The British Empire and Victorian Britain

\

Sam

Alexander’s

book cover

1880

Queen Victorian and her Indian servant Abdul Karim

(the „Munshi”)

„I am so very

fond of him. He

is so good and

gentle and

understanding,

and is a real

comfort to me”

John Everett Millais: The Boyhood of

Raleigh (1870)

Map of

the

British

Empire

1888

The British Empire in 1939:

By 1914: 400 million inhabitants

(total population of the world: 1.800.000)

Colonial acquisitions and losses1819 Singapore

1821 Gold Coast

1829 Western Australia

1842 Hong Kong

1846 North Borneo

1886 Burma

1895 Kenya

1899 Sudan

The end:

1947 India

1960 Nigeria

1962 Jamaica

1963 Kenya, Malaysia

1965 Singapore

1970 Fiji

1980 Zimbabwe

1997 Hong Kong

1949: Commonwealth

Structure of the Empire

colonial administration

dominions – India – other dependencies

mandatory areas + informal empire (Egypt)

Colonial Office (1768-1782)

1854: New Colonial Office + India Office

no general plan

“We seem, as it were, to have conquered half the

world in a fit of absence of mind” (J. Seeley)

“The British were not an imperially minded

people; they lacked both a theory of empire

and the will to engender and implement one”

(Max Beloff)

“Colonization is not only a manifest expedient

for, but an imperative duty on, Great Britain.

God seems to hold out his finger to us over the

sea…I think this country is now suffering

grievously under an excessive accumulation of

capital, which, having no field for profitable

operation, is in a state of fierce civil war with

itself”. (Coleridge)

Abolitionist medallion:

‘Am I not a man and a brother?’

1807: slave trade

abolished

1814: 750.000

signatures

Josiah Wedgwood

design

1833: slavery abolished

in the Empire

Emigration

Empire: outlet for all sorts

(Ford Madox Brown: The

Last of England, 1855)

1815-1930: 10 million

emigrants from the British

Isles

1830s: 10.000 per month

Financial role (railway

bonds)

Economic role

The shrinking of the world

Phineas Fogg in Jules Verne: 80 Days Around

the World, 1873

imperial networks of communication,

commerce, transportation and travelling

globalisation

railways – Roman roads

Suez Canal (1869)

Lansdowne Bridge

Material presence of the Empire

Tea, coffee, sugar, silk, spices

Exotic plants introduced

British Museum: full of colonial loot

(Elgin marbles, mummies, Sumerian winged

bulls, Niniveh stone slabs)

Architecture: ‘colonial style’

Colonial Office, London

Chennai (Madras) Museum

Royal pavilion, Brighton

the Royal Pavilion as an Indian

hospital 1914-6

The Music Room

Curzon Hall, Dhaka

Palace of the Mysore maharajah

Great Exhibition

(1851),

Shakespeare

exhibit

Imaginative presence of the

Empire

“And what should they know of England who

only England know?” (Kipling, „The English

Flag”)

Thomas Jones Barker (1863):

The Secret of England’s Greatness

manumission

Spiridone Roma: The East Offering Its Gifts to

Britannia (1778)

After 1857

New sense of imperial

mission

Disraeli (PM)

“marketing” the Empire

“There is a destiny now possible to us, the

highest ever set before a nation... Will you

youths of England make your country again a

royal throne of kings, a sceptred isle, for all the

world a source of light, a centre of peace and

mistress of learning and of the Arts..? ... This is

what England must do or perish; she must

found colonies as fast and as far as she is able,

formed of her most energetic and worthiest

men; ...teaching these her colonists that ...their

first aim is to advance the power of England by

land and sea.” (John Ruskin, 1870)

“When the contrast between the influence of a

Christian and a Heathen government is

considered; when the knowledge of the

wretchedness of the people forces us to reflect

on the unspeakable blessings to millions that

would follow the extension of British rule, it is

not ambition but benevolence that dictates the

desire for the whole country. Where the

providence of God will lead, one state after

another will be delivered into his stewardship”

(Macleod Wylie, 1854)

Empire Day (from 1898)

Empire day school tableau, with

Britannia

Presence of the Empire

Popular culture: displays, dioramas, museums,

ethnographic collections, zoos

Music halls, popular theatre, songs (Britannia,

1885)

travel writing

Education: school textbooks: the creation of

imperial heroes (heroic poetry)

advertising

Pears soap ad

Gilbert and

Sullivan:

Utopia, Ltd

(1893)

King Paramount