Talk:British Empire

The bibliography was prepared by RJensen for Wikipedia Richard Jensen 22:15, 3 September 2007 (CDT)

Maps

I switched it the section to a gallery format to help the visibility some - it does make them smaller, but there is less whitespace. These could always go on a gallery subpage too. Feel free to revert. --Todd Coles 08:58, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

I'll put the maps in proper place when the main text gets written--I hope this week. Richard Jensen 12:43, 4 September 2007 (CDT)

Rewrite needed?

The article as it stands is misleading and opinionated as well as being inadequate. A total rewrite would seem to be the only possible remedy. Nick Gardner 12:44, 24 August 2009 (UTC)

yes. Sandy Harris 03:46, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Definition

"independence was granted to the dominions of Canada, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa in the 1920s"?

In what sense, if any, is this true? Politically, it seems to have been understood that dominion status was in fact independence, subject to a few anomalies. Thus the dominions made separate declarations of war in 1914. Legally, there was no difference between a colony and a dominion until the Statute of Westminster 1931. Peter Jackson 09:50, 5 May 2012 (UTC)

What I was taught in a Canadian high school history class was that the Statute of Westminster marked the end of our colonial status. In WW I, there were Canadian regiments under British generals, but no Canadian generals or divisions; we were a colony contributing to the defense of the Empire. In WW II, there was at least one Canadian general (McNaughton) and separate Canadian divisions. We were an ally. Sandy Harris 03:41, 6 May 2012 (UTC)

Isn't unified command common enough? Haven't our forces been serving in Afghanistan and Iraq under American generals? Some people call us an American colony but that's just political rhetoric.

My great-uncle's war memorial entry refers to a Canadian brigade in WWI. Did they still have the rank of Brigadier-General in those days?

Think about the Irish Free State. Don't you think after the war of independence they thought they'd achieved it? Peter Jackson 08:46, 11 May 2012 (UTC)

Damage limitation

I did not follow up on my 2009 comment because I did not consider the subject important compared with the many that had not been covered at all. I now think I should have given more weight to the damaging effect of an article of this quality upon CZ's reputation. Some items in the forbiddingly long bibliography may be worth retaining, however.Nick Gardner 21:47, 13 May 2012 (UTC)

Looking at it further I see lots of factual errors. Peter Jackson 10:42, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

Are there any objections to the deletion and replacement of the entire article? Nick Gardner 15:11, 14 May 2012 (UTC)

A possible framework

Having consigned the recital of facts to subpages, the main page could be laid out something like this

1. Introduction - Unintended Consequences (how did the Brits acquire the biggest-ever empire without setting out to do so?)

2. Influences (what made it possible?)

3. Outcomes (what happened?)

4. Consequences (how has it affected those involved and others?)

Is this a sensible idea?

Nick Gardner 21:39, 17 May 2012 (UTC)

Some questions

The above outline is fine, but there are some questions I'd like to see the article answer, or at least discuss.

How did they acquire and keep all those allies? The English fought wars against the Scots and the Irish at about the time the Empire developed and the Welsh earlier, yet they ended up with regiments from all those places. In India, they fought two wars against the Sikhs, several on the Northwest frontier and one in Nepal, yet they ended up with Sikh, Pathan and Gurkha regiments. None of these ex-enemies were abused slave soldiers like the captive Poles that the Germans forced into the trenches in WW II; they were some of the Empire's finest and most loyal troops.

They took New France in 1759. Twenty years later that was almost the only colony on the North American mainland that remained loyal to the British Crown; the first big group of English-speaking immigrants to Canada were loyalists (or traitors, depending on your point of view) fleeing the American Revolution. Why did a conquered territory stay loyal when the ones full of British immigrants revolted?

What did they do wrong? After independence a number of ex-colonies have had vicious strife. At least India/Pakistan, Nigeria and Sri Lanka, arguably many others. To what extent is British misrule or clumsy withdrawal responsible for these disasters? Or did British rule prevent them happening earlier?

What about the mistresses and children of British men posted abroad? My perception — based only on personal travel in Asia — is that there was a fairly large difference between the British and the Portuguese in this. I met people in Goa who were of partly Portuguese descent and proud of it, had Portuguese names but Indian faces. Plenty of Portuguese men there married local women and started families, as they did in Macau. I don't think the British in India or China did that nearly as much; they kept mistresses and sired bastards instead, and their descendants were not usually treated as well. Of course there were exceptions, Portuguese bastards and Anglo-Indian wives, but I think the rule holds in general. Is this perception accurate? Does it generalise, perhaps to Catholic vs Protestant powers or to British vs everyone else? How did the Spanish, the Dutch and the French behave in this regard?

Sandy Harris 00:43, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Can you recommend some useful sources of information on those topics? - Nick Gardner 06:31, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Not really. The Anglo-Sikh and first Anglo-Afghan wars are covered well in the Flashman novels (WP link), but those are fiction. They have footnotes with better references, but I no longer have the novels to hand. Sandy Harris 06:54, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Just some thoughts on the above.

In the early period East India Company staff often married native women. The apartheid attitudes developed later.

Inter-imperial comparisons might be very interesting. At the present day the remaining French and Dutch overseas territories have full voting rights in the elections "back home", but British ones don't (except Gibraltar votes for the European Parliament, last I heard). Legally, any native of the British Empire held equal "citizenship", as we'd call it now. The Romans encouraged loyalty by the possibility of earning citizenship. Peter Jackson 10:20, 23 May 2012 (UTC)

Hong Kong moved from British to Chinese control in 1997, nearby Macau from Portuguese to Chinese in 1999. There's an interesting contrast there. For one thing, Hong Kong was a colony but Macau was treated as an overseas territory, in some sense part of Portugal.

Some Hong Kong residents already had British passports and many more tried to get them in the period leading up to the change. Most failed; the British government did not make it easy. The rich moved to Vancouver, Melbourne or wherever in droves and stayed long enough to acquire passports; then many of them moved back home. After the handover, China provided passports for most Hong Kong residents, but only for ethnic Chinese. There were a significant number of people of Indian, Filipino, etc. descent left in the lurch; they could get neither a British nor a Chinese passport, Hong Kong no longer issued its own, and in many cases their family had not lived in the ancestral country for generations. Ooops! I've seen a claim that there were 150,000 people in this situation; I do not believe that but there does not seem to be any doubt there were a significant number.

Macau took a rather different approach. Anyone born in Macau and living there at the time of the handover got a Portuguese passport. Of course there was some paperwork; you had to produce a birth certificate for example, but basically they just gave everyone passports. Sandy Harris 01:36, 24 May 2012 (UTC)

I remember that controversy at the time. The Liberals and some others wanted all Hong Kong people given passports, but the government put through provisions for a quota (300,000?).

The UN Declaration of Human Rights says everyone has a right to a nationality, but doesn't specify what nationality they have a right to, making the provision meaningless. As a result of the interaction between different nationality laws, some people have no nationality while others have more than one (I knew someone once who apparently had a right to any of five). Peter Jackson 16:52, 24 May 2012 (UTC)