ABSTRACT
For much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the British built and maintained a vast empire that extended from North America to Australia and included the Indian subcontinent, much of the Caribbean and parts of South-East Asia and the Middle East. Various rationales have been forwarded for this determined expansion: the rise of European democracy and competition between the imperial powers, the military imperative, the economic imperative and the moral imperative (Marshall 1996). Historians are by no means agreed on the relative signifi cance of these driving forces. Britain employed the might of its military and naval forces to establish and defend its territories from competing powers, maintain order within them and facilitate relations of production, investment and trade with them, to its advantage. Commercial penetration and political infl uence combined with arms to provide the British with opportunities to incorporate complementary economies into the empire and the broader world capitalist system and it came to function as a closely integrated trading network, reaching its height between 1900 and 1930 (Osterhammel 1997; Cain and Hopkins 2002). This historical occupation of foreign lands left a lasting legacy and dramatically shaped the modern world.1 The creation and expansion of the formal British Empire2 not only infl uenced the developmental paths of
1. Conventionally, key periods in the history of the British Empire are identifi ed as: (a) 1630-1680, when the Caribbean plantation economy was perhaps the fi rst ‘periphery’ of the Eurocentric world economy; (b) 1760-1830, when the loss of most of Britain’s colonies in North America was formally recognized and a second wave of colony formation was initiated involving expansion into India by the East India Company and settlement in Australia and New Zealand; (c) 1880-1900, during which a ‘new imperialism’ emerged involving the partition of Africa via the Berlin Act of 1885; (d) 1900-1930, the heyday of colonial settlement in the existing outposts and expansion into the Middle East; (e) 1945-1960s, the era of decolonization in many countries (Marshall 1996; Osterhammel 1997). 2. Gallagher and Robinson (1953) distinguished between formal (colonial rule)
and informal empire. Whilst formal empire entailed sovereign control and the political, social and economic organization of the colonies, informal empire involved control by other means: ‘British policy followed the principle of extending control informally if possible and formally if necessary . . . [W]hatever the method British interests were steadily safeguarded and extended. The usual summing of the policy
the territories that were ruled through the introduction of new systems of government, education, language, societal organization, religion and even sport, but also physically transformed the land through farming and mining, the construction of infrastructure assets and the introduction of diseases (Marshall 1996).
