The resurgence of interest in ‘empire’ and empires has been one of the more striking academic developments of recent years. Inevitably, it has been driven in part by polemic and political debate. But something more interesting has also been happening. Not long ago it was usual to assume that empires – certainly modern empires – represented a great aberration from the High Road of history on which all the sign posts clearly pointed ‘This Way to the Nation State’. Empires delayed, distorted and even destroyed the (supposedly) universal impulse towards the formation of national communities. They were also invariably predatory, despotic, militaristic and, since they often seemed under the sway of a powerful individual – the ‘emperor’ – they could also be seen in varying degrees as psychopathic phenomena in their drive for what Schumpeter called ‘objectless expansion’ (Schumpeter, 1951). Except to their benighted champions, they were obviously a ‘bad thing’. Indeed some historians felt obliged to assert their hatred for empire in case writing about them was mistaken for admiration. That empires possessed all these defects, and worse still were bound to fail, was amply proved to most commentators’ satisfaction by their post-1945 collapse. Alas, we are no longer so sure.

If contemplating the contemporary scene has discouraged the belief that empires belong to the irrelevant past, another powerful influence has been the revival of longue durée global history. To an extent that would have struck many observers in the 1970s and 1980s as remarkable (and shocking) it is now almost a commonplace to say that empires have been the default form of political organisation above the pettiest scale for most of the world and most of world history. Two implications might follow, one perhaps easier to swallow than the other. (1) It becomes more difficult to treat empires as a metahistorical blockage to human progress. That is not to say that they become a ‘good thing’. But they become an object of study without overriding moral preconceptions, even if we might conclude that some were better than others by certain criteria of human happiness.

Memory, especially in its collective or codified forms, is a weapon of immense cultural and political power. There is, one might think, scarcely any significant act or influential belief that is not founded, whether explicitly or otherwise, on memory – that is the conventionalized perception of past experience. No social or political actor can escape the necessity to frame his or her preferences in relation to the ‘past’ – distant or immediate. Hardened into ‘memory’ or its close relative ‘history’, past experience is the basis on which people act or claim to act. The shaping of memory or even control over its public expression is, in consequence, of the greatest interest to states and to those that seek to shape their behaviour. In free societies, it is invariably a field of intense competition. As observers of the events surrounding the recent funeral of Margaret Thatcher will have noticed, her death occasioned a sharp set of skirmishes in Britain's ‘memory wars’.

But, why should the memory of empire play any part in those British ‘memory wars’ or concern us here now? Perhaps the answer is obvious. Britain was once a great power and possessed a huge global empire. Many of the connections which the empire created persist to this day, even if in a much altered form. A plausible case can be made that the vision of Britain as a global actor continues to exert a powerful attraction on its political leaders. The size and shape of Britain's armed forces (until the recent downsizing) arguably reflected their longstanding role (briefly interrupted – by two World Wars) as the guardians of empire. The baubles and titles of post-imperial Britain retain the language of empire. Thus, the Queen still appoints ‘Commanders of the British Empire’ and awards ‘Orders of the British Empire’ and his strangely antiquated vocabulary has resisted all modification.

Empire and ethnicity have been among the most powerful forces that have shaped the modern world. Yet, as I shall try to suggest, their highly ambivalent relationship has so far not been explored systematically – or, insofar as it has, with unsatisfactory results. This is a bold claim to make. Let us see first where the argument stands at the moment.

Where they have imagined the encounter between empire and ethnicity, historians and social scientists have typically seen it as overbearing, aggressive, or simply exploitative. Empire is usually perceived (despite much contrary evidence) as an administrative monolith, a leviathan that was capable of repressing all opposition (and certainly of suppressing any ethnic assertion) – until, that is, its own strength gave way. Faced with “indigenous” cultures and identities (the elements of ethnicity), empires in this view reacted in four ways. The first response was to subjugate: to destroy the capacity for autonomous political action or force it into channels and molds that imperial agents could control. That might mean the removal or crushing of “traditional” leaders and the confiscation of their wealth. It might mean the banning of external forms of identity, as the tartan was banned in the Scottish Highlands after 1746. It invariably meant the systematic disarming of a conquered community, rooting out the old status of arms and arms-bearing or restricting it tightly to a tiny favored minority. The second response followed quickly behind. The act of conquest required justification to opinion both at home (however narrow in practice the “political class”) and abroad (to appease rivals enraged by successful predation). It was natural enough to disparage the conquered as barbarians or worse. Their “disorders” were a threat to the industrious and peaceful. Their customs affronted those of a higher morality. Their modes of production were stagnant and wasteful at best. Their religious beliefs were mere superstition.

