Category
📺
TVTranscript
00:00In 1937, the Chinese city of Nanking fell to imperial forces.
00:19As the empire extended its grip over Asia, the army ran amok.
00:31Three hundred thousand civilians were killed.
00:36Up to eighty thousand women were raped.
00:42In grotesque scenes of torture, some prisoners were hung by their tongues from meat hooks.
00:54This was imperialism at its very worst, but of course it was carried out not by British
00:59imperial forces, but by the Japanese.
01:03The rape of Nanking revealed the true face of the leading alternative to British rule
01:07in the 1930s in all its hideousness.
01:15The downfall of the British empire is usually attributed to nationalist movements.
01:20We think of Gandhi in India, or Sinn Féin in Ireland.
01:27We're used to being told the empire was the bad guy.
01:31The so-called freedom fighters were the heroes.
01:35But in truth, British rule wasn't overthrown as punishment for wickedness.
01:40On the contrary, in the 20th century the British empire would justify its existence by coming
01:46to the rescue of civilization.
01:52It would fight, and fight again, against far nastier rival empires.
02:05What really killed off the British empire was the staggering cost of doing the right
02:09thing.
02:13The effort left it bankrupt, owing billions of dollars.
02:20That was why the heir to Britain's global power would be its most successful former
02:25colony.
02:26Tonight, the United States of America makes the following demands.
02:50This is the traditional image of the First World War, the storm of steel and the Somme,
02:57the muddy hell of Flanders.
03:01We think of it as a European conflict, with both sides quite evenly matched.
03:06In truth, it was a global imperial war.
03:12The main contenders were an ageing and complacent British empire, and the young and restless
03:20German Reich.
03:24Conscious of their vulnerability in the war of two fronts in Europe, the Germans set out
03:28to globalise the conflict, to distract Britain by undermining her position in Asia.
03:33It was the Germans who first spoke of the war as Der Weltkrieg, the World War.
03:39And the fulcrum of this war was not in Flanders, but in the Middle East, the gateway to British
03:45India.
03:51In 1914, Istanbul, known then as Constantinople, was a hotbed of imperial intrigue.
03:59It was the heart of the Ottoman Empire that centred on Turkey and stretched from the Balkans
04:04to Baghdad.
04:07This former superpower was now dismissed as the sick man among the great powers, increasingly
04:12dependent on its ally, Germany, for military and economic aid.
04:40But the Ottomans still had one great strategic asset.
04:46Down there is the Bosphorus, the narrow channel linking the Mediterranean to the Black Sea
04:52and dividing Europe from Asia.
04:54In age of naval power, this was one of the world's great strategic bottlenecks, and in
04:58the First World War, it was the key to supplying the Russian war effort against Germany.
05:05Turkey could menace that vital supply line, and also Britain's imperial communications
05:10through the Middle East to India.
05:16As an Islamic empire, Turkey posed a further threat to British India.
05:22The German Kaiser Wilhelm II urged his Turkish ally to unleash a jihad, a holy war, against
05:29British power.
05:34Our consuls in Turkey must fire the whole Mohammedan world to fierce rebellion against
05:39this hated, lying, conscienceless nation of shopkeepers.
05:44For if we are to bleed to death, England shall at least lose India.
05:53The Turkish Sultan duly declared a jihad against Britain.
05:58Given that nearly half of the world's Muslims were ruled by Britain or her allies, this
06:03could have been a masterstroke of German strategy.
06:08But Britain's answer to the challenge of world war was to mobilise her imperial forces as
06:14never before.
06:23It's often said that the best fighting men of the First World War came from the empire's
06:26furthest flung outposts.
06:32The Australian and New Zealand Army Corps, ANZACs for short, would make a vital contribution
06:37to the war effort, most famously in the Middle East, at Gallipoli.
06:53The aim here was a bold frontal assault on Germany's ally, Turkey.
