Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [147]
The empire was Britain’s main international preoccupation for a very long time. But instead of trying to grapple with the implications of the story of empire, the British seem to have decided just to ignore it. It is perhaps possible that this collective amnesia has nothing whatever to do with the country’s lamentable failure to find a comfortable role for itself in the world. But it seems unlikely. The most corrosive part of this amnesia is a sense that because the nation is not what it was, it can never be anything again. If only the British would bring a measure of clarity to what was done in their country’s name, they might find it easier to play a more useful and effective role in the world.
Notes
Introduction
6 ‘We shape our’: Winston Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons, 28 October 1943), quoted in Churchill, Never Give In!, p. 358.
6 Arthur Hocart spent: Hocart, Kingship.
6 ‘My country is’: Quoted in Hyam, Understanding the British Empire, p. 22. The king in question was Moshoeshoe.
9 ‘We are the finest’: ‘Confession of Faith, 1877’, Oxford, Bodleian Library of Commonwealth and African Studies at Rhodes House, MSS Afr. t. 1.
10 ‘What is he’: Hughes, Tom Brown’s School Days, p. 80.
11 ‘a typical public-school’: Henty, With Roberts to Pretoria, p. 6.
12 ‘We even think’: Wood, The Modern Playmate, p. 75.
13 ‘who was our’: Astley, Fifty Years of my Life in the World of Sport at Home and Abroad, vol. 1, p. 213.
13 ‘I think we’: James, Warrior Race, p. 434.
Chapter One
16 ‘This town is’: Talty, Empire of Blue Water, pp. 139–40.
16 ‘The Spaniards wondered’: Sir Thomas Modyford in Calendar of State Papers, Colonial: North America and the West Indies, 1574–1739, quoted in Cundall, Historic Jamaica, p. 51.
16 ‘in the Spaniard’s’: The phrase comes from E. Hickeringill, Jamaica Viewed and is quoted in Nuala Zahedieh, ‘The Wickedest City in the World: Port Royal, Commercial Hub of the Seventeenth-Century Caribbean’, in Shepherd, ed., Working Slavery, Pricing Freedom, p. 7.
17 ‘I know many’: Quoted in Whitfield, Sir Francis Drake, p. 149.
19 ‘to do and perform’: Morgan’s commission and instructions, BL, Add. MS 11268, fols. 68–72, quoted in Dictionary of National Biography entry, Nuala Zahedieh.
20 ‘the greatest mart’: Dictionary of National Biography entry, Nuala Zahedieh; quotation from Morgan’s relation, BL, Add. MS 11268, fol. 78.
21 ‘the buccaneers’ daring’: F. Gonzalez Suarez, Historia General de Republica del Ecuador, quoted in Rodger, The Command of the Ocean, p. 92.
22 ‘I don’t wonder’: Wright, ed., Lady Nugent’s Journal of her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, p. 57.
23 ‘the foundation of’: An African Merchant, A Treatise upon the Trade from Great Britain to Africa, humbly recommended to the Attention of Government, quoted in Hague, William Wilberforce, p. 119.
24 ‘[a slave named]’: Diary of Thomas Thistlewood, Friday, 30 July 1756, Lincolnshire County Archives.
25 ‘even the parsons’: J. Latimer, Annals of Bristol in the Eighteenth Century, quoted in Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, pp. 60–61.
26 ‘I have not’: G. Williams, History of the Liverpool Privateers, with an Account of the Liverpool Slave Trade, p. 594, quoted in Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 63.
26 ‘the mainspring of’: Malachi Postlethwayt quoted in J. F. Ross, ‘The Phases of British Commercial Policy in the Eighteenth Century’, Economica (1925), p. 143: see in Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, p. 51.
26 popular drama: For example, George Colman the Younger’s Inkle and Yarico, which was set in the West Indies, was the second most popular play of the last quarter of the eighteenth century, after The School for Scandal: Troost, ‘The Rise of the Comic Opera’.
27 ‘selling, bartering and’: Quoted in Hague, William Wilberforce, p. 118.
28 ‘what is all this’: Quoted in Walvin, Black Ivory, p. 17.
29 ‘We seem … to have’: Seeley, The Expansion of England, p. 12.
30 ‘to possesse ye welth’: Quinn, ed., The Voyages and Colonising Enterprises of Sir Humphrey Gilbert, vol. 1, p. 160.
30