The British Imperial Establishment, Post Imperial Era, and the ‘Churchillian’ World View, 1945-2016. (Adjustments & Challenges in Contemporary British Diplomatic Strategy)

39

A Short History of the
British Imperial Expansion

Empire
was advocated in the United Kingdom in the 1880s by Joseph
Chamberlain in opposition to the “Little
Englanders” who favoured a policy of
isolationism. To defend his argument, Chamberlain declared that the
expanding
influence of France and Germany must be counterbalanced by the expanding
influence of the
United Kingdom.

However,
“the origins of the British Empire, like the form of it, were
random.”8 The British Empire goes back many centuries before the time of
Chamberain. It was
only in the 1880s that the empire had reached its greatest
extent. The British possessions overseas can be
traced to the days of the Normans,
who brought with them title to the Channel Islands, and parts of France,
and who
presently seized Ireland too. “Since then the imperial esate had fitfully grown.
Sometimes
possessions had been lost – the thirteen colonies of America, for
instance, or the ancient possessions of the
French mainland. Often they had been
swapped, or voluntarily surrendered, or declined.”9 Tangier, Sicily, Heligoland,
Java, The Ionians, Minorca had all been British at one
time or another. Costa Rica
had applied successfully for a British protectorate, and Hawaii was British
for
five months in the 1840s.

Once
again, there was no other reason for acquiring the possessions except
“for profit – for raw materials,
for promising markets, for investment, or to deny
commercial rivals undue advantages.”10 As free traders the British had half
convinced themselves of a duty to keep
protectionists out of undeveloped
markets, and they were proud of the fact that when they acquired a new
territory,
its trade was open to all comers. “Economics, though, must be sustained by
strategy, and
so the Empire generated its own extension.”11 In order to
protect
ports, hinterlands must be acquired. To protect trade routes, bases were necessary.

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