The Legacy of Empire

A very interesting result from last week's poll- bearing in mind most of those who voted, were presumably bloggers themselves.

The overwhelming majority of you think this medium is completely pointless.



I'm actually going to go out on a limb here and say I completely disagree.
Communication is the most important thing we do.

It is what life is all about.
As Electro-Kevin says, the purpose of life is to pass on DNA.
DNA is a method of passing on coded information.
Life itself, survives better and evolves faster, by it's ability to receive and transmit information.

The stars communicate their presence to us.

Human existence and human progress are all about communication.
Most of the problems of the world, can be blamed on poor communication between people.
The greatest advances in human history have been those which found better ways to store and disseminate information.

This is what makes us different. We know so much, we DO so much, because we are able to pool all the good ideas any human ever had and build on them. Our knowledge and our thoughts are the product of those of the many many great thinkers who walked this road before us.
We start our lives further along it than they did.

This is a medium which democratises the spread of ideas and information. It allows YOU the ability to disseminate YOUR thoughts.

Great men alone don't change the world, millions of little people can too, simply by talking.
Have faith in what you are doing and the role you play in people's lives.
I don't think this IS pointless.

Or it needn't be.

Tonight's post (and poll) is in some ways a continuation of last nights.
Crashie actually seems to have had a foreboding of it, because her comment on the last post, is related to this one.

One thing we really don't like to talk about in the UK is the Empire. We acknowledge it existed, but we don't like to debate it, or understand how it happened- or what it really left behind.
I think we need to.

Because unless we understand it, we can never really understand the world we live in.
And I really do mean, the WHOLE world.

We are too busy either exagarating our decline, or feeling guilty about the less pleasant bits to be completely objective.
Our ancestors weren't objective either, but their subjectivty at least acheived something.
Whether in the final judgement, they acheived something truly amazing, or simply exploitative, is open to debate.



To find the roots of Empire, we need to go back to the seventeenth century.
The seventeenth century was a hard time across Europe.
It was a battle betwen superstition and reason, betwen Protestant and Catholic, Kings and People.

And in a small island on the edge of Europe, the people made the final choice. They had learned something from their century of struggle.
They had learned from the experience of being ruled by Cromwell.
The basic lessons they learned were simple.

1. Never hero worship your leaders.
2. Retain the right to sack your government.
3. Permit all views to be freely aired. The more people discuss, the sooner truth is reached. Suppressing ideas, leads them to go underground. Truth will out, as they say.
4. Allow people as much freedom as you possibly can- that way you give free rein to their creativity, and the people themselves make their country great.

It took most of the rest of Europe a pretty long time to come to these conclusions- in some ways, being honest, I'm not sure they really are QUITE ingrained in continental culture yet.
Throughout the twenties and thirties, many European peoples were easily duped into the idea that their problems could be solved by scrapping democratic systems and raising up leaders who could not be sacked and demanded hero worship.

Hitler is the most obvious example- every voter who voted for him knew that he wasn't a big believer in democratic decisions- but their fredom from absolutism was young, and they didn't yet believe in it.

The French almost got the idea in 1789- before they clamoured to make Napoleon a new God-Emperor of Reason.
And their hero-worship of De Gaulle was a little alarming- it is hard to see him as a real democratic ruler.

In Europe, freedom is granted from above, in the Anglosphere, power is granted by the people.

The Eighteenth century was the century when the peoples of the British Isles felt the benefits of their new system- completely different then to the way any other people in Europe thought.
Freed from oppressive government, the people flourished, created, invented, travelled- and rose quickly from a second rate power, to the first of the Superpowers.



And they carried their message with them.
To be sure, the traders who sent their ships- and their mercenaries- took with them the profit motive.
But they also took with them a pretty amazing set of values, by the standards of the time.
They didn't just come to pillage, as other empires had done, doing for the conquered territories the bare minimum to provide expedient rule.

The came to develop the lands they conquered. They knew they were able to acheive so much, because their system and their values were the best in the world (at the time). They were right to have faith in that.
They were imposing it, and imposing it by force, but a part of them surely felt, that if the British way of life had done such wonders for them, they were good values to proselytise.

The British invested in their territories in an extraordinary way, they allowed free settlement in an extraordinary way.

The only empire that truly compares to it in impact, is that of Rome.

The Romans left roads, aqueducts, laws, etc.
They left behind countries far more advanced than they found them. Whatever we may think of the worst of their rulers, their decadent ways, their culture of slavery, they changed the world for the better.

Likewise, the British Empire left behind a complex infrastructure and a system of values it not only left to the peoples it subjected, but values which have gradually won over the world.



Whatever was done along the way, the true legacy of the Empire, it's bequest to the world really was a better way of doing things.

And its legacy lives yet.

The Second World War was a real struggle of ideas- a struggle between tyranny and freedom.
But ultimately it was the battle where the Empire and it's children- most notably the United States- put their money where their mouth was.

It is no coincidence that Westminster democracy is still considered the paradigm, and British Justice, for all faults, still in principle the model that is held up to the world.
The realities may be tarnished, the principles are good.

The world sees that, and it is a powerful dynamic in the world today.

For the world's policeman, is the Empire's child. It is trusted by many across the globe because it is the most powerful champion of those amazing values that any thinking person can se, must never be allowed to die.

And the Special Relationship, or Transatlantic Alliance?
It is fundamentally important to the US.
Not just because of what the UK is today, but because of what we were.

Every value the US holds dear, every value it trumpets, reached it's shores from the mother country.
When it acts in the name of those values, without the support of it's aged parent, those values seem hollow.
The world is not convinced.

But when the two act together, history is invoked.
The champions of the free world, the peoples who invented freedom, fought two world wars for it, and defended the free world against the Soviet Union.

It's a powerful legend, and like so many legends, has more than a grain of truth in it.
There is a tendancy for the world to trust the Star and Stripes and the Union Jack flying side by side.



The British Empire carved a world largely in its own image, globalisation has been more anglicisation than we care to admit.

In my opinion, future generations will be fascinated by it.

It simply remains for me to quote the words on the statue of Boudicca on the Thames embankment;
'Regions Caesar never knew, Thy posterity shall sway.'

Maybe it wasn't all bad.

Have your say!