ramseyoptom wrote:

jamest wrote:Can somebody explain the logistics of all this, to me? I've never understood how such a small nation could conquer and control such a vast empire, for so long. How was that even possible?

The answer: The Royal Navy.

One cannot control vast swathes of land by sea alone.

I understand that Britain had a powerful navy - though if you consider how far-stretched it must have been, then it wasn't really that powerful in any given locale other than around Britain itself.

Father O Rielly wrote:When you have a machine gun, and the natives have spears, the contest is quite skewed.

Of course, though such devastating weapons emerged relatively-late within the context of 'The Empire' itself.

India, with its huge population, was a problem, and Britain never did really directly rule the entire subcontinent. They made deals with sub-states, and ruled some key areas. Even at that, they depended enormously on local support. But it was a little tenuous, certainly by the mid twentieth century. The Far East went down like a house of cards under the Japanese in 1941, and India only stuck around because of the promise of independence after WW2. By the time the US ordered Britain out of Egypt during the Suez Crisis in 1956, it was obvious the imperial game was over.

I'm more-interested in hearing reasons for why/how the empire was possible/developed, than in why it ended.

If it all still seems a stretch, jamest, you can look at it from another angle. The world was quite a different place when the empire has forming. By today’s standards, it was very sparsely populated, and underdeveloped. Many people, throughout the Americas, most of Africa, and parts of Asia and the Pacific, lived an essentially hunter-gatherer existence. Relatively small European powers, with just slightly better technology, could go a long way under those circumstances. Britain may have been a small country, but it was significant in the context of the times.

Sea power was one of those technological elements that went a long way. It allowed for the control of trade, and hence the enrichment of the home country. It also denied the use of the sea to others, very useful in times of conflict. Yes, the RN was spread thinly, but so were others, even more so in many cases.

What is often forgotten in the modern age is that upto probably the early 20C is that the normal highway for trade and travel was the sea, be it coastal or oceanic, most major trading centres are based on the coast. Roads were abysmal and most trade went by sea.

To illustrate this when Isambard Kingdom Brunel (sorry I felt I should just give one of the greatest engineers of the 19C his full name) ordered some railway engines for the Great Western Railway from Robert Stephenson in Newcastle the trains were delivered by sea, down the east coat of England, to London. One ship sank and the remains including railway engine have just been found in the last 10 years.

One of the British Empires worst episodes, the Opium Wars with China, the British desire to export its production of opium into China, was enforced by the Royal Navy, very little land fighting as such took place, mainly the reduction of Chinese coastal forts.

One of its best episodes, the enforcement of the abolition of the slave trade took place with the same force.

Control of the sea, again upto the 20C, gives the ability to place armed forces more or less where ever and when ever you want.

So a strong naval presence, again upto the 20C gives you, as already mentioned, control of trade, and this is what most of Britains wars have been about. Against the Spanish we wanted the gold from South America (there was also the religeous element). Against the Dutch the Spice trade. Against the Spanish(again), and French the triangular trade (slaves- sugar- manufactures). Against anybody else - well it was just because we didn't like you.

Just time for a very quick comment.

It's helpful to step away from the idea that the British Empire was a kind of monolithic, tightly controlled set of colonies, surrounding a metropolitan core. Colonies of settlement, such as Australia or Canada, were very different in character from colonial possessions such as India. The former type, once established, had strong motives of their own for maintaining the integrity of the empire, whereas British rule in India depended largely on the coincidence between British imperial interests and those of indigenous elites. The British transformation of traditional tax collectors (zemindars) under the Mughals into a landowning class directly involved in agricultural production is a case in point.

Britain could never have maintained its empire without exploiting social divisions and important economic interests within its possessions. When these could no longer be contained or satisfied under British rule, the imperial project tended to crumble, as happened in the American colonies in the 18th century and the Raj in the 20th.

I also fully endorse ramseyoptom's point about British finances. I frequently recommend John Brewer's terrific book The Sinews of Power: War, Money and the English State 1688-1783, in which the author charts the rise of what he terms the 'fiscal-military state'. The question of how Britain was able to develop the kinds of centralised, capitalistic state structures that were crucial to its empire-building is fascinating in itself, but not easy to address in such a short post.

Father O Rielly wrote:The British Empire- did it produce things of enduring value, that still have significance in our world today? Or, was the empire just another example of imperialism and colonialism, that stunted the development of many in the third world in an attempt to aggrandize the mother country, and is best forgotten about?

Attitudes were quite different in those past centuries, and many sincerely thought they were doing something positive for the world in their colonizing efforts. The state of understanding of human psychology and physiology was not well developed compared to today, and so beliefs that are condemned today were often taken quite seriously back then.

Certainly we can say that English has become he common world language, and many have adopted the Westminster style of government, and other such institutions, to varying degrees.

On the other hand, many, like India for example, must wonder how things would have turned out if they had been able to follow their own course, and perhaps industrialize much sooner. Some places, like Egypt, certainly have no warm feelings of nostalgia.

The eighteenth and early nineteenth economic wars between Britain and France (then often characterized as comparable to that between Carthage and Rome) were solely meant to advance economic advancement by way of total victory by one side or the other: eliminating competitors, capturing new markets and the establishing of a world trade monopoly, including over European markets, all of which in turn also implied control of the high seas.

With its superior industrial base Britain defeated France every time, and with relative ease at that, except the once when France supported the Americans in their War of Independence (which instead plunged it into dire financial straits, so laying the groundwork for its 1789 Revolution). Britain decisively eliminated her nearest competitor and, in so far around 1850 the only economy effectively industrialized, went on to not only dominate the world but became its ‘workshop’ for two generations.

Thus by 1850 the economic consequences of the Industrial Revolution, with Britain at its centre, were already becoming clear, with the division between the ‘advanced’ – certain Western Europe regions and the USA – and the ‘underdeveloped’ countries the most lasting legacy; the latter turning under the pressure of Western imports and exports, or Western gunboats and military expeditions, into economic dependencies of the West. In fact, little defined the history of the twentieth century so potently.

Those governments appreciating the advantages of balanced economic development, or merely the gross disadvantages of dependence, were generally less than overjoyed at an international economy which effectively made Britain the chief industrial power, demanding protectionism, the Americans and Germans not the least.

India had a thriving cottage industry before being de-industrialized. With control over the oceans serviced by a string of strategic naval bases, Britain wasn’t really all that interested in occupying other lands per se: India was a major and precious exception though, partly in that it comprised the gateway into China and the rest of the East.

In Egypt, by way of illustration, Mohammed Ali hoped to turn the tables on the West by systematically transforming his country into a modern industrial economy (with French help) until British gunboats forced the country open to foreign trade, to the superior competition of the world’s industrialized sector.