The British Empire and Victorian Britainieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_9235.pdf · bonds) Economic role....
Transcript of The British Empire and Victorian Britainieas.unideb.hu/admin/file_9235.pdf · bonds) Economic role....
Sam
Alexander’s
book cover
1880
Queen Victorian and her Indian servant Abdul Karim
(the „Munshi”)
„I am so very
fond of him. He
is so good and
gentle and
understanding,
and is a real
comfort to me”
John Everett Millais: The Boyhood of
Raleigh (1870)
Map of
the
British
Empire
1888
The British Empire in 1939:
By 1914: 400 million inhabitants
(total population of the world: 1.800.000)
Colonial acquisitions and losses1819 Singapore
1821 Gold Coast
1829 Western Australia
1842 Hong Kong
1846 North Borneo
1886 Burma
1895 Kenya
1899 Sudan
The end:
1947 India
1960 Nigeria
1962 Jamaica
1963 Kenya, Malaysia
1965 Singapore
1970 Fiji
1980 Zimbabwe
1997 Hong Kong
1949: Commonwealth
Structure of the Empire
colonial administration
dominions – India – other dependencies
mandatory areas + informal empire (Egypt)
Colonial Office (1768-1782)
1854: New Colonial Office + India Office
no general plan
“We seem, as it were, to have conquered half the
world in a fit of absence of mind” (J. Seeley)
“The British were not an imperially minded
people; they lacked both a theory of empire
and the will to engender and implement one”
(Max Beloff)
“Colonization is not only a manifest expedient
for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain.
God seems to hold out his finger to us over the
sea…I think this country is now suffering
grievously under an excessive accumulation of
capital, which, having no field for profitable
operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with
itself”. (Coleridge)
Abolitionist medallion:
‘Am I not a man and a brother?’
1807: slave trade
abolished
1814: 750.000
signatures
Josiah Wedgwood
design
1833: slavery abolished
in the Empire
Emigration
Empire: outlet for all sorts
(Ford Madox Brown: The
Last of England, 1855)
1815-1930: 10 million
emigrants from the British
Isles
1830s: 10.000 per month
Financial role (railway
bonds)
Economic role
The shrinking of the world
Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne: 80 Days Around
the World, 1873
imperial networks of communication,
commerce, transportation and travelling
globalisation
railways – Roman roads
Suez Canal (1869)
Lansdowne Bridge
Material presence of the Empire
Tea, coffee, sugar, silk, spices
Exotic plants introduced
British Museum: full of colonial loot
(Elgin marbles, mummies, Sumerian winged
bulls, Niniveh stone slabs)
Architecture: ‘colonial style’
Colonial Office, London
Chennai (Madras) Museum
Royal pavilion, Brighton
the Royal Pavilion as an Indian
hospital 1914-6
The Music Room
Curzon Hall, Dhaka
Palace of the Mysore maharajah
Great Exhibition
(1851),
Shakespeare
exhibit
Imaginative presence of the
Empire
“And what should they know of England who
only England know?” (Kipling, „The English
Flag”)
Thomas Jones Barker (1863):
The Secret of England’s Greatness
manumission
Spiridone Roma: The East Offering Its Gifts to
Britannia (1778)
After 1857
New sense of imperial
mission
Disraeli (PM)
“marketing” the Empire
“There is a destiny now possible to us, the
highest ever set before a nation... Will you
youths of England make your country again a
royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the
world a source of light, a centre of peace and
mistress of learning and of the Arts..? ... This is
what England must do or perish; she must
found colonies as fast and as far as she is able,
formed of her most energetic and worthiest
men; ...teaching these her colonists that ...their
first aim is to advance the power of England by
land and sea.” (John Ruskin, 1870)
“When the contrast between the influence of a
Christian and a Heathen government is
considered; when the knowledge of the
wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect
on the unspeakable blessings to millions that
would follow the extension of British rule, it is
not ambition but benevolence that dictates the
desire for the whole country. Where the
providence of God will lead, one state after
another will be delivered into his stewardship”
(Macleod Wylie, 1854)
Empire Day (from 1898)
Empire day school tableau, with
Britannia
Presence of the Empire
Popular culture: displays, dioramas, museums,
ethnographic collections, zoos
Music halls, popular theatre, songs (Britannia,
1885)
travel writing
Education: school textbooks: the creation of
imperial heroes (heroic poetry)
advertising
Pears soap ad
Gilbert and
Sullivan:
Utopia, Ltd
(1893)
King Paramount