Britannia rules the waves

I have decided to teach myself about the British Empire. Now I'm done with my history degree, I have the freedom to read whatever popular history books I want in my spare time. So I picked up Niall Ferguson's Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World. It's a race through 400 years of colonial history, but what fun! I expected to read all sorts of terrible stories about slave-driving and ethnic extermination, but no - Niall has taken the brave decision to make the British Empire look good. Like I said, what fun!

He acknowledges all the terrible things about the Empire, but then gives a big yawn and gets on to the more interesting patriotic stuff. Here's a few things I've learnt:

1) In 1775, the trade revenue from Jamaica was fives times greater than all the American colonies put together. There was barely any support in London for the war against the American rebels. Why shouldn't our fellow overseas Britons have their own government? And, anyway, they had no economic value to us.

2) The Boston Tea Party was not a protest against tax on tea - it was a protest against a reduction on tax that meant the East India Company decided to unload all its surplus in America rather than in Britain where excise was greater. As one American said at the time, "Will not posterity be amazed when they are told that the present distraction took its rise from the parliament's taking off a shilling duty on a pound of tea, and imposing three pence, and call it a more unaccountable frenzy, and more disgraceful to the annals of America, than that of witchcraft?"

3) In the seventeenth century, the famous East India Company (which later took control of the whole of India) struggled to compete with the Dutch East India Company, which was better organised and better financed. The solution? A merger (of sorts): the 1688 "glorious revolution", which made the Duke of the Netherlands the King of England.

4) When slave-trading in the Empire was ended in 1807, it was met with protests not from plantation oweners, but from African chiefs (!) who relied on selling Africans as slaves for their wealth. As King Gezo put it, "The slave trade has been the ruling principle of my people. It is the source of their glory and wealth. Their songs celebrate their victories and the mother lulls the child to sleep with notes of triumph over an enemy reduced to slavery. Can I, by signing a treaty, change the sentiments of a whole people?"

The fact is that this unashamedly Brito-centric account keeps surprising me. This has a lot to tell us about how far the study of history has come. When the post-colonial narrative has become the dominant one; when there are calls for an official apology from the government to descendants of slaves; when the suppressed narrative is the nationalistic one - that's when we can be proud. This book is a testimony to that progress.

To end, I thought I'd just add a little quote from 1854. It's scary because it sounds an awful lot like the attitude of the West in 2006. Do we really live in a post-imperial world?

"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." (Macleod Wylie)

Britons never, never will be slaves...