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The chapter epigraph on page 270 is taken from The Siege of Krishnapur by J. G. Farrell, published by W&N Fiction, a division of the Orion Publishing Group, London. Reproduced with permission

ISBN: 978-0-67-091960-4

* In February 2006, the Archbishop of Canterbury apologized for the ‘shame and sinfulness of our predecessors’, explaining that ‘the body of Christ is not just a body that exists at any one time, it exists across history’. The previous year he had apologized for the sinfulness of missionaries in imposing Hymns Ancient and Modern on the people of Africa. The empire is very much alive in the Anglican Church. Indeed, the tensions between its different overseas sections may well be the death of it.

* And compare the language of political leaders. Martin Luther King has a dream in 1963 that ‘one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers’. In 2006, Tony Blair mumbles about ‘how we express our deep sorrow that it [slavery] could ever have happened and rejoice at the better times we live in today’.

* The explorer John Cabot, who had sailed to the New World on behalf of a group of Bristol merchants in 1497, had been dumbstruck by the quantities of fish, which seemed so abundant he wondered that his ship could move through them. The bounty lasted until the late twentieth century, when industrial fishing sucked the sea empty.

† ‘I suppose everyone is someone else’s Newfie,’ as one exasperated Canadian put it.

* ‘The Men Behind the Wire’, the rousing 1970s republican protest song against the British government’s policy of interning suspected IRA activists without trial, contained the verses:

Not for them a judge and jury

Nor indeed a trial at all

But being Irish means you’re guilty

So we’re guilty one and all

Round the world the truth will echo

Cromwell’s men are here again

England’s name again is sullied

In the eyes of honest men.

The internment policy was a direct inheritance from colonial experiences elsewhere in the world and was a political disaster in Ireland.

* In India, for example, the British monopolized salt and then devised a hugely profitable tax on it. Salt smuggling was prevented by a Customs Line in the form of a Great Hedge, which eventually ran for over 2,000 miles.

* He was killed on a beach in Hawaii, or, as he preferred to call the place, the Sandwich Islands, after his patron the Earl of Sandwich. The Hawaiians scraped the flesh from Cook’s body and burned it, distributing the bones among local chieftains. Cook’s second in command eventually persuaded them to allow him to reunite the skeleton and bury it at sea.

* The disease, whose effects included depression, lassitude, fever, diarrhoea, ulcers, acute pain in the joints, paralysing toothache and bulging eyes, was caused by a lack of vitamin C.

* A macaroni was a fop or dandy. As the Oxford Magazine had it while Banks was away at sea: ‘There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up amongst us. It is called a Macaroni. It talks without meaning, it smiles without pleasantry, it eats without appetite, it rides without exercise, it wenches without passion.’ Apparently, the condition was caused by too much of a liking for pasta.

* Flinders had been inspired to go to sea after reading Robinson Crusoe, which James Joyce famously took to be the great text of empire. Crusoe’s transition from shipwrecked mariner to