06:58The plan was to sail into the Black Sea Straits, land at Gallipoli, march on Constantinople
07:04100 miles to the north-east and secure the strategically crucial Bosphorus.
07:13At dawn on the 25th of April 1915, the ANZACs came ashore down there at ANZAC Cove.
07:19They were actually about a mile north of where they should have been, probably because of
07:23strong currents.
07:24But the Turks were very quickly on the scene and soon the beach was coming under a hail
07:28of rifle fire and shrapnel.
07:30By the end of the first day, 500 ANZACs were dead and 2,500 were casualties.
07:39Among the Australian infantrymen was Sam Weingott from Sydney, son of a Jewish clothes manufacturer
07:46who had fled Russian persecution to make a new life in the British Empire.
07:57On Wednesday the 5th of May, I had a merry time with the enemy and fired close on 250
08:02shots myself.
08:06Enemy do heavy damage with shrapnel and I narrowly miss getting hit with a cap of a
08:12shell.
08:15Enemy keep up heavy gunfire and the aim is very accurate.
08:19Mate of mine shot through the heart whilst asleep.
08:24Shell explodes in our trench, killing Captain Hill.
08:33Dead bodies outside the trench begin to smell.
08:37Terrible sights.
08:40Many lose their nerves.
08:4429th of May.
08:47Tremendous bombardment by the enemy guns.
08:49One shell burst in my face and although unwounded, was knocked out for a few minutes.
08:55My rifle was twisted beyond recognition.
09:00That was one of Sam's last entries.
09:02On the 1st of June, in recognition of his bravery, he was promoted to Lance Corporal.
09:08On the 5th of June, he was shot in the stomach.
09:11He died on a hospital ship later that day.
09:20Despite repeated attempts to break out, the Anzacs simply couldn't overcome dogged Turkish
09:25defence of the high ground.
09:28There seemed no alternative but to evacuate the Allied troops.
09:38The legend of Gallipoli is of heroic Anzacs led to their deaths by effete and incompetent
09:43POM officers.
09:44It's a caricature, though it has a grain of truth.
09:48The reality was that the British had taken on what they thought was a defunct oriental
09:53empire and lost.
09:55The Turks had been well schooled by their German allies and were much quicker to learn
09:58the new techniques of trench warfare.
10:01Their morale was also good, a combination of nationalism and religious fervour.
10:06Just as in the Boer War, the British had fatally underestimated the enemy.
10:19The ill-starred campaign had cost more than a quarter of a million Allied casualties.
10:32But the German-Ottoman stranglehold on the Bosphorus remained, and with it, the threat
10:37to India.
10:41It was time for plan B.
10:44The Kaiser had stirred up a jihad.
10:47The British now answered it by summoning a new and potent force from the desert, Arab
10:52nationalism.
10:55This daring new strategy was the brainchild of T.E.
10:58Lawrence, an eccentric Oxford historian with a passion for the exotic.
11:04T.E.
11:05Lawrence was an extraordinary bundle of contradictions, the illegitimate son of an Irish peer who
11:10loved dressing up in Arab clothing.
11:12He was a brilliant archaeologist, but also a fierce guerrilla fighter.
11:17He was a spy who loved fame and then ran away from it when it came.
11:21The romantic war hero was someone who admitted to having been buggered by his Turkish captors.
11:28He was, in every sense, a queer hero.
11:34For centuries, the Arabs had resented Turkish rule.
11:38Lawrence's plan was to turn their discontent into open rebellion.
11:44The Arabs had to feel they were fighting for their own freedom, he argued, not for the
11:49privilege of being ruled by the British.
11:56The appeal to Arab nationalism would trump the German-backed jihad.
12:02Lawrence and the Arabs were soon probing Turkish defences in Palestine, and in December 1917,
12:08Jerusalem fell to the British.
12:13After three long years of military reverses, here at last was a proper victory with all
12:18the trimmings, cavalry charges, fleeing Orientals and a dashing young hero in the vanguard.
