Understanding the British Empire

"I attended Ronald Hyam’s lectures when I was an undergraduate at Cambridge. With this book he has brought together many of the articles he has written over a very creative lifetime, where he’s tried to suggest that there are many different ways of approaching the Empire and that the best way to understand it is to realise what an astonishingly complicated organism it was and that no simple explanation really does it justice. Yes. Many of the essays operate on a fairly general level, talking about the geopolitical, economic and in one case the sexual dynamics of the Empire. But Hyam is also concerned with specific figures as well. He has things to say about Churchill and the British Empire. He talks quite a lot about this largely forgotten man, John Bennett, who was a figure in the Colonial Office and was rather interesting during the later stages of the Empire. He also talks about individual historians of the British Empire. He is very interested in both looking at the Empire as a generalised global phenomenon, which it certainly was, and also in the way in which specific individuals need to be understood in an imperial context and how particular bits of the Empire can’t be understood without reference to individual figures. Underpinning the whole of the book is an extraordinary amount of archival research, especially into the official documents of the Empire, which in a way was Hyam’s greatest interest and greatest strength. It is certainly true that when we look at the map of the world in the late 1910s and early 1920s large parts were coloured red, and it does seem strange that this tiny island with not that many people seems to have governed a disproportionate amount of the world for more than one century. But I think that the picture needs quite serious unpacking and this again is one of the points that Hyam is interested in looking at. The impact of Britain on these large parts of the world coloured red wasn’t always anything like as strong or as deep or pervasive or permanent as these atlases of the world suggest. Yes. One of the points made in John Darwin’s book The Empire Project , which I will come back to, is that you can’t look at the British Empire as a kind of system because it has this astonishing range of different forms of imperial dominion. Also, it depends on a lack of rivals in Europe and, at least for much of the 19th century, on a relatively quiet Asia and on a relatively isolationist America. So it is those circumstances which give the British the slightly flukish opportunity to become this global power, perhaps even a global hegemon, and when these powers change then, in a sense, the show is over."