The British Empire: Echoes of Britannia's Rule

The Diamond Jubilee of Queen Victoria was the high noon of the British Empire. On 22 June 1897, the elderly Queen gave thanks to God for her reign of 60 years. Her British subjects joined in a festival of celebration and self-congratulation. The British Empire in Jubilee Year was the largest Empire the world had known. It was 91 times the area of the mother country, a quarter of the earth's surface. In their 'jubilation,' the British compared themselves to Imperial Rome, and assumed that God was on their side. As they watched the great Jubilee military procession through London, they cheered the 'Soldiers of the Queen' who had fought 70 colonial wars during the 60 years Victoria had been on the throne.

The British Empire virtually began in the islands of the West Indies - and for 200 years they were its richest possession. The wealth of the islands came from sugar cane which provided sugar to sweeten the tea tables of Britain, and rum to enliven its taverns. To work the plantations millions of slaves were brought from Africa - and on this trade ports like Bristol, Liverpool and London grew rich. Huge fortunes were made by the planters who came home from the West Indies to buy country estates, to build magnificent houses, to marry into the aristocracy, and to push their interest in Parliament. To protect the sugar islands from rival European powers hundreds of thousands of British soldiers and sailors died. Great admirals like Benbow, Vernon, and Rodney made their names there - and Nelson fought his first battles. The plantation system was efficient and flourishing, but an Empire built on sugar could only last as long as its principal support - the labour of the slaves - was taken for granted...

For over a century the world's second most populous country was run by a commercial firm with headquarters in the City of London - the East India Company. Its merchants first went to India in search of exotic spices, but they ended up by supplanting the mighty Mogul dynasty. The Company built new cities like Calcutta, Madras and Bombay. Young men like Warren Hastings flocked to India to make an easy fortune. Relations between the races were carefree. Inter-marriage was common. The Company had its own army and fought epic wars to unify the sub-continent. In the hills of Afghanistan, it also suffered one of the worst defeats ever inflicted on a British army. And in 1857, after two and a half centuries, the East India Company was destroyed by the great Mutiny which almost lost Britain her Indian Empire.

In 1759 Britain won Canada in a 15-minute battle with the French outside Quebec. It was a territory larger than India, over a million square miles, inhabited by 60,000 disgruntled Frenchmen and some scattered tribes of Red Indians. For the next 100 years the British were hard put to hold Canada against the aggressive expansionism of the United States which had broken away from the Empire to become its most relentless enemy. The British Army stood guard along a 1,500-mile frontier, the longest and most vulnerable in the Empire - in fact it was Wellington who said Canada was 'all frontier and nothing else!' But under the protection of the British Army hundreds of thousands of immigrants, driven out of the British Isles by poverty and famine, were to arrive in Canada to carve a hard new life out of the wilderness...

At the beginning of the 19th century no continent seemed to Europeans so mysterious, so fascinating, as Africa. There were legends about great wealth and great kingdoms in the interior. The abolition of slavery by the British - but not by other nations - provided fresh impetus to exploration. And the feats of the great missionary explorer David Livingstone stirred Victorian Britain. In southern Africa the British took over the Cape of Good Hope from the Dutch to protect their route to India. The Dutch, fretful of British rule, began to trek northwards but came into collision with the warlike Zulu nation. At Blood River the Zulus suffered a terrible defeat - but were not conquered. The pattern of conflict is set: the land hunger of the white men - Dutch and British - versus the ancestral rights of the African. But - as will emerge in a later programme - the pattern of conflict will eventually widen into war between the white men themselves.

With the Indian Mutiny a thing of the past, the Raj is born, and in 1877 Victoria is proclaimed Queen Empress. The impact of Britain becomes more evident: canals bring life to deserts; railways criss-cross the country and help unify the subcontinent; the memsahib arrives. Civil servants flock out, often to be doctor, judge, vet and administrator all rolled into one. Bureaucracy flourishes, spawning such titles as 'Inspector of Steam Boilers and Prime Movers.' At the very top of the Raj reigned the Viceroy. In 1899 it was Lord Curzon - 'a very superior person' - and one of the most dazzling and controversial figures ever to hold the position. In the mountains of the North West Frontier, fighting continued between British troops and the fierce tribesmen who refused to accept the authority of anyone. In 1911, many of these troops paraded at Delhi in one of the biggest displays of British pomp and power ever staged - the great Durbar when George V was crowned King Emperor.