12:28By the autumn of 1918, it was clear that the German gamble and global war had failed.
12:37Even on the Western Front, British imperial might finally triumphed.
12:44At the peace conference at Versailles, it looked like just another version of the familiar
12:49old story.
12:50To the victor, the spoils.
12:55Despite Lawrence's wartime promises to the Arabs, much of the Middle East, including
13:00Palestine, became British mandates, colonies in all but name.
13:07German territories in Africa were transferred to British rule.
13:12A chunk of New Guinea was handed over to Australia.
13:15Now even Britain's colonies had colonies.
13:20The Secretary of State for India, Edwin Montague, dryly remarked that he'd like to hear some
13:25arguments against Britain's annexing the whole world.
13:28Yet there was an illusory quality to this imperial high tide.
13:31True, the empire had never been bigger, but nor had the costs of victory, which wholly
13:36dwarfed the economic value of the new territories.
13:40Before 1914, the benefits of empire had seemed to most people to outweigh the costs.
13:45After the war, the costs suddenly and inescapably outweighed the benefits.
14:09Britain had won the First World War, but with peace came doubt.
14:17The exorbitant cost of victory left many questioning the whole point of ruling the world.
14:24So in 1924, in the drab London suburb of Wembley, the government staged a vast exhibition to
14:30celebrate the imperial achievement.
14:34It was time for a collective pat on the back.
14:41Visitors could gawp at reenactments of imperial victories, see the Zulus vanquished all over
14:47again.
14:55But there were problems with this morale-boosting extravaganza.
14:58Financially, the exhibition was the Millennium Dome of its day, running up a huge loss of
15:03£1.5 million.
15:06Just as importantly, and again like the Millennium Dome, the exhibition became something of a
15:10national joke.
15:14P.G.
15:15Woodhouse had his most famous character Bertie Wooster pop in, but he quickly tired of Wembley's
15:20worthy attractions.
15:24By the time we'd tottered out of the Geldkast and were working towards the Palace of Machinery,
15:30I was being pointed to my shortly executing a quiet sneak in the direction of the rather
15:35jolly Planters Bar in the West Indian section.
15:50Before the 1920s, the British had been remarkably good at taking their empire seriously, and
15:55that in itself was an important source of imperial strength.
15:59Yet by the time of Wembley, it seemed harder to play the role of global policeman with
16:04a straight face.
16:07The crisis of confidence had its roots in the crippling price Britain had paid for victory.
16:24Apart from the huge loss of human life, more than a million imperial servicemen dead, the
16:31war increased the national debt tenfold.
16:36To make matters worse, Britain's new territories cost substantially more than they'd brought
16:41in.
16:43In 1921, running Iraq cost more than the total UK health budget.
16:53With slow growth and high unemployment at home, the British government simply didn't
16:57have the cash to run and defend the even bigger slice of the world they now owned, and certainly
17:03not to fight another world war.
17:07The policy of appeasement was born.
17:12Under pressure from voters to attend to domestic problems, the politicians first neglected
17:17and then forgot about imperial defence.
17:19An ingenious new rule was devised.
17:22It wouldn't be another major war for at least ten years.
17:25Each year the rule was renewed, each year the spending was postponed.
17:30They got away with it for a while, for at this stage the principal threats to the empire
17:34seemed to come not from foreign powers, but from within.
17:43In 1916, the Irish Republican Brotherhood secured their places in the Hall of Fame of
17:49Irish nationalism by staging the abortive Easter Rising against British rule.
17:58In the immediate aftermath of the war, ex-soldiers were recruited into the notorious Black and
18:03Tans in an effort to stamp out republicanism.
18:10But soon, the empire's will to fight had gone.
18:15A peace deal was cobbled together, partitioning Ireland between a mainly Protestant north
18:20and a Catholic south, which would ultimately become an independent republic.
18:27Time and again, this was the sorry pattern that would repeat itself throughout the interwar
18:32period.
