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The Impact of the British Empire Upon Britain   Term Paper ID:27777 Click to get this paper

Essay Subject: Views the British Empire from social, political, and cultural perspectives. Describes the scope in terms of land and power of the Empire, and examines some of the negative aspects of imperialism.... More...

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Paper Abstract: Views the British Empire from social, political, and cultural perspectives. Describes the scope in terms of land and power of the Empire, and examines some of the negative aspects of imperialism. Paper Introduction: 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 Text of the Paper: The entire text of the paper is shown below. However, the text is somewhat scrambled. We want to give you as much information as we possibly can about our papers and essays, but we cannot give them away for free. In the text below you will find that while disordered, many of the phrases are essentially intact. From this text you will be able to get a solid sense of the writing style, the concepts addressed, and the sources used in the research paper. The relationship between British trade and the British Empire is, inturn, a complex one. Consider India. Asalready noted, the British "public" school system became the trainingground of the Empire (Gathorne-Hardy, 1978, pp. When Bismarck wasasked how he would respond to a British landing on the coast of Germany,his reply was that he would send the police to arrest them. Did theImperial experience, in the long run, add to or detract from the wealth,freedom, and cultural heritage of the British people? It could be argued that militarism in the narrow sense misses thepoint, because the British Empire was founded upon battleships, notbayonets. Bloomington: Indiana University.Winch, Donald (1965). London: Edward Arnold.Stokesbury, James L. Britain, in contrast, had a huge merchant marine andseafaring population. New York: Howard Fertig. An ancient civilization,it was the jewelin the crown of the empire. (Note that thepost-Imperial Royal Navy was strong enough to win the Falklands war in1982. It is worth noticingthat British industrial laxity was being criticized as early as the turn ofthe century (Berard, 1973). But (also in 1776) AdamSmith published The Wealth of Nations, andthe later British Empire co-existed with a doctrine of free trade (Winch,1965). In the absence of the Empire, it is perhaps more likely that thedeclining British aristocracy would have become source of reactionarydiscontent, and perhaps a focus of extreme right-wing politics -- as theircounterparts did in England and France. The British first acquired India after fighting over access to it withthe French. Byextension, the same is true in many respects of social and political life.A strong navy, we have seen, was required by Britain's strategic andeconomic circumstances, whether or not it had an empire. But by any objective international standardBritain remains a prosperous industrial democracy, on a par with itscontinental European neighbors. Navy and Empire. The sun has set on the Empire, and Brittania nolonger rules the waves. We may finally turn to the question of British intellectual life. Indeed, every other European overseas empire existed bysufferance of the Royal Navy, since in time of war any of them would havebeen cut off from its colonies. Likewise, by the seventeenth century Britainwas becoming a commercial society that would be economically crippled ifsubjected to enemy blockade. pub. British Imperialism and Commercial Supremacy. Indeed, this rolepredated the Empire itself; Wellington said that the Battle of Waterloo waswon on the playing-fields of Eton (Gathorne-Hardy, 1978, p. Ifthe Empire had any fundamental effect on Britain itself, it was perhaps asa safety-valve for the traditional upper class, allowing the sons of thearistocracy to expend their energies abroad, instead of tempting them intomilitarism and authoritarianism. The Old School Tie: The Phenomenon of the English Public School. The Edwardians. Buteven here, we may argue that British patterns of thought were rooted deepin English history (e.g., the heritage of the Common Law, contrasted tothat of Roman law), and were supported more by Britain's overall positionas a trading state rather than specifically by the experience of Empire. In short, maintaining a powerful fleet was necessary to secure Britishsecurity and prosperity, whether or not Britain had an empire (Stokesbury,1983). In France and Germany, the army became therepository of the old order, and indeed Sandhurst was a common follow-on toEton. The Empire may have helped make thedemocratization of Britain possible. We may finally point out that the scope of British tradesubstantially reduced the social and economic burden of the navy. Certainly, ascompared