Empire_ What Ruling the World Did to the British - Jeremy Paxman [175]
* They would have been supervised by refugees from America who had stayed loyal to the Crown during the War of Independence and now needed another place to live.
* Montgomery Scott – the wonder-working ‘Scotty’ of the Starship Enterprise – stands for all of them. A small plaque inside the town museum in Linlithgow marks his supposed birthplace. The fact that Scotty will not be born for a couple of centuries is neither here nor there: there is a well-established pattern of Scotsmen going where no man has gone before.
* A marriage consummated at home in the construction of the new Somerset House, the magnificent neo-classical building erected in the heart of London to allay an anxiety that the capital had too few grand edifices for Britain’s swelling status. The close relationship between state and learning was reflected in its occupants: the navy had the west wing, various tax and supply offices had other parts, and their neighbours included the Royal Society, the Royal Academy and the Society of Antiquaries.
* The contrast is with empires like the Russian or Austro-Hungarian, or even, latterly, the absurd Italian Empire, which were essentially made by armies rather than navies.
† Macabre tales of how all the officers of the Bona Esperanza had been found as blocks of ice still seated around a table on board turned out to be the work of an imaginative reporter: they had actually been discovered lying on a beach. Astonishing stories of remote places became a staple of the imperial experience.
‡ Its territory of Rupert’s Land comprised about 15 per cent of the entire acreage of North America, so when the Dominion of Canada was formed, the company was, by a long margin, the biggest private landowner. Nowadays its intrepid history is reduced to a chain of department stores selling, among much else, its distinctive green, red, yellow and blue colours knitted into hats, scarves and teddy-bear jackets.
* The headquarters was demolished, but contemporary accounts depict a splendid building, inside which a white marble statue showed Britannia ‘seated on a globe by the sea-shore, receiving homage from three female figures, intended for Asia, Africa, and India. Asia offers spices with her right hand, and with her left leads a camel; India presents a large box of jewels, which she holds half open; and Africa rests her hand upon the head of a lion. The Thames, as a river-god, stands upon the shore, a labourer appears cording a large bale of merchandise, and ships are sailing in the distance’ (Knight, ed., London, vol. V, pp. 61–2).
* The factory – the world’s largest legal opium facility – still exists, exporting most of its production to western pharmaceutical companies. The management does not encourage visitors, but those who have managed to get inside talk of a serious monkey problem. Fortunately the creatures do not impede the production process very much because they’re addicted to opium and spend most of the day lying around.
* The closest acknowledgement is a single sentence: ‘Reflective of the times in which it traded, the Group has led the way in many businesses and has helped bring prosperity to the region,’ which must have taken the corporate public-relations department a good few meetings to compose.
* And continues to fester. Residents of Hong Kong enjoy greater freedom and prosperity than the vast majority of their mainland Chinese counterparts. But the official history of the place, and the displays at the Hong Kong Museum, bristle with resentment. A British trade delegation to China in November 2010 triggered a minor diplomatic spat when they wore red paper poppies in memory of British war dead, without realizing that poppies on British lapels were unlikely to inspire affection.
* James Matheson