18:33Minor outbreak of dissent, a sharp military response, but then a complete collapse of
18:38British self-confidence.
18:39Hand-wringing, second thoughts, a messy concession, another concession.
18:44By allowing their very first colony to be split in two, the British had sent a fateful
18:49signal to the rest of the empire.
19:05Though we hear less about it, India had made an even bigger contribution to the imperial
19:09war than Australia.
19:11In 1914, around a third of British forces on the Western Front had been made up of rather
19:17bewildered sepoys.
19:23Over 60,000 who were killed in action are commemorated at the Great India Arch in New
19:28Delhi.
19:34In return for their sacrifice, the British now held out the promise of home rule for
19:39India.
19:44But to the more radical members of the Indian National Congress, the pace of reform seemed
19:50intolerably slow.
19:56By the end of the First World War, even the recently created Legislative Assembly in Delhi
20:02was being sidelined.
20:04The British decided to continue their wartime restrictions on political freedom.
20:09It seemed to confirm that the promises of home rule were empty.
20:21The British had plenty of experience at dealing with violent protest in India, but the diminutive
20:26Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi, the Mahatma to his followers, that seditious fakir to Churchill,
20:33was something new, a modern-day holy man.
20:36Gandhi urged Indians to harness what he called satyagraha, which roughly translates as soul
20:42force.
20:43The idea was to make protest non-violent, passive.
20:48And yet the British still smelt a rat.
20:50To them, Gandhi's idea of a hartal, a national day of self-purification, sounded suspiciously
20:56like a general strike.
20:58They resolved to meet soul force with fist force.
21:06One British commander personally attempted to stop what he saw as a rerun of the Indian
21:11mutiny.
21:13The irascible, chain-smoking Brigadier General Rex Dyer was not a man noted for subtlety.
21:21As a young officer, he was said to be happiest when crawling over a Burmese stockade with
21:27a revolver in his mouth.
21:30When amid demonstrations in Amritsar, a female British missionary was attacked, Dyer was
21:36incensed.
21:40He ordered any Indian entering the street where the attack occurred to crawl on his
21:45stomach.
21:48And when, despite a ban on public meetings, a crowd of 20,000 gathered, Dyer ordered his
21:54Gurkha troops to open fire without warning.
22:02Three hundred and seventy-nine demonstrators were killed.
22:06More than 1,500 wounded.
22:12Many of Dyer's fellow army officers in India celebrated him as a hero who'd saved the Raj
22:17from anarchy.
22:20But at home, there was horror.
22:24In Parliament, even Winston Churchill, no friend of Indian nationalism, denounced the
22:29massacre as the most frightful of all spectacles, the strength of civilisation without its mercy.
22:37Dyer was forced out of the army.
22:42Amritsar was India's Easter Rising, creating martyrs on one side and, perhaps more importantly,
22:48a crisis of self-confidence on the other.
22:56The ruthless determination to kill for empire, which had once made heroes of the likes of
23:01Clive and Kitchener, had gone.
23:05Between the 1920s and 1930s, many educated Britons lost their belief in empire, as surely
23:12as they lost their faith in God.
23:17The New Zealand-born cartoonist David Lowe ridiculed the old imperial ethos in his celebrated
23:23caricature, Colonel Blimp.
23:28Fat, pompous and irrelevant, Blimp personified all that was stuffy and silly about the empire.
23:43Ironically, amid all this inter-war anxiety, the empire's staunchest fan was not British,
23:50but Austrian.
23:54The British have learned the art of being masters.
23:59However miserably the inhabitants of India may live under the British, they will certainly
24:04be no better off if the British go.
24:07If we took India, the Indians would not be slow to regret the good old days of English
24:15rule.
24:24Adolf Hitler repeatedly expressed his admiration for the British empire.
24:30Indeed, his favourite film was Lives of a Bengal Lancer.
24:36Hitler sought to persuade the British that they could keep their empire if he could be
24:41given a free hand in Europe.
