Daily Archives: June 25, 2024

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Empires (3) British Empire

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Map or areas of the world that were part of the British Empire (current British Overseas Territories underlined in red with Mandates and protected states in a lighter shade) by Redstorm1368 for Wikipedia “British Empire” and licensed for use under https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

 

(3) BRITISH EMPIRE (1707 – 1997)

 

Pax Britannica.

Rule, Britannia! Britannia rule the waves!

To many – and certainly to modern history – THE Empire.

The largest empire of history – with a quarter of the earth’s land area, with a reach extending well beyond that to virtually every corner of the globe, including a command of the seas that effectively made them a British lake.

Essentially, the British made the world their pink bits – not a lewd innuendo (as it might be for the United States as part of its ‘soft’ influence – heh), but a reference to the tradition of mapmakers marking the British Empire in pink on maps.

Also the most populous empire of history, with a quarter of the world’s population (although not the most populous empire by relative proportion of the world’s population).

And above all the empire that more or less made the modern world – “to which we owe the development of transport and communication, the spread of science and technology, and the spread of the English language as a global lingua franca” – a global influence enduring in its American successor, not surprisingly as a former British colony and the subsequent “special relationship” between them.

“The British Empire is credited, even by its critics, for contributing to general economic development as it enforced a free-trade area over a quarter of the globe”, albeit lopsided in places – and the British as agents of industrialization and modernization. Even Karl Marx noted, with the sardonic wit that was his best stylistic feature, that the British were “conservatives at home and revolutionaries abroad”, tending to displace traditional and aristocratic elites for developing middle classes.

Politically, it was a forum for “the Enlightenment and its ideas of human rights”, the rule of law, social contract and political liberty – which of course would eventually be applied against the empire itself. That included such things as the abolition of the slave trade and slavery, or suttee in India.

The British Empire is often classified into the First and Second British Empires, although they are essentially continuous but for the loss of the American colonies in the American Revolution, which is the demarcation between them. However, it was the Second British Empire that took Britain truly to the glittering heights of world empire for which it is remembered, driven by its victory in the Napoleonic Wars, naval supremacy and the powerhouse – economic, financial and technological – of the Industrial Revolution.

By many metrics the British Empire would rank as top empire, so why only third here? Well, to be honest, I just find the top two entries more intriguing – with the top entry as more enduring and influential in its template for subsequent empires, including the British Empire. Also, as a modern empire, the wounds it inflicted are still too recent and raw.

Those wounds tend to be the focus of contemporary observers. However, such observations overlook the extent to which the British Empire was based on collaboration with their subjects, not least their uncanny ability to co-opt defeated warrior tribes – from the Scottish Highlands to the Gurkhas – for imperial service. It had to be – it is surprising just how limited British military forces were, apart of course from their prized naval supremacy, and how much of a shoestring they operated on, for a global empire.

Of course, the British were quite prepared to use brute force when they had to – “there would not have been a British Empire in the first place if its constituent peoples were free, or possessed agency in any meaningful capacity, to leave it whenever they were so inclined”. The British just preferred to use other more subtle means of influence and coercion when they could.

Of course, in their colonial wars, the British also relied on that classic art of war, picking curb stomp battles, through superiority of firepower. In the words of Hillaire Belloc – “Whatever happens, we have got – the Maxim gun, and they have not”. Or in the words of Edmund Blackadder – “back in the old days when the prerequisite of a British campaign was that the enemy should under no circumstances carry guns — even spears made us think twice”.

Ultimately however, such brutality, initially limited to small minorities of their subjects involved in active rebellions, “became harder to conceal and make palatable as time went on, and the British lost their grip on the levers of mass media and propaganda which played an immense role in justifying and enabling their regime to its own citizens as well as international observers”.

And so the empire declined and fell, amidst other powers that rose to challenge it, or in the case of the United States, replace it. However, there are no definitive endpoints for it – even today, Britain retains overseas territories – although many are nominated. Singapore in 1942 and Suez in 1956 are two common nominations. The independence of India and cession of Hong Kong (back) to China are others, and I’ve gone with the last here.

In the end, I tend to agree with the assessment of TV Tropes, that the British were neither the first, the worst or the most damaging of the imperialists, but merely the most successful.

 

 

DECLINE & FALL

Again – and how!

It may not have been as long as other classical declines I could name but then modern history tends to move faster. The British Empire reached its vaunted territorial height after the First World War, when it even managed to gain some more territory. In reality, the cracks were there from that war, but it took the Second World War for them to fall apart.

