British Empire
Great Britain ruled over a powerful empire during the reign of Queen Victoria, that brought the British in contact with
various cultures.
In the last decades of the 19th century the British Empire occupied an area of 4 million square miles and more than 400
million people were ruled by the British.
Queen Elizabeth and later James I, during the second half of the 16th century, encouraged “plantations” – the settling
of English and Scottish people in Ireland on land forcibly taken from the native Irish.
In 1600, Elizabeth I also hired the British East India Company.
India came under direct rule by Britain, and Queen Victoria was crowned Empress of India by the British prime
minister in 1877.
The British also occupied Australia and New Zealand, seized parts of China – including Hong Kong in 1841 – and
expanded their possessions in Africa and Southeast Asia in 1886.
Expansionist activity reached a crescendo with the ‘scramble for Africa’ in the 1880s and 1890s. This was a race among
European powers to establish territorial rights to those parts of the continent yet unclaimed.
Britain took over Egypt to protect its routes to India through the Suez Canal in 1882 and then Sudan in 1884. From
1899 to 1902, Britain was at war in South Africa against the Dutch settlers over control of gold and diamond mines.
The British won, but with great difficulty.
Because the British came into contact with and subdued vastly different areas at different times, they were able to
shape imperial and colonial policy gradually, adapting to different realities and producing an empire united in name
but varied in fact.
The expressions of the civic pride and national fervor among the British were frequent in the late 19th century.
Patriotism was deeply influenced by ideas of racial superiority. The British had only to look at their empire – at the
variety of races and peoples they governed – to find apparent confirmation of this view.
About the role as colonizers, there was a belief that the ‘races’ of the world were divided by fundamental physical and
intellectual differences – that some were destined to be led by others. It was thus an obligation, ‘the white man’s
burden’, imposed by God on the British to impose their superior way of life, their institutions, laws and politics on
native peoples throughout the world.
price of independence: Burma was annexed as a province of British India in 1886. In 1941 the Japanese invaded
Burma, promising independence if the British were defeated. At the end of World War II, the leader Aung San
negotiated independence from Britain, which was granted in 1948. From 1948 to 1962, Burma was a democratic
republic, with U Nu as the I° prime minister. In 1962 General Ne Win led a military coup d’état. He ruled for 26 years
as a dictator, suspending the constitution, and establishing military rule. Outside visitors were few and restricted to
Rangoon, Mandalay and a handful of other tightly controlled towns close to the central plains.
In July 1988, demonstrations broke out across the country during the ‘Democracy Summer’. In 1988, Aung San Suu Kyi,
daughter of Aung San, founded the National League for Democracy (NLD). Her party quickly gathered country-wide
support. Although committed to non-violence, Aung San Suu Kyi was placed under house arrest in July 1989 for
‘endangering the state’ and kept there for the next 6 years. Nevertheless, her party won the elections in 1990. In 1991
she was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; in 2003, she was imprisoned once again and released in 2010.
The humanitarian situation in Burma is disastrous. Civil war still ravages the border areas. The effect of military rule
has been an impoverished and underdeveloped nation; Burma is rated as the second least developed nation on the
United Nations Development Index. Peace, democracy and the most basic human rights do not exist.
The mission of the colonizer – The White Man’s Burden
The concept of ‘the white man’s burden’ was exalted in the works of colonial writers like Rudyard Kipling, and the
expansion of the Empire was often regarded as a mission. Every time the British took control over a territory, they felt
they brought civilization to the barbarian, faith to the heathen, wealth to the poor and law and social order to
primitive societies. Rudyard Kipling’s poem ‘The White Man’s Burden’, written in 1899 to give advice to the United
States on the occasion of the annexation of the Philippines, contains the author’s most famous phrase, ‘the white
man’s burden’, which made him the bard of the English Empire and came to symbolize the belief in the superiority of
the Anglo-Saxon race.
paraphrase:
Take up the White Man’s Burden