24:46To their eternal credit, the British turned him down flat.
24:57Yet they only did so after six wasted years of appeasing him.
25:02When the Second Battle of Empires began in 1939, Britain's defences had never been so
25:09depleted, and her imperial rivals had never been so ruthless.
25:31The Second World War pitted the British Empire against two of the most evil empires in history,
25:37the German and the Japanese.
25:48The collision between the British and Japanese empires was the collision between an old,
25:53self-doubting empire and a new and utterly ruthless one, between the setting sun and
25:58the rising sun.
26:00You might say that there were different degrees of imperialism.
26:03Certainly, in its treatment of conquered peoples, Japan's empire went far beyond anything
26:08the British had ever done.
26:10And this time, we were among the conquered peoples.
26:25By the beginning of 1942, the British naval base at Singapore was surrounded by Japanese
26:30forces.
26:33It was supposed to be the impregnable fortress of Britain's Asian empire.
26:38But starved of resources, the defences simply crumbled on land, sea, and in the air.
26:46We had been pushed back into the town itself, and were being shelled from all sides.
27:05An ignominious surrender had to be made, and the fighting ceased.
27:10It was hard to believe we were now in Japanese hands.
27:14We couldn't help but think of the rape of Nanking.
27:22130,000 British, Australian, and Indian troops laid down their arms before a force less than
27:29half that size.
27:31It was quite simply the greatest military disaster in the history of the British empire.
27:44But the humiliation didn't end there.
27:47The Japanese high command regarded surrender as dishonour, and were contemptuous of those
27:53who did not fight to the death.
27:59The British rightly began to suspect an official policy of humiliating their prisoners of war
28:06to diminish the empire's prestige in Asia.
28:15The British had used huge numbers of Asian coolies to build their railway network in the east.
28:21But now, in one of the great symbolic reversals of history, the Japanese forced over 60,000
28:27British, Australian, and Dutch prisoners of war to build a 250-mile railway across the
28:33Thai-Burmese border.
28:35It had been one of the British empire's proudest boasts that Britain's most powerful
28:41It had been one of the British empire's proudest boasts that Britain's never, never shall be slaves.
28:46But the men who built the bridge on the River Kwai were just that.
28:49They were slaves.
29:02The sadistic abuse of the prisoners was recorded in the secret journal kept by the Australian
29:08surgeon and POW commander, Lieutenant Colonel Edward Dunlop.
29:17Dunlop was nicknamed Weary, partly because of the stoop he had to adopt when speaking
29:22to his much shorter captors, to save their faces and avoid provoking their violent anger.
29:32Tomorrow, 600 men are required for the railway.
29:35Light duty and no-duty men and all men without boots to go, just the same.
29:40This is the next thing to murder.
29:44I see men being progressively broken into emaciated, pitiful wrecks.
29:49It is a bitter lesson to all of us not to surrender to these beasts, while there is
29:54still life in one's body.
29:57Secretly, and at the risk of his own life, Jack Chalker, an art student before the war
30:03and now a POW in Dunlop's camp, drew vivid sketches of the conditions in which he and
30:09his comrades were kept.
30:12The punishment beatings meted out even to sick men,
30:17and the tropical ulcers that could gnaw a man's flesh to the bone.
30:27One section of railway ran directly through a massive rock face.
30:35240 feet long and 80 feet high.
30:41The site was worked around the clock, and during the night shift, flickering carbide
30:46lamps and the gaunt faces of the POWs earned this cutting the nickname Hellfire Pass.
30:57This really is a place of the most intense, unimaginable human suffering.
31:06What you have to remember is that Wiri Dunlop and his men hacked their way through this
31:10rock, cut this pass with steel drills, digging and carrying the rock with their bare hands
31:19at the height of a cholera epidemic and during the monsoon season.
31:23And they did it in just 12 weeks.
31:27In many ways, Hellfire Pass doesn't really do it justice.
