This remarkable book is the product of many years of meticulous research and is so detailed and of such duration that its references are accessible via internet access. It is based on the notion that on 29 September 1923, the British Empire was at its most extensive, covering a quarter of the world’s landmass and containing 450 million people. Within days of the September Imperial Conference, its scale was diminished, albeit only marginally initially, with the cessation of Rwanda to Belgium and the desolate Jubaland on the Kenyan border to Mussolini’s Italian Somaliland.
It is impossible to summarise the content of this massive work. All the elements that comprised the emerging British Empire are explored and analysed, providing us with extraordinary insights into how they were acquired, managed and governed. Beyond the British involvement with Canada, Australia and New Zealand, it is a chronicle of insensitivity and mismanagement. It is clear that what applied within Britain – with a near complete adult suffrage, full adult literacy, an emergent welfare state, regulatory bodies for working practices and indeed the role of free trades unions – was not regarded as appropriate for the multitude of local populations in India and in the other territories in Asia, the Pacific and West Indies. Their aspirations were disregarded as inappropriate. This Empire had been assembled in haphazard stages, all with different reasons for being part of the British Empire. In addition to the aftermath and legacy of slavery, there were other ethnic groups who had been encouraged to migrate to new homelands who then were not given the respect that they warranted.
A classic example of the disregard that was displayed is revealed at the beginning of the book, with the treatment and fate of Ocean Island in the Pacific where developers and industrialists had discovered that the landscape basically was composed of pure phosphate, a resource much needed for agricultural improvement elsewhere. The relentless exploitation of this resource became a critical issue for the resident Banaban population, and the way that they were treated was at the pinnacle of insensitivity. It was only the intervention of the Duke of Devonshire, as Colonial Secretary, that prevented the wholescale deportation of the population to an entirely different location, with even the bleak Falkland Islands being considered. It has to be said that lessons were not learned from this episode because, more recently, the nearby island of Nauru, with similar exploitative phosphate potential, has been devastated in much the same way, with its terrain being rendered basically infertile.
The massive imperial territorial growth was a relatively recent development, outside India, because Matthew Parker quotes Lord Palmerston, whom we generally associate with a vigorous foreign policy, as observing that ‘all we want is trade and land is not necessary for trade: we can carry on commerce very well on ground belonging to other people’. This is a poignant indication of what had happened: Britain’s worldwide trading system, with harbours and trading points on various coastlines, had been extended inland as part of international rivalry for territory in the post-Palmerston era.
Matthew Parker’s sourcing of his evidential material very interestingly embraces some internationally-famous writers – E. M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and George Orwell – and each is used to illustrate the prejudices exhibited by local officials towards to the local populations in India, Malaya and Burma. Along with them also he references Arthur Grimble, the author of Pattern of Islands, his highly influential introduction to life in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands, where he was a District Officer. The wider context of Grimble’s work and career is carefully revealed. This is a matter of considerable interest to this reviewer who studied his famous book as a GCE text sixty years ago and what I read then now makes much more sense!
Those of us who lived through the de-colonization of the Empire in the 1950s sometimes tended to be aware of the frenetic pace at which it was happening. We did not have the benefit of the insights provided by Matthew Parker to see the inevitability and urgency of this process. Much of this happened under the premiership of Harold Macmillan, the son-in-law of the Duke of Devonshire, who as Colonial Secretary, had shown an instinctive awareness that this form of colonial management had had its flaws and this may well have been a contributory factor in Macmillan’s adoption of this policy.
Trevor James was Editor of The Historian from 2006-2019. One Fine Day: Britain’s Empire on the Brink by Matthew Parker is out now in paperback.