Still, the British can claim that they staked and gave up their empire on their finest hour – an apocalyptic struggle against the most destructive and predatory empires in history – with some fairness on one hand, but excluding such things as the Bengal Famine on the other. Ironically, it gained its true territorial height in the Second World War, with the occupation of former Italian or French colonies and other territory, but which soon evaporated.

 

THE BRITISH EMPIRE NEVER FELL

On the other hand, the British Empire never fell – as Britain still retains overseas territories. That and we still live in the world they made, literally speaking their language.

 

THE SUN NEVER SETS

The British Empire was THE empire on which the sun never sets. Still is, in fact, technically through its overseas territories. Looking at you, Pitcairn Islands.

 

EVIL EMPIRE

And how!

The British often like to imagine themselves as ‘nice’ and their empire as the ‘nice’ one, as if they just went around the world playing cricket and sipping tea. In the words of TV Tropes, “home of men in red coats and pith helmets, being served lots and lots of tea by the locals…the great white Hunter, the adventure archaeologist”.

Or in the (ironic) words of D.H. Lawrence, “the English are so nice”.

Spoiler alert – although like all empires, the legacy of the British Empire is more complex than a mere matter of vindication or vilification, they were not and their Empire was not…nice. You don’t win and run global empires by being nice. And indeed there is a whole publishing industry, traditional and online, devoted to the British Empire as evil empire, including one hilariously over the top book “The Evil Empire: 101 Ways That England Ruined the World”.

It has some fairness to it – one could easily compile a Top 10 (or Top 101) list for the British Empire as evil empire. Perhaps the most insidious evil of the British Empire was its indifference to famine, which some historians equate to holocausts, particularly in Ireland and India – those punching bags of the British Empire, from which one could well compile that Top 10 British Evil Empire list all of themselves.

And this time, it’s personal. Yes, I married the evil empire, when I was colonized by my British ex-wife – which lent itself to my theory of the British Empire as a relentless creeping doom, starting with just helping the British with their luggage when they arrived, but ending with your complete submission, as they expect everything else from you as well.

“And what’s more, they’re very nice about being nice

about your being nice as well!

If you’re not nice they soon make you feel it”.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)

Top Tens – History: Top 10 Wars (3) Vietnam War

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Excerpt from Apocalypse Now, one of the most iconic Vietnam War films – with the ubiquitous helicopters that were one of the most iconic visual images of the war itself

 

(3) VIETNAM WAR (1954-1975)

 

The iconic twentieth century war after 1945 – as visual image in popular culture or imagination, and as metaphor and archetype in history or politics.

In terms of visual image in popular culture or imagination, Vietnam is a war most people can see in their mind’s eye, whether accurate or not. I have a theory that we all have a mythic or psychic geography of cities and landmarks we can see in our mind’s eye or psyche – and so too we each have a mythic or psychic history. And Vietnam looms large in our modern mythology.

It originates from the modern proliferation of visual images that inform our mythic or psychic geography and history – predominantly on screen in film or television. For Vietnam, there was the prevalence of images from the war itself, often stylized as the first war fought on television, which was a substantial part of why the American civilian population and government turned against it, as well as fictional depictions of it in American mass media and popular culture.

The imagery from the war itself endured beyond the defeat of the Americans or of South Vietnam in those fictional depictions, including my favorite film of all time, Apocalypse Now. As such, Vietnam lent itself to the most enduring iconic images of war in the twentieth century – the ubiquitous choppers or helicopters, the Viet Cong or Charlie, napalm, fragging, My Lai, Tet, the fall of Saigon, and so on.

And the endurance of the Vietnam War in history is also in large part because of its historical significance, not least because it continues as an enduring historical Rorschach test or metaphor. President Kennedy famously quipped that while victory has a thousand fathers, defeat is an orphan. Ironically, however, that quip doesn’t apply to Vietnam, where almost everyone seems to claim it as vindication for their own ideas or ideologies – although the only ones who might do so unequivocally would be the Vietnamese themselves.

Our entry here is for the Vietnam War involving the United States in varying levels of engagement from about 1954, with the height of its military engagement from about 1965 to 1972. However, that war was also the Second Indochina War, following almost directly from the First Indochina War 1945-1954 against the French colonial regime – and in turn followed by the Third Indochina War 1975-1991, primarily between Vietnam and Cambodia but also the brief Sino-Vietnamese War against Vietnam’s former Chinese ally. And arguably these are part of a long line of Vietnam Wars, dating back to Vietnamese resistance to Imperial China and the Mongols.

