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the Transvaal at the head of a force of badly equipped police and assorted riff-raff volunteers. The idea had been that, when they saw the British column, the Uitlanders – the largely British prospectors who had poured into the Transvaal to prospect for gold, and who paid most of the taxes yet were denied the vote – would stage their own rebellion against the Boers: the Jameson Raid was to be the detonator that fired the explosion. But the rising never came, and four days after he had thundered into the Boers’ territory, Jameson ingloriously surrendered to them. This ineptly planned and incompetently executed pantomime had several consequences, one of which was to force Rhodes’s resignation from the premiership of the Cape Colony and another of which was to lay the ground for the South African War between the Boers and the British, which cost many thousands of the lives of his precious Anglo-Saxons.

It is estimated that between 1815 and 1912 some 21.5 million people emigrated from the British Isles – there can hardly have been a family that did not have a relative living somewhere overseas. The biggest single group are believed to have been drawn to the United States, but millions more settled in the empire, and in so doing created a British diaspora. The imperial historian Ronald Hyam estimates that by 1900 two-thirds of the English-speaking people lived outside Europe. Most had been driven to leave by need: when Robert Louis Stevenson sailed on an emigrant ship from Glasgow in the summer of 1879 he described it as a ‘shipful of failures, the broken men of England’, whom any casual observer might well have assumed were all ‘absconding from the law’. But there were plenty of other motives, too. Some joined gold rushes, established farms or ran trading stations. Others went to serve the Crown, still more hoped to win one: another Kipling short story, ‘The Man Who Would Be King’, tells of a couple of one-time soldiers who establish themselves as monarchs in the remotest corner of Afghanistan. Needless to say, it all goes wrong, but anyone deterred could turn instead to the great fictional model for those with monarchical ambitions, Daniel Defoe’s story of a man washed up on a tropical island, Robinson Crusoe. ‘How like a King I look’d,’ says Crusoe as he marvels at the island he controls; James Joyce thought him ‘the true symbol of the British conquest’. (In mid-nineteenth-century Borneo, James Brooke established himself as an authentic ‘white rajah’. The second rajah of Sarawak, for whom the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography summons a wheelbarrow-load of adjectives – ‘brave, ruthless, decisive, pragmatic, austere, dignified, parsimonious, reserved, and self-sufficient’ – ruled as ‘both an English gentleman and an oriental despot’. The third rajah walked away from the kingdom in the 1940s.) For most of the remainder who left Britain, life in the empire promised freedom of one sort or another – from class, from creditors, from penury, from religious oppression. Living abroad offered a better life, at lower cost. For many there was something about the mere act of leaving the ordered society in which they had grown up which allowed them to breathe more freely. ‘I have never felt entirely myself till I had put at least the Channel between my native country and me,’ as Somerset Maugham put it.

How to manage this restlessness? Britain’s overseas possessions did not make the Statue of Liberty’s offer to ‘your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’, which appealed so much to the hungry Irish desperate to escape British rule. The British Empire was scattered across the globe, and different parts of it were deemed to have different attractions and different functions. West Africa, with its sweaty climate and sickly reputation, was a great deal less appealing than the bright, airy highlands of Kenya, for example, and throughout the early years of the twentieth century the leader of the Kenyan settler community, Hugh Cholmondeley, third Baron Delamere, fought to keep the place in the hands of a certain class of white