Africa held two gateways to India - Suez, and the staging post at the Cape - and Britain gained control of both. In holding them, she was sucked into trouble. With Britain's hands tied at either end of the Dark Continent, other European nations began to grab slices of Africa for themselves. It looked as if they might get the lion's share until Cecil Rhodes determined at all costs (and he held the monopoly of South Africa's diamonds) to carve a path for a British Cape-to-Cairo railway. Opposed to Rhodes was President Kruger of the Transvaal. Kruger, the leader of the god-fearing Boer farmers, found himself sitting on most of Africa's gold. Rhodes's attempts to win the strategic heartland of Africa, combined with the implacable demands of Alfred Milner and Joseph Chamberlain, culminated in the Anglo-Boer War of 1899-1902. British prestige, already tarnished in the eyes of the world, was further diminished as the Boers defied British might. In 1901 Victoria died. An age was over.

Until the Boer War the British basked in Imperial glory: domination of the seas, world power, world Empire, peace and progress. But there were some who saw dangerous weaknesses; educational, social and industrial development lagged sadly behind the new state of Imperial Germany. British naval guns missed their target twice in every three shots; the Army was more fitted for fighting ill-armed natives than a modern European foe. Yet by 1918 the German challenge had been defeated; the British Empire had united and acted as a single, collective power - a super state. But in this moment of triumph, the Empire stood at the turning point of its destiny.

One consequence of the British Empire was the emergence of the Australian 'character' - a half-legendary figure fashioned from the struggle against a harsh environment and the influence of imperial power. He was born not in the growing cities on the sea-board but in the Outback, somewhere beyond 'the Black Stump,' a mythical landmark at the end of the known world. The Australian character was supposedly independent, despising authority. But in the Great War, Australia sent a volunteer army of 330,000 to fight for King and Empire. The Australian legend found its climax in the defeat at Gallipoli.

The meeting between the ideas and culture the British took overseas, and those they encountered, is a recurring theme of Empire. Nowhere was this clash more dramatic than in Africa where the British took tremendous belief in their way of life, and were often baffled by African ways. To Africans, the laws, rituals and costumes of the British seemed strange. Yet British values were adopted - or adapted - while others were rejected. This film, the third set in Africa, is about the meeting of two worlds.

Joseph Conrad, the sea captain who became a novelist, wrote of "the bewitching breath of the Eastern waters... the gift of endless dreams. In the China Seas the British dreamt dreams of endless power, endless wealth and endless superiority. The heart of their dreams was Singapore, the gateway to the East, the fulcrum of Asian trade - and, by the 1930s, an impressive fortress. In December 1941, the rising Empire of Japan attacked Malaya, and inflicted a swift and humiliating defeat on the British. Singapore fell on 15 February 1942. The dreaming was over. The illusion of British power and superiority was shattered.

Even in the early Victorian era, idealistic Britons foresaw that one day India would be capable of self-government. The British themselves fostered Indian political aspirations. In 1885 a Scotsman, Allan Octavian Hume, founded the Congress movement. The Great War of 1914-18 proved the turning point. Indians felt they had won their title to nationhood on the battlefield. British concessions were never big enough to satisfy Indian leaders like Gandhi and Nehru and the British were soon locked in a fierce struggle with the nationalists. To get themselves out of India after the Second World War, the British chose as their last viceroy the kind of single-minded man of action who had got them there in the first place - a Robert Clive in reverse - Lord Louis Mountbatten.

After India was granted independence from British rule in 1947 a succession of other countries pressed towards the same goal. The pace was fastest and most furious in Africa. In 1957 the Colonial Empire in Africa was intact - ten years later it had disappeared - except for rebel-administrated Rhodesia, and Swaziland - soon to be independent. In those ten years, 12 African States had gained their independence and joined the Commonwealth. Where there had been little or no white settlement the process was comparatively painless, but wherever the British presence had held the balance - as between European and African in Kenya - withdrawal was to prove more difficult. In these cases, British soldiers were called in to play as vital a role in the dissolution of Empire and its transformation into a new multi-racial Commonwealth, as they had in its creation.