American historiography of the war often poses the questions of whether the war was justifiable or moral, and whether it was winnable – with a tendency to answer both questions in the negative, although that is clouded by the historical reality of defeat on one hand and parallels with the Korean War on the other. It’s as much a part of that historical Rorschach test as the rest of the war.

At very least, the Americans should have queried how they could improve upon the French defeat, let alone double down on it. In this, ironically, they lapsed into similar errors of military judgement as Germany in both world wars in their failure to understand the nature of war, which involved understanding the limitations of military force in war and limitations of national power in the world.

I’ve seen arguments, with various degrees of persuasive force although I have yet to be persuaded by them, as to how the United States might have “won” – interestingly, these seem to cluster either near its starting point or its finishing point, with the former being more persuasive for obvious reasons, although with the obvious counterpoint that not starting it at all may have been better yet.

Finally, as a historical archetype, Vietnam seems to combine most of the predominant threads of war in the twentieth century – anti-colonial war or war of independence, civil war, proxy war, and most famously above all, guerrilla war or insurgency, perhaps the definitive type of war in the twentieth century (and beyond).

 

ART OF WAR

It’s been famously said that the Americans won all the battles but lost the war. However, almost as famous is the Vietnamese rejoinder (to Col. Harry Summers Jr) – “That may be so. But it is also irrelevant.” And so it was, as for the Vietnamese, the Vietnam War was not about battles but winning the war – which was a matter of endurance or outlasting their adversary.

It, along with other successful modern insurgencies, has often led to observations of guerrilla warfare as synonymous with, or even definitive of the art of war. Not so much in pre-modern history – although it did occur in the right circumstances, you don’t tend to hear too much of successful guerrilla warfare, because states were prepared to wipe out or displace entire populations to eliminate resistance.

However, counter-insurgency in modern warfare is notoriously tricky. There is arguably a modern, smart way of winning against insurgency, or there remains the more brutal way, but few modern states have demonstrated the means or above all patience to achieve the former without invariably lapsing into the latter or something resembling it. Just ask the Americans about the coup against Diem, My Lai, the bombing, napalm, Agent Orange or the Phoenix program.

Of course, insurgency can be tricky as well. After all, what do you do with all your forces while you are avoiding all those battles – but at the same time hoping to expand your political control? Insurgencies often default to a brutal answer – killing civilians. You know, those civilian collaborators or representatives of your enemy. Even those insurgencies seen as the “good” ones. Just ask the city of Hue during the Tet Offensive.

 

WORLD WAR

Vietnam as world war? Surely not? Although even in strict terms of combat, Vietnam was not that localized as a battlefield. It was after all the Indochina War – expanding to Laos and Cambodia, while also involving China and Thailand at its borders.

Beyond that, it evolved from being part of one world war to another. The Vietnamese resistance to French colonialism was caught up in the Second World War – involving Americans, Chinese, Japanese and British one way or another in Indochina. And after the Second World War, the Americans sponsored the French in the First Indochina War, before becoming involved more directly in the Second Indochina War after France was defeated. And that was part of the larger cold war – with the Soviet Union and China provided substantial aid or forces to North Vietnam, while Australia, South Korea and the Philippines all provided combat forces to support the Americans and South Vietnam.

 

STILL FIGHTING THE VIETNAM WAR

The stereotypical Vietnam veteran is or was often depicted as “”still fighting the Vietnam War” – I’m not sure to what extent that stereotype is accurate, such as whether they may have had disproportionately high rates of PTSD. Beyond that, the Vietnam War cast a long shadow, particularly with refugees and persistent allegations of MIAs or prisoners retained by Vietnam.

For the actual Vietnam War, we’re not still fighting it. If anything, Vietnam is probably more positive or even a potential ally towards the United States than it is to its former ally, China.

But for the Vietnam War as enduring imagery, metaphor and archetype, we’re still fighting the Vietnam War – with new wars constantly being compared to it.

 

GOOD GUYS AND BAD GUYS

Defeat may be more an orphan – and never more so than in terms of morality for the defeated. Not many people these days tend to argue for the Americans as the good guys, although that begs the question of how one distinguishes it from, say, the Korean War, which tends not to be seen in the same terms.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (GOD TIER)