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UK: from Empire to democracies
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UNIT I
UK: FROM EMPIRE TO DEMOCRACIES
Contents
| 1. Lead-in p. p. 1-4 · Texts A & B p. p. 1-3 · Critical thinking p. 3-4 2. Listening 1 p. 4 p. 4 3. Reading 1 · Text p. p. 4-7 · Comprehension tasks p. p. 7-8 · Critical thinking & Speak up p. 8 4. Listening 2 p. 9 5. Vocabulary practice 1 p. p. 10-13 6. Listening 3 p. p. 13-14 | 7. Reading 2 · Text p. p. 14-16 · Comprehension tasks p. 17 · Critical thinking & Speak up p. p. 17-18 8. Vocabulary practice 2 p. p. 18-21 9. Vocabulary and grammar revision p. p. 21-24 10. Integrating core skills · Individual project work p. p. 24-25 · Semester project L2 p. p. 25-26 · Debate p. p. 26-27 11. Reader p. p. 27-51 |
LEAD-IN
PRE-READING QUESTIONS
1. What, to your knowledge, is the legacy of the British Empire?
2. Why do you think the Empire’s role is being reassessed now?
Skim Texts A and B to find out what, according to their authors’, the impact of the British Empire on the world was.
Text A
The British Empire’s Legacy
The British Empire is long dead; only flotsam and jetsam[1] now remain. What had been based on Britain’s commercial and financial supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and her industrial supremacy in the nineteenth was bound to crumble once the British economy buckled under the accumulated burdens of two world wars. The great creditor became a debtor. In the same way, the great movements of population that had once driven British imperial expansion changed their direction in the 1950s. Emigration from Britain gave way to immigration into Britain. As for the missionary impulse that had sent thousands of young men and women around the world preaching Christianity and the gospel of cleanliness, that too dwindled[2], along with public attendance at church. Christianity today is stronger in many of her former colonies than in Britain itself.
It cannot be denied, however, that the imperial legacy has shaped the modern world so profoundly that we almost take it for granted. Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world’s largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly[3] British models. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on planet.
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Of course no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished[4]. On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the ‘ethnic cleansing’ of indigenous peoples. Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.
/Based on Conclusion Chapter from Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson. Penguin books LTD, London, 2004/
Niall Campbell Ferguson (/ˈ niː l/) is a Scottish-American historian and Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University.
Text B
The Myths of the British Empire
[…] A self-satisfied and largely hegemonic belief survives in Britain that the empire was an imaginative, civilising enterprise, reluctantly undertaken, that brought the benefits of modern society to backward peoples. Indeed it is often suggested that the British empire was something of a model experience, unlike that of the French, the Dutch, the Germans, the Spaniards, the Portuguese – or, of course, the Americans. There is a widespread opinion that the British empire was obtained and maintained with a minimum degree of force and with maximum co-operation from a grateful local population.
This benign[5], biscuit-tin view of the past is not an understanding of their history that young people in the territories that once made up the empire would now recognise. A myriad revisionist historians have been at work in each individual country producing fresh evidence to suggest that the colonial experience – for those who actually " experienced" it – was just as horrific as the opponents of empire had always maintained that it was, perhaps more so. New generations have been recovering tales of rebellion, repression and resistance that make nonsense of the accepted imperial version of what went on. Focusing on resistance has been a way of challenging not just the traditional, self-satisfied view of empire, but also the customary depiction of the colonised as victims, lacking in agency[6] or political will.
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. " Special" courts and courts martial were set up to deal with dissidents, and handed out rough and speedy injustice. 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.
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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 1834, 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[7] 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 1830s, the thirst for labour by the greedy 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[8], 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. […] 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 expansion of empire was conducted as a military operation. The initial opposition continued off and on, and in varying forms, in almost every colonial territory until independence. To retain control, the British were obliged to establish systems of oppression on a global scale, ranging from the sophisticated to the brutal. These in turn were to create new outbreaks of revolt. […]
The rebellions and resistance of the subject peoples of empire were so extensive that we may eventually come to consider that Britain's imperial experience bears comparison with the exploits of Genghis Khan or Attila the Hun rather than with those of Alexander the Great. The rulers of the empire may one day be perceived to rank with the dictators of the 20th century as the authors of crimes against humanity. […]
/Based on 'Let's End the Myths of Britain's Imperial Past’ by Richard Gott/
https: //www. theguardian. com/books/2011/oct/19/end-myths-britains-imperial-past
Richard Gott is a British writer and historian known for his radical politics. He worked for many years at the Guardian as a leader-writer, foreign correspondent and as the features editor.
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