The last long decade before the outbreak of the First World War was a proving ground. It tested the extent to which the British had been able to adapt their superstructure of power and influence to the more strenuous global conditions that set in during the 1880s and 1890s and reached a further peak of intensity after 1900. The judgment of historians has been variable. The Edwardian decade has sometimes been seen as the ‘high noon’ of empire, the last hurrah of a self-confident imperialism. But, usually, the view has been sterner. Indeed, the more closely the Edwardians have been scrutinised, the more they seem prone to well-merited anxieties. Far from delivering a new security, their abandonment of ‘splendid isolation’ brought the uncertain liabilities of the Triple Entente and an uneasy dependence on Japan in East Asia. The cost of defending their naval supremacy was a furious arms race with Germany, and ended in a strategic withdrawal from the Mediterranean Sea. The Edwardian economy lost ground on productivity, and real incomes stagnated – one cause of large-scale industrial unrest in the last years of peace. The scale of mass poverty revealed by contemporary inquiry was an indictment of both ‘national efficiency’ and social justice. Domestic stability was threatened by fierce divisions over tariffs, taxation and the constitution. The revival of the Irish Question after 1910 highlighted the failure of parliamentary government to resolve the future of Ulster and raised the spectre of civil war in the British Isles.

The British Empire, wrote Adam Smith in 1776, ‘has hitherto been not an empire, but the project of an empire; not a gold mine but the project of a gold mine’. A hundred years later, his condemnation might have softened. But, viewed as a political or administrative entity, British imperialism remained just such a project: unfinished, untidy, a mass of contradictions, aspirations and anomalies. Defined as the exercise of sovereign power, or the unfettered enjoyment of imperial rule (the criteria still favoured by many historians), the British Empire in its heyday was largely a sham. Over much that was most commercially or strategically valuable, it could claim no authority; over much that was useless, its hold was complete. Of the half-dozen states whose loyalty was most vital to British world power in 1914, only one could be given direct orders from London.

Partly for this reason, I have preferred the term ‘British world-system’ to the conventional ‘Empire’. The term was given authority by the shrewdest historian of modern British imperialism. It is also meant to convey (the real theme of the book) that British imperialism was a global phenomenon; that its fortunes were governed by global conditions; and that its power in the world derived rather less from the assertion of imperial authority than from the fusing together of several disparate elements. Amid the colossal expansion of scholarly work on the history of empire, it has been easy to lose sight of the geopolitical facts on which its cohesion depended.

For more than a century after c.1840, the British Empire formed the core of a larger British ‘world-system’ managed from London. This book is a study of the rise, fortunes and fall of that system.

The British world-system was not a structure of global hegemony, holding in thrall the non-Western world. Except in particular places and at particular times, such hegemonic authority eluded all British leaders from Lord Palmerston to Churchill. But the British ‘system’ (a term that contemporaries sometimes made use of) was much more than a ‘formal’ territorial empire, and certainly global in span. It embraced an extraordinary range of constitutional, diplomatic, political, commercial and cultural relationships. It contained colonies of rule (including the huge ‘sub-empire’ of India), settlement colonies (mostly self-governing by the late nineteenth century), protectorates, condominia (like the Sudan), mandates (after 1920), naval and military fortresses (like Gibraltar and Malta), ‘occupations’ (like Egypt and Cyprus), treaty-ports and ‘concessions’ (Shanghai was the most famous), ‘informal’ colonies of commercial pre-eminence (like Argentina), ‘spheres of interference’ (a useful term coined by Sellars and Yeatman) like Iran, Afghanistan and the Persian Gulf, and (not least) a rebellious province at home. There was no agreed term for this far-flung conglomerate. This may have been why contemporaries sometimes found it convenient to fall back on that protean phrase ‘the Pax Britannica’ once it came into use after 1880, as if the ‘British Peace’ formed a geographical zone.

Until the mid-1920s, it had seemed as if the profound dislocation of economic and political life unleashed by the war would defeat all attempts to devise a new equilibrium. After 1925, the outlook improved. A new economic order took shape in Europe, underwritten by the flow of American investment. Franco-German reconciliation lifted the threat of a new European struggle. The impetus behind anti-colonial nationalism slackened off. The world economy recovered the vigour of its pre-war decade. The volume of trade surpassed the levels of 1913. As the age of extremes receded, liberalism and ‘moderation’ seemed in the ascendant. But it proved a false dawn. In October 1929, the Wall Street ‘crash’ signalled the return of economic uncertainty, followed soon after by the huge fall in commodity prices, the sharp contraction of trade, deep rural impoverishment and mass unemployment. The crisis of capitalism became the crisis of liberalism. The survival of nations and their internal stability demanded illiberal solutions: protection, autarky, or aggressive imperialism (to those with the means); a retreat to the land, exiguous self-sufficiency, or desperate rural rebellion to those without power. In culture, as in trade, free exchange was devalued in so hostile a climate. Utopianism, despair and nostalgia were its more typical products.

