† ‘I suppose everyone is someone else’s Newfie,’ as one exasperated Canadian put it.
* ‘The Men Behind the Wire’, the rousing 1970s republican protest song against the British government’s policy of interning suspected IRA activists without trial, contained the verses:
Not for them a judge and jury
Nor indeed a trial at all
But being Irish means you’re guilty
So we’re guilty one and all
Round the world the truth will echo
Cromwell’s men are here again
England’s name again is sullied
In the eyes of honest men.
The internment policy was a direct inheritance from colonial experiences elsewhere in the world and was a political disaster in Ireland.
* In India, for example, the British monopolized salt and then devised a hugely profitable tax on it. Salt smuggling was prevented by a Customs Line in the form of a Great Hedge, which eventually ran for over 2,000 miles.
* He was killed on a beach in Hawaii, or, as he preferred to call the place, the Sandwich Islands, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich. The Hawaiians scraped the flesh from Cook’s body and burned it, distributing the bones among local chieftains. Cook’s second in command eventually persuaded them to allow him to reunite the skeleton and bury it at sea.
* The disease, whose effects included depression, lassitude, fever, diarrhoea, ulcers, acute pain in the joints, paralysing toothache and bulging eyes, was caused by a lack of vitamin C.
* A macaroni was a fop or dandy. As the Oxford Magazine had it while Banks was away at sea: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ Apparently, the condition was caused by too much of a liking for pasta.
* Flinders had been inspired to go to sea after reading Robinson Crusoe, which James Joyce famously took to be the great text of empire. Crusoe’s transition from shipwrecked mariner to master of all he surveyed, complete with a subject people in the shape of his own black servant, had been accomplished by industry, technology, gunpowder, trade and religion. Flinders decided that ‘Since neither birth nor fortune have favoured me … my actions shall speak to the world.’
* They would have been supervised by refugees from America who had stayed loyal to the Crown during the War of Independence and now needed another place to live.
* Montgomery Scott – the wonder-working ‘Scotty’ of the Starship Enterprise – stands for all of them. A small plaque inside the town museum in Linlithgow marks his supposed birthplace. The fact that Scotty will not be born for a couple of centuries is neither here nor there: there is a well-established pattern of Scotsmen going where no man has gone before.
* A marriage consummated at home in the construction of the new Somerset House, the magnificent neo-classical building erected in the heart of London to allay an anxiety that the capital had too few grand edifices for Britain’s swelling status. The close relationship between state and learning was reflected in its occupants: the navy had the west wing, various tax and supply offices had other parts, and their neighbours included the Royal Society, the Royal Academy and the Society of Antiquaries.
* The contrast is with empires like the Russian or Austro-Hungarian, or even, latterly, the absurd Italian Empire, which were essentially made by armies rather than navies.
† Macabre tales of how all the officers of the Bona Esperanza had been found as blocks of ice still seated around a table on board turned out to be the work of an imaginative reporter: they had actually been discovered lying on a beach. Astonishing stories of remote places became a staple of the imperial experience.
‡ Its territory of Rupert’s Land comprised about 15 per cent of the entire acreage of North America, so when the Dominion of Canada was formed, the company was, by a long margin, the biggest private landowner. Nowadays its intrepid history is reduced to a chain of department stores selling, among much else, its distinctive green, red, yellow and blue colours knitted into hats, scarves and teddy-bear jackets.
* The headquarters was demolished, but contemporary accounts depict a splendid building, inside which a white marble statue showed Britannia ‘seated on a globe by the sea-shore, receiving homage from three female figures, intended for Asia, Africa, and India. Asia offers spices with her right
hand, and with her left leads a camel; India presents a large box of jewels, which she holds half open; and Africa rests her hand upon the head of a lion. The Thames, as a river-god, stands upon the shore, a labourer appears cording a large bale of merchandise, and ships are sailing in the distance’ (Knight, ed., London, vol. V, pp. 61–2).
* The factory – the world’s largest legal opium facility – still exists, exporting most of its production to western pharmaceutical companies. The management does not encourage visitors, but those who have managed to get inside talk of a serious monkey problem. Fortunately the creatures do not impede the production process very much because they’re addicted to opium and spend most of the day lying around.
* The closest acknowledgement is a single sentence: ‘Reflective of the times in which it traded, the Group has led the way in many businesses and has helped bring prosperity to the region,’ which must have taken the corporate public-relations department a good few meetings to compose.
* And continues to fester. Residents of Hong Kong enjoy greater freedom and prosperity than the vast majority of their mainland Chinese counterparts. But the official history of the place, and the displays at the Hong Kong Museum, bristle with resentment. A British trade delegation to China in November 2010 triggered a minor diplomatic spat when they wore red paper poppies in memory of British war dead, without realizing that poppies on British lapels were unlikely to inspire affection.
* James Matheson carried his shameless enthusiasm for the opium trade to the grave. When he died in the south of France in 1878 (aged eighty-two) his body was returned to the Highlands and interred in a huge grey-stone mausoleum at Lairg, on the banks of Loch Shin. Beneath eight Corinthian columns decorated with what look very like carved opium-poppy seed-heads, a memorial commemorates the ‘high repute’ of his trading house.
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