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By Root 1309 0

the cooler weather of winter arrived, the survivors would gather together to celebrate their achievement in simply being alive. A pyramid in the cemetery marks the grave of Elizabeth Jane Barwell, the great beauty of late eighteenth-century Calcutta, who threw a ball into hilarity by confidentially telling each of her young British suitors beforehand what colour dress she would be wearing: a dozen young men are said to have attended, all in an identical shade of pea-green. Another tomb contains the remains of four infant children from a single family, not one of whom lived to the age of two. Crows squawk in the mango trees. A child’s home-made kite – a sheet of rice-paper on the thinnest of wooden frames – hangs from a wall, the pye-dogs scuttle from their shade when you approach and sulk at a distance. Few visitors call.

All that is now left of the British Empire to which India belonged are fourteen territories, political curiosities scattered across the oceans of the world, known perhaps to stamp collectors or corporate lawyers seeking a tax haven. They are mainly islands and bring no discernible benefit to Britain, which seems to regard them as a form of charity work, dispatching a governor ready to turn out at formal events in a plumed hat (as long as the local people will pay for such a thing) and happy to let the Girl Guides camp in the gardens of the Residence. Should an enemy menace or a hurricane strike, the old imperial power promises to send (and does send) warships and aid. Given a world map, most British citizens could not even stick a pin within a thousand miles of most of them (the Pitcairn, Henderson, Ducie and Oeno islands, anyone?). Many of them are inaccessible (it is a twelve-day journey by smelly fishing boat from Cape Town to Edinburgh of the Seven Seas, almost the only settlement on Tristan da Cunha – population 263 – and there’s a good chance the sea may not allow you to disembark when you get there). But Edinburgh of the Seven Seas is a true metropolis by comparison with the Pacific island of Pitcairn, which has a total headcount of only fifty, descendants of mutineers on the Bounty and electors in the world’s smallest democracy. The only thing these places have in common is the judgement they have made that they cannot make a go of things on their own. Occasionally, some Napoleon of Nowhere blusters about independence, but even on Bermuda, which has the largest population of these imperial relics, there is no great appetite for freedom. The empire on which the sun never set is reduced to a total overseas population of 200,000. On the other hand, between them these places do provide over 90 per cent of the biodiversity which Britain lays claim to.

There are further reminders of empire in the Union Jack which flutters in the corners of the flags of countries like Fiji, New Zealand and Tuvalu. Millions of people of British descent in Australia, Canada, New Zealand and South Africa (and thousands of settlers in places like Kenya and Zimbabwe) are a living legacy. Schools, solid government buildings, ornate railway stations, out-of-place cottages and tin-roofed neo-Gothic churches testify to the former presence of sun-burned foreigners in improbable places. War graves are scrupulously maintained. But the physical memorials to earnest African missionaries, pickled Malayan planters and cricket-playing doctors on Pacific islands crack and tumble. The empire lives on less in stone and masonry than in the conventions of international trade and law and in the language of diplomacy, science and travel. It is evident in the mace which sits in parliaments across Africa; in the kilted Chinese who mark New Year’s Eve in Hong Kong by playing the bagpipes; in the dusty monkey-skin hats of King’s African Rifles veterans on Remembrance Sunday in Kenya; in the ‘tuck shops’ at Pakistani filling stations; in the very stones of Jerusalem (for it was the colonial Governor, Ronald Storrs, who decreed that all new building must be finished in local stone, which is why the city retains its magical golden colour); in games