31:34In all, more than 48,000 Allied prisoners of war lost their lives in Japanese hands.
31:40Roughly a quarter of all those captured during the Pacific War.
31:45Never in the history of the British Empire has such a large number of prisoners of war
31:50been captured.
31:52In fact, the number of prisoners of war in the Pacific was the largest in the world.
31:57Roughly a quarter of all those captured during the Pacific War.
32:01Never in the history of the British Empire had there been such suffering, such sacrifice.
32:07This was the Empire's passion, its time on the cross.
32:15After this, could the Empire ever be resurrected?
32:20True, it still had formidable resources.
32:24But the key to victory and the key to the future of the Empire itself
32:28lay, ironically, with the country that had first thrown off British rule.
32:39America's hopes, America's prayers.
32:42Go with the men on land and sea and air, fighting for civilization and freedom.
32:54From his earliest days as Prime Minister,
32:57Winston Churchill had pinned his hopes on the United States.
33:02Churchill was convinced that an alliance of the English-speaking peoples
33:06was the key to victory.
33:08A victory that would restore the British Empire.
33:12When the Japanese attacked the Americans at Pearl Harbour in December 1941,
33:16he could scarcely conceal his glee.
33:18Yet the so-called special relationship between Britain and the United States
33:22had its own special ambiguity.
33:28To the Americans, reared in the mythology of their own fight for freedom
33:32to throw off the British yoke,
33:34the idea of ruling over subject peoples was unpalatable.
33:37It also implied those foreign entanglements the Founding Fathers had warned them against.
33:42For the Americans, it was deadly.
33:45The Americans wanted allied war aims to be based on the right of all peoples
33:50to choose the form of government under which they live.
33:55That sounded like the death knell for the Empire.
33:58But it was not.
34:00It was not.
34:02It was not.
34:04It was not.
34:06It was not.
34:08It was not.
34:10It was not.
34:12It was not.
34:20But what alternative did Churchill have?
34:23Without American money,
34:25the British War effort would simply have collapsed.
34:29The US advanced supplies to Britain worth billions of dollars.
34:35If the First World War ate into the Empire's savings,
34:38The second covered the imperial balance sheet with a massive red ink.
34:44Britain now had debts of $40 billion.
34:55The British had mortgaged their empire to pay for the war.
35:01British officials, negotiating with their American creditors in Washington,
35:05found themselves in the position of humble supplicants.
35:09This didn't come naturally to the leading figure in the British delegation,
35:13John Maynard Keynes.
35:16In London, everyone was in awe of Keynes's great brain.
35:20He was the preeminent economist of the 20th century, and he knew it.
35:25But when Keynes met US Treasury officials in this room here in Washington,
35:28it was a different story.
35:30To the Americans, Keynes was just one of these guys who knew all the answers,
35:34a wise guy. Keynes couldn't stand them either.
35:37He hated the way the American lawyers used to try to blind him with jargon,
35:41speaking Cherokee, as he called it.
35:43And he loved the way the American politicians used to answer the telephone
35:47when he was in mid-sentence.
35:57Above all, what Keynes objected to
35:59was the way the Americans sought to exploit Britain's financial weakness.
36:03As he vividly put it,
36:05the Americans were picking the eyes out of the British Empire.
36:18The foundations of the empire had always been economic,
36:21but those foundations had been eaten away by the cost of the war.
36:24What's more, the new Labour government's ambitious plans for a welfare state
36:28implied a drastic reduction in Britain's overseas commitments.
36:31In a word, the empire was bust.
36:34Now, when a firm goes belly up,
36:36the obvious answer is for the creditors to take over the assets.
36:39Britain owed the US millions,
36:41and Roosevelt himself had joked about taking over the empire
36:44from its broke masters.
36:46But could the British bring themselves to sell?
36:49Could the Americans bring themselves to buy?
37:02MUSIC FADES
37:14There was something very British about the Suez Canal military base.
