Yet the sheer scale and continuity of imperial repression over the years has never been properly laid out and documented. No colony in their empire gave the British more trouble than the island of Ireland. No subject people proved more rebellious than the Irish. From misty start to unending finish, Irish revolt against colonial rule has been the leitmotif that runs through the entire history of empire, causing problems in Ireland, in England itself, and in the most distant parts of the British globe.
The British affected to ignore or forget the Irish dimension to their empire, yet the Irish were always present within it, and wherever they landed and established themselves, they never forgot where they had come from.
The British often perceived the Irish as "savages", and they used Ireland as an experimental laboratory for the other parts of their overseas empire, as a place to ship out settlers from, as well as a territory to practise techniques of repression and control.
Entire armies were recruited in Ireland, and officers learned their trade in its peat bogs and among its burning cottages. Some of the great names of British military history — from Wellington and Wolseley to Kitchener and Montgomery — were indelibly associated with Ireland. The particular tradition of armed policing, first patented in Ireland in the s, became the established pattern until the empire's final collapse. For much of its early history, the British ruled their empire through terror.
The colonies were run as a military dictatorship, often under martial law, and the majority of colonial governors were military officers. Normal judicial procedures were replaced by rule through terror; resistance was crushed, rebellion suffocated. No historical or legal work deals with martial law. It means the absence of law, other than that decreed by a military governor.
Many early campaigns in India in the 18th century were characterised by sepoy disaffection. Britain's harsh treatment of sepoy mutineers at Manjee in , with the order that they should be "shot from guns", was a terrible warning to others not to step out of line.
Mutiny, as the British discovered a century later in , was a formidable weapon of resistance at the disposal of the soldiers they had trained. Crushing it through "cannonading", standing the condemned prisoner with his shoulders placed against the muzzle of a cannon, was essential to the maintenance of imperial control. This simple threat helped to keep the sepoys in line throughout most of imperial history. To defend its empire, to construct its rudimentary systems of communication and transport, and to man its plantation economies, the British used forced labour on a gigantic scale.
From the middle of the 18th century until , the use of non-indigenous black slave labour originally shipped from Africa was the rule.
Indigenous manpower in many imperial states was also subjected to slave conditions, dragooned into the imperial armies, or forcibly recruited into road gangs — building the primitive communication networks that facilitated the speedy repression of rebellion. When black slavery was abolished in the s, the thirst for labour by the rapacious landowners of empire brought a new type of slavery into existence, dragging workers from India and China to be employed in distant parts of the world, a phenomenon that soon brought its own contradictions and conflicts.
As with other great imperial constructs, the British empire involved vast movements of peoples: armies were switched from one part of the world to another; settlers changed continents and hemispheres; prisoners were sent from country to country; indigenous inhabitants were corralled, driven away into oblivion, or simply rubbed out. There was nothing historically special about the British empire.
Virtually all European countries with sea coasts and navies had embarked on programmes of expansion in the 16th century, trading, fighting and settling in distant parts of the globe. Sometimes, having made some corner of the map their own, they would exchange it for another piece "owned" by another power, and often these exchanges would occur as the byproduct of dynastic marriages.
World empire, in the sense of a far-flung operation far from home, was a European development that changed the world over four centuries. In the British case, wherever they sought to plant their flag, they were met with opposition. In almost every colony they had to fight their way ashore. While they could sometimes count on a handful of friends and allies, they never arrived as welcome guests.
The Print Collector. How did the empire come about? How big was the Empire? The map below shows the British Empire at its territorial peak in the early 20th century. Start your trial subscription today ——————————————————————————————— In India became independent following a nonviolent civil-disobedience campaign spearheaded by Mahatma Gandhi. History India British Empire.
British Empire. How did World War One end? In Depth. What do the different coloured poppies mean? The National Trust: a cultural battleground. An empire is a group of countries ruled over by a single monarch or ruling power. An empire doesn't need an 'emperor'. The British Empire comprised of Britain, the 'mother country', and the colonies, countries ruled to some degree by and from Britain. In the 16th century Britain began to establish overseas colonies. By , Britain had built a large empire with colonies in America and the West Indies.
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