Text 2. The British Empire

Read the text and do the tasks that follow:

The growth of the British Empire was due in large part to the ongoing competition for resources and markets which existed over a period of centuries between England and other European countries – Spain, France, and Holland. During the reign of Elizabeth I, England set up trading companies in Turkey, Russia, and the East Indies, explored the coast of North America, and established colonies there. In the early seventeenth century those colonies were expanded and the systematic colonization of Ulster in Ireland got underway.

Until the early nineteenth century, the primary purpose of Imperialist policies was to facilitate the acquisition of as much foreign territory as possible, both as a source of raw materials and in order to provide markets for British manufactured goods. Britain imported food and raw materials for her factories from all over the Empire, while selling back manufactured goods. A profitable balance of trade, it was believed, would provide the wealth necessary to maintain and expand the Empire.

After ultimately successful wars with the Dutch, the French, and the Spanish in the seventeenth century, Britain managed to acquire most of the eastern coast of North America, the St. Lawrence basin in Canada, territories in the Caribbean, stations in Africa for the acquisition of slaves, and important interests in India. The loss in the late eighteenth century of the American colonies influenced the so-called “swing to the East” (the acquisition of trading and strategic bases along the trade routes between India and the Far East).

In 1773 the British government was obliged to take over for the financially troubled East India Company, which had been in India since 1600, and by the end of the century Britain’s control over India extended into neighbouring Afghanistan and Burma.

Australia was the last continent to be discovered and developed, and its development was very slow until it had become of sufficient importance in itself to be the terminus of regular trade roads to and from the Old World.

The discovery of gold in Australia in 1851 attracted thousands of diggers from all over Europe. The powerful Australian aristocracy who saw in these immigrants a menace to their vast holdings of land, and found that the rush to the gold-fields made in hard to obtain shepherds and sheep shearers used their influence with the British government to have heavy taxes and all kinds of irksome police restrictions placed upon them.

The gold deposits gave out after a few years, but the population continued to increase. Sheep farming and mining continued to be important, but with the growth of railways considerable industries developed in Australia.

With the end, in 1815, of the Napoleonic Wars, the last of the great imperial wars which had dominated the eighteenth century, Britain found itself in an extraordinarily powerful position, though a complicated one. It acquired Dutch South Africa, for example, but found its interests threatened in India by the southern and eastern expansion of the Russians. (The protection of India from the Russians, both by land and by sea, would be a major concern of Victorian foreign policy). At this time, however, the empires of Britain’s traditional rivals had been lost or severely diminished in size, and its imperial position was unchallenged. In addition, Britain had become the leading industrial nation of Europe, and more and more of the world came under the domination of British commercial, financial, and naval power.

This state of affairs, however, was complex and far from stable. The old mercantile Empire was weakened during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries by a number of factors: by the abolition in 1807 of slavery in Britain itself, and by adoption of Free Trade, which minimized the influence of the oligarchies and monopolistic trading corporation, and by various colonial movements for greater political and commercial independence.

During the Victorian Age, however, the acquisition of territory and of further trading concessions continued (promoted by strategic considerations and aided or justified by philanthropic motivations), reaching its peak when Victoria had been crowned Empress of India. Advocates of the imperialist foreign policies justified them by invoking a paternalistic and racist theory which saw Imperialism as a manifestation of “the white man’s burden”. The implication, of course, was that the Empire existed not for the benefit – economic or strategic or otherwise – of Britain itself, but in order that primitive peoples, incapable of self-government, could, with British guidance, eventually become civilized. The truth of this doctrine was accepted naively by some, and hypocritically by others, but it served in any case to legitimize Britain’s acquisition of portions of central Africa and her domination, in concert with other European powers, of China.

At the height of the Empire, however, growing nationalist movements in various colonies presaged its dissolution. The process accelerated after World War I, although in the immediate post-was period the Empire actually increased in size as Britain became the “trustee” of former German and Turkish territories (Egypt, for example) in Africa and the Middle East. The English-speaking colonies, Canada and Australia, had already acquired dominion status in 1907, and in 1931 Britain and the self-governing dominions – Canada, Australia, New Zeland, South Africa, and the Irish Free State – agreed to form the “Commonwealth of Nations”. The Dominions came to the aid of Britain during World War II, but Britain’s losses to the Japanese in the Far East made it clear that it no longer possessed the resources to maintain the old order of things. The Americans were in any case ready, indeed anxious, to replace British influence in many areas of the world.

Britain’s hold on India had gradually loosened. India achieved qualified self-government in 1935 and independence in 1947. Ireland, which had at last won dominion status in 1921 after a brutal guerrilla war, achieved independence in 1949, although the northern province of Ulster remained a part of Great Britain. The process of decolonization in Africa and Asia accelerated during the late 1950’s. Today, any affinities which remain between former portions of the Empire are primarily linguistic or cultural rather than political.

Ex. 1. Answer the questions.

1. What was the growth of the British Empire due to?

2. When were the first English trading companies set up? Where did they establish colonies? What was the primary purpose of Imperialist policies until the early nineteenth century?

3. What caused the “swing” to the East in British colonial policy?

4. When did Australia become Britain’s colony? How did it develop?

5. What was Britain’s position in the world with the end of the Napoleonic Wars?

6. What factors weakened the British Empire?

7. What doctrine was the British Empire guided by during the Victorian Age to ligitimize Britain’s acquisition of portions of Central Africa and its domination of China?

8. What presaged the Empire’s dissolution?

9. What happened when Britain’s hold on her colonies had loosened?

Speak on the biggest British colonies and what they provided Britain with.