37:20There were ten lavatories at the station.
37:22Three for officers, three for warrant officers and sergeants,
37:26three for other ranks,
37:28and one for the small number of servicewomen.
37:32It was a bizarre echo of the old imperial hierarchy.
37:37It was also an intimation of where the empire was headed.
37:47In the summer of 1956,
37:49the canal-based lavatories flushed for the last time
37:52as the final detachment of British troops left Egypt.
37:59Almost at once, the dynamic new Egyptian president,
38:02Colonel Nasser, nationalised the canal,
38:05which had been partly owned by the British government since the 1870s.
38:09Now he has seized the canal itself, and Britain suffers most.
38:13For she is not only the main shareholder, but also the main user.
38:18Convinced that Nasser was a Middle Eastern Hitler,
38:21the British Prime Minister, Anthony Eden, ordered an invasion.
38:25The French joined in.
38:27Fort Said reeled under the attack of Anglo-French invasion forces
38:30intent on wresting control of the...
38:32But as far as the Americans were concerned,
38:34this was just another selfish imperial adventure by the Europeans.
38:39...while ground troops mopped up isolated resistance.
38:43With the Soviet Union trying to lure Egypt into its orbit,
38:46the Americans felt their interests would be better served
38:50by currying favour with Nasser than by propping up the British Empire.
38:54Suddenly, the old world policemen and the new were eyeball to eyeball.
38:59We believe it can...
39:03It was the British who blinked.
39:05And what made them blink was once again
39:08their economic dependence on America.
39:14It was here at the Bank of England that the Empire was effectively lost.
39:18As Britain's gold and dollar reserves drained away during the crisis,
39:22Harold Macmillan, then Chancellor of the Exchequer,
39:25was compelled to ask for massive American aid,
39:28and that meant that the Americans could dictate terms.
39:31Only when Eden agreed unconditionally to evacuate Egypt
39:35did Eisenhower come through with a billion-dollar bailout.
39:39The Americans had refused point blank to sanction Nasser's overthrow,
39:43and that sent a signal to nationalists throughout the Empire.
39:46The hour of freedom had struck.
39:49But the hour was chosen by the Americans, not by the nationalists.
39:55The break-up of the British Empire happened with astonishing speed.
40:01In his haste to get shot of India, the last Viceroy, Louis Mountbatten,
40:06had plunged that country into bitter inter-communal violence,
40:10which left up to a million people dead and countless others homeless.
40:20In Palestine, too, the British had cut and run,
40:24leaving behind the unresolved question of Israel's relations
40:28with the now stateless Palestinians and the neighbouring Arabs.
40:41Thus it was that the British Empire, which had literally been for sale in 1945,
40:47was broken up rather than taken over,
40:50went into liquidation rather than acquiring a new owner.
40:53It had taken 300 years or so to build,
40:56and at one time had covered around a quarter of the world's land surface
41:00and about the same proportion of its population.
41:03It took just three decades to dismantle,
41:06leaving just a few scattered islands from Ascension to Tristan da Cunha
41:10by way of sad mementos.
41:13The British had won two world wars, but lost their world empire.
41:20Britain's imperial wealth,
41:22based on commercial and financial supremacy in the 17th and 18th centuries
41:26and industrial supremacy in the 19th,
41:29had been exhausted by the costs of global conflict.
41:33The great movements of peoples that drove British imperial expansion
41:37changed their direction in the 1950s.
41:41Emigration gave way to immigration.
41:47The missionary impulse that sent preachers like David Livingstone
41:51around the world also dwindled.
41:54Sir Richard Turnbull, the penultimate governor of Aden,
41:57once told Dennis Healy that when the British Empire
42:00finally sank beneath the waves,
42:02it would leave behind it only two monuments.
42:05One was the game of association football.
42:08The other was the expression, fuck off.
42:19The British Empire was a massive empire,
42:23In truth, the imperial legacy has shaped the world so profoundly
42:28that we almost take it for granted.
