Impact of the British Empire on Britain

The Impact of the British Empire upon Britain:

Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural

The British Empire was the greatest political entity known to human history. At its height it embraced much of Africa, all of the Indian subcontinent, the continent of Australia and much of the immense archipelago that links it to Southeast Asia, much of North America, not to mention numerous small but important territories scattered around the world. In addition, of course, it embraced the British Isles themselves. It ruled about a third of the world's people and perhaps half its wealth. For five generations the sun in fact did not set on it, and -- immeasurably more so than the post-cold-war United States -- it was truly the "sole superpower."

The impact of British rule on its farflung territories was of course enormous. On the negative side, more obvious to us in an age that frowns on imperialism, it subjected many millions of people to alien rule, and a rule that looked down on them, regarding them as "lesser breeds without the Law." On a more positive side, it gave many of its territories a more efficient and less corrupt government than they ever had before, and often better than they have had since. Consider India. An ancient civilization, it was the jewel

in the crown of the empire. But the British Civil Service, the Indian Railways -- and, by historical irony, ideals learned partly from the British themselves -- made India for the first time a nation.

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trine of free trade (Winch, 1965). This was not, perhaps, hypocrisy on the part of the British. British commercial prosperity did not depend on its colonies. Instead, in large measure, the relationship between Empire and trade was a defensive one. There were two conditions in which British trade could not thrive: first, if it were forcibly shut out of a potential market by some other power, and second, if civil disruptions within a potential market rendered peaceful trade impossible. Most British imperialism was in fact a response to one condition or the other -- and primarily to the first. The British first acquired India after fighting over access to it with the French. Once the French were defeated, the British found themselves intervening, willy-nilly, in quarrels among Indian princely states, and presently found themselves dominating the subcontinent. Likewise, the colonialization of Africa was essentially a scramble among the European powers, and the British felt they had to grab their share, or risk being cut out. In any case, the Empire was not the heart of the British commercial economy; trade with the United States and its European neighbors accounted for a larger share of the whole. The Empire, we may then s

Category: Foreign - I