This massive upheaval in global conditions held huge implications for the British world-system. In the late 1920s, its liberal apologists had talked of a ‘third British Empire’, based not on rule but on the growth of cooperation and partnership in a world-spanning ‘Commonwealth’.

The most curious aspect of the British reaction to Suez, once the immediate drama had passed, was the mood of public indifference. There was no grand debate about Britain's place in the world, no official inquiry into what had gone wrong. Neither main party showed any desire to rake over the details, perhaps because even those most against Eden's policy realised how deeply the crisis had divided British public opinion. Instead, all sides seemed anxious to treat it as an unfortunate accident, or as Eden's personal tragedy, as if the whole episode could be laid at his door. A desire to avoid any further embarrassment, or perhaps some awareness of what an inquiry might reveal, may explain this response. But what seems even more curious is that, after such a defeat, British leaders still showed an extraordinary faith that, with its sails duly trimmed, Britain must remain a world power. For, despite the conventional view that they hastened to scuttle their remaining commitments and fall back upon Europe, the reverse was the case. The dream of a British world-system, updated and modernised, haunted Harold Macmillan, prime minister 1957–63. A less robust version, more anaemic and ethereal, bewitched Harold Wilson, who led the Labour government of 1964–70. The rapidity with which what remained of the Empire was wound up politically, far from being planned, was a painful surprise. Official opinion had intended a ‘managed’ withdrawal, with a ‘transfer of power’ to carefully chosen ‘moderates’.

In South Africa, the bond of empire was weaker and the strains on it much greater than in other colonies of settlement. The European whites were predominantly non-British; the indigenous blacks more numerous and resilient. The frontier wars of conquest lasted longer, were fought with greater ferocity and spread out over a whole sub-continent. For much of the nineteenth century, South Africa was viewed in London as a hybrid region: a composite of settler and ‘native’ states. Imperial policy veered unpredictably between a ‘Canadian’ solution of settler self-government and the ‘Indian’ solution of direct control – at least over the large zones where autonomous black communities survived. Partly as a result, on the white side certainly, the ‘Imperial Factor’ was regarded with profound mistrust.

South Africa was likely to be an awkward element in the imperial system at the best of times. The sub-continent was stuck in its own version of Catch-22. As long as the struggle between whites and blacks continued there could be no hope of devolving imperial authority to a settler government on the model of Canada, the Australian colonies or (most relevantly) New Zealand. The whites were too divided; and the blacks were too strong to be contained without the help of imperial troops. But every imperial effort to promote settler unity and impose a common policy towards black peoples and rulers roused fresh white animosity against London's ‘dictation’ – especially among the Afrikaner (or Boer) majority.

Amid the calamities that crashed over them in 1942, it was hardly surprising that British leaders, including Churchill, should have thought mainly in terms of survival. In the course of that year, they faced the prospect of defeat in the Middle East and the loss of Egypt and the Canal, a disaster which would have meant far greater losses than those incurred at Singapore. Without their main fighting force, their hope of keeping control over India – let alone of exploiting its resources and manpower – would have been fatally weakened. The Viceroy's ability to suppress the Quit India movement would not have been helped by the sight of the Germans in Cairo. At much the same time, they could only watch helplessly as the German advance into Russia threatened the collapse of the Soviet regime. A huge reordering of Eurasia seemed on the cards with the ‘world-island’ divided between the Nazi and Japanese empires. Preserving a maritime ‘rimland’ without the Middle East, India and Southeast Asia, and keeping Britain's connection with Australia and New Zealand, would have been all but impossible. The British world-system would have been a funeral pyre.

Of course, it was true that America's entry in December 1941 had brought massive relief and the assurance, perhaps, of survival in some form. In June 1942, the battle of Midway destroyed Japan's hopes of naval control of the Western Pacific.

In 1918, the British won an astonishing, almost fortuitous, victory, snatching an imperial triumph from what seemed, as late as June, the jaws of continental defeat. Their greatest imperial rivals had been broken, one (Russia) by the other (Germany). In the Armageddon of empires, British credit, domestic unity and imperial cohesion had been tested to the limit, but had survived. Of the three principal victor powers, the United States, France and Britain, the British seemed best placed to turn the making of peace to their advantage. They had made the largest territorial gains, in the Middle East, Africa and the Pacific and had most to bargain with. They had incurred heavy debts to the United States, but London's influence on post-war reconstruction was bound to be large, since it was from London that the European victor states had borrowed most. With their pre-war rivals in disarray, there seemed little danger that British authority would be challenged by colonial politicians – whose leverage had been cut down by peace – or client states, no longer able to play off two sides in the great game of imperial influence. Above all, perhaps, with the gravest threat to the balance of power in Europe extinguished by the defeat of the Central Powers, the British could hope to lower their naval guard (after the strain of the Anglo-German arms race) and ease the pre-war tensions over imperial defence created by their single-minded concentration on the North Sea.