42:32Without the British Empire, it's hard to believe
42:35that free market capitalism and parliamentary democracy
42:38would have been established successfully
42:40in so many different countries around the world.
42:46And quite apart from football, there's the English language itself,
42:50perhaps the most important single cultural export of the last 400 years.
42:59Of course, the record of the British Empire wasn't unblemished.
43:05It often failed to live up to its own rhetoric of liberty.
43:10Yet the 19th century empire pioneered the abolition of slavery.
43:15It invested in a global network of modern communications
43:19and enforced the rule of law over vast areas.
43:25Though it fought many small wars,
43:28the empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since.
43:33It was global government that worked.
43:40And in the 20th century, when faced with the choice
43:43between appeasing or fighting the worst empires in all history,
43:47the British Empire did the right thing.
43:52In 1940, it stood alone
43:54against the truly evil imperialism of Hitler and Hirohito.
44:01The empire sacrificed itself to defeat them.
44:07Yet the break-up of British rule after 1945
44:10hasn't meant the end of English-speaking empire.
44:14For out of the ashes of one empire, another seems to have risen.
44:20Windows XP is the most powerful, fastest,
44:24most reliable operating system we have ever done.
44:32Multinational corporations, Christian evangelists and Hollywood.
44:37America's informal imperialism today isn't so very different
44:41from the monopoly trading companies, missionaries
44:44and royal pageantry of the British Empire.
44:49Even US foreign policy recalls the gunboat diplomacy
44:52of British overseas rule in its heyday,
44:55when a little trouble on the periphery
44:57could be dealt with by a short, sharp military intervention.
45:01The only difference is that today's gunboats fly.
45:12The recent clash between America and Islamic fundamentalism
45:16also has its parallels in the past.
45:19There's a striking resemblance between the Mahdi in the 1880s
45:23and Osama bin Laden today.
45:31Just as in the 19th century, the opponents of empire today
45:35are coming to the forefront.
45:37Just as in the 19th century, the opponents of empire today
45:41are cultural conservatives fighting the forces of globalisation.
45:50And just as in the past, by globalisation,
45:54we really mean anglobalisation,
45:57an integrated world economy under English-speaking leadership.
46:02Yet the process of anglobalisation is profoundly different today.
46:06For one thing, the United States isn't a net exporter of capital
46:10in the way that Britain was, nor does it export millions of people.
46:14Perhaps more importantly, Americans are uncomfortable
46:17with the idea of empire.
46:19Maybe the memory of that lost war in Vietnam
46:22is still too painfully fresh.
46:25The great poet of empire, Rudyard Kipling,
46:28put his finger on it back in 1899
46:31when he appealed to the United States
46:33to shoulder its imperial responsibilities.
46:39Take up the white man's burden.
46:41Send forth the best ye breed.
46:44Go bind your sons in exile
46:47to serve your captives' need.
46:50To serve your captives' need.
46:53Take up the white man's burden
46:56and reap his old reward,
46:58the blame of those ye better,
47:01the hate of those ye guard.
47:08Just as Kipling urged,
47:10the Americans have taken on a kind of global burden,
47:13fighting the war on terrorism,
47:16preaching the gospel of freedom.
47:19But the empire that rules the world today
47:22is an empire that dare not speak its name.
47:26The American empire is both more and less
47:29than its British predecessor.
47:32A vaster motherland,
47:34but somehow in denial about its imperial mission.
47:49The Americans used to joke
47:52that Britain had lost an empire
47:55but failed to find a role.
47:57But perhaps the reality is that they found a role
48:00without yet owning up to the empire.
48:03The technology of overseas rule may have changed.
48:06The dreadnoughts may have given way to F-15s.
48:09But empire is as much a reality today
48:12as it was throughout the 19th century.
48:15And empire is as much a reality today
48:18as it was throughout the 300 years
48:21when Britain ruled and made the modern world.
48:45www.larryweaver.com