to its continental neighbors France and Germany, imperial Britainwas not a society distorted either economically by militarization orsocially by militarism. If Britain has an atmosphere of beingslightly shabby and run-down, the same could be said of the northeasternUnited States, and for essentially the same causes; both regions are payingthe cost of early industrialization, and therefore of early industrialobsolescence. This negative view of modern Britain may, however, itself be theproduct of a sort of romanticism, of evaluating Britain not for what it is,but for what it was. 8 ff). Throughout the Imperial era,for example, the British army was notoriously small. The dream of every British industrialistwaseither to procure a knighthood for himself, or to marry a daughter to theson of an earl. Classical Political Economy and Colonies. On the negative side, more obvious to us in an age that frownson imperialism, it subjected many millions of people to alien rule, and arule that looked down on them, regarding them as "lesser breeds without theLaw." On a more positive side, it gave many of its territories a moreefficient and less corrupt government than they ever had before, and oftenbetter than they have had since. The existence and effects of the Empire perhaps help to explain whyBritish thought grew along the materialistic and pragmantic lines of Lockeand Adam Smith rather than the idealistic, abstract lines of Berkeley. British tradeand the Royal Navy made it relatively easy to acquire, so it was Britainthat shaped the Empire rather than the Empire really shaping Britain. Cambridge: Harvard. New York: William Morrow.Thompson, Paul (1975). But again, a comparison to the United Statessuggests an answer in the negative. By the nineteenth century, urbanization andpopulation growth had escalated the threat to one of outright starvation ifthe island's overseas lifelines were cut. There were two conditions in which British tradecould not thrive: first, if it were forcibly shut out of a potential marketby some other power, and second, if civil disruptions within a potentialmarket rendered peaceful trade impossible. Instead, they roughly apedtheir British counterparts, becoming politicians or philanthropists.Indeed, they sometimes followed the Briish pattern even more directly,marrying the daughters of aristocrats; Winston Churchill was the son ofsuch a union. But the British Army was too small to preserve the dominance of anaristocratic class, while the Navy never commanded quite the same socialeclat (and its officer class came largely from naval families; manycaptains at Jutland were descendents of captains who had fought atTrafalgar). The Empire, we may then suggest, was therefore not central to Britisheconomic life either as burden nor fount of wealth. VictorianEngland was essentially a commercial and industrial society, yet at the topof its social pyramid was not a class of great-merchants, as in theseventeenth-century Netherlands, nor of industrial barons, as in itscontemporary, Gilded-Age America. The safety-valve of the Empire may have beenan important reason why, in the 193 s, British fascism never became asignificant political or social force. The first observation we can make is that the direct costs ofthe Empire to Britain were decidedly modest. Likewise, thecolonialization of Africa was essentially a scramble among the Europeanpowers, and the British felt they had to grab their share, or risk beingcut out. Instead, in large measure, the relationship between Empire and tradewas a defensive one. What might be called the First British Empire -- theone lost in 1776 -- was predicated upon mercantilism, the belief thatcommercial wealth was inherently tied to colonies. The expense of that huge navy was surely asubstantial burden on the British economy. "Navalism" does not dominate societies, even greatsea powers, as militarism often does. A Social History of Education in England. 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 -- immeasurablymore so than the post-cold-war United States -- it was truly the "solesuperpower." The impact of British rule on its farflung territories was of courseenormous. Yet the universities,Oxford and Cambridge, do not seem to have suffered from the anti-intellectualism of the public schools (Lawson and Silver, 1973, 345-49).British achievements in the arts and sciences throughout the imperial erastand up fully to comparison with their continental counterparts. Thepublic schools certainly were not temples of intellect, as the elitesecondary schools of France and Germany often were. This was not, perhaps, hypocrisy on the part of the British.British commercial prosperity did not depend on its colonies. The sons of Rockefellers and Carnegiesdid not go on to become leaders in technology. 26 -62). (Orig. In a later generation, and in spite of an IrishCatholic background with no heritage of love for things English, the sonsof Joseph Kennedy also abandoned business in favor of public life. However, the cost of the Royal Navy cannot really be charged againstthe Imperial account; instead, the Empire itself was in many respects afringe benefit of the Royal Navy. Most British imperialism was infact a response to one condition or the other -- and primarily to thefirst. Once the French were defeated, the British found themselvesintervening, willy-nilly, in quarrels among Indian princely states, andpresently found themselves dominating the subcontinent. And what would havehappened if it had not? It may be a shadow of its past glory, but it remains one of theworld's most formidible fighting forces. At its height it embraced much of Africa, all of the Indiansubcontinent, the continent of Australia and much of the immensearchipelago that links it to Southeast Asia, much of North America, not tomention numerous small but important territories scattered around theworld. ReferencesBerard, Victor (1973). The Empire has been called a vast system ofoutdoor relief (i.e., welfare) for the sons of the aristocracy. But what of the effects of the Empire on Britain itself? It is tempting toanswer in the negative, in part from anti-imperialist ideology, and in partbecause of the widespread popular image of post-Imperial Britain as ashrunken, demoralized society trapped by the grandeur of its past. 145). The word "empiricism" has no etymologicalconnection with "empire," yet British empiricism, with its emphasis uponexperience rather than theory as the basis of knowledge, seems a naturalcounterpart to the haphazard but effective character of the British Empire. The Impact of the British Empire upon Britain: Social, Political, Economic, and Cultural The British Empire was the greatest political entity known to humanhistory. The United States is the onlyother country that could defeat a regional power so far from its ownshores, and so close to the enemy's.) Moreover, navies have never been thethreat to their own societies that armies have so often been. The two essential missions of the navywere to defend Britain against invasion, and to keep open its sea lanes.In the last four centuries, Britain hason three occasions faced overt invasion threats, in 1588, 18 4, and 194 .Given the small size of the British Army at almost all times, the threathas been continually latent. There was a trace of reactionaryrevolt by the aristocracy in the Edwardian era, but it quickly faded(Thompson, 1975, pp. Had there been no Empire, would the sons of the rich have gone on tobecome engineers instead of Imperial civil servants, and would England thenhave maintained the industrial edge it gradually lost? The means were readily at hand to procure warshipsand their crews, with minimal distortion to the economy or society. 2 1ff). Nevertheless, the existence of the Empire had an effect on the statusand ethos of the British upper class -- and therefore on the class systemas a whole, and the ethos of the society -- that remains to be examined(Royle, 1987, pp. Themodern United States Navy is an artificial creation, in the sense that thecountry has almost no merchant marine, and thus "naturally" produces veryfew ships or sailors. London: Methuen.Royle, Edward (1987) Modern Britain: A Social History, 175 -1985. But the British Civil Service, the IndianRailways -- and, by historical irony, ideals learned partly from theBritish themselves -- made India for the first time a nation. Generalshave often marched on their own capitals; admirals have seldom if eversailed against them. In short, we may suggest that the long-term effect of the BritishEmpire on Britain itself was rather slight. 19 6).Gathorne-Hardy, Jonathan (1978). The subtlest intellectual effect of the Empire may be found in thepatterns of British thought. (1983). It may be argued that the American pattern itself might never haveappeared save by following the British example, but there is little groundsfor supposing this. It is certainly true that when Bismarck made his joke at theexpense of the British Army, the British Navy was maintained at a "twopower" standard, its battle fleet equal to those of any two rivals incombination. In any case, the Empire was not the heart of the Britishcommercial economy; trade with the United States and its European neighborsaccounted for a larger share of the whole. Would this aristocratic ethos have survived through the nineteenthcentury and into the twentieth without the Empire? New York: Viking.Lawson, John, and Harold Silver. The sons of the new rich went to Eton or Harrow andabsorbed there the values of the old aristocracy, and the younger ones atleast were likely to find careers in Imperial service. If this paper is not what you are looking for, you can search again: Search for: or Click here to request an essay written just for you.