British Empire
Posts in The Copybook tagged ‘British Empire’
The villagers of Mabutso in Southern Africa begged Dr David Livingstone to rid them of a menacing pride of lions.
On February 16th, 1844, Scottish missionary David Livingstone was digging a water channel at his mission near the South African village of Mabotsa when the villagers rushed up, crying that lions had again raided their village and slaughtered their sheep and goats. Livingstone ‘very imprudently’ agreed to go with them and demoralise the pride by shooting one of the dominant males.
Sir William Hunter looks back over a Government committee’s plan to introduce tea cultivation to India in 1834.
The British drink almost 36 billion cups of tea each year, a trend set by King Charles II’s Portuguese wife, Queen Catherine. The tea itself came exclusively from China, which by the early Nineteenth Century had become a cause for concern. What if China were to close her ports to Europe, as neighbouring Japan had done? So the Government set up a Tea Committee.
The Founder of Singapore established his city on principles of free people and free trade.
Sir Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) is well-known to anyone who has visited Singapore, the city he founded in 1819. Still held in honour there, he is much less widely remembered back in his own country, but deserves better from us for his pioneering campaigns against slavery in the Far East and for being a champion of free trade in a world dominated by gunboat diplomacy.
Stamford Raffles, Lieutenant-Governor of Java, urged London to bypass our European partners and trade directly with Japan.
On February 13, 1814, Stamford Raffles (1781-1826) in Java wrote to Lord Minto, former Governor-General of India, urging London to pursue a more vigorous trade policy with Japan. Previous trade links had employed Dutch agents, but Raffles believed that Britain would do better by trading directly rather than through European partners.
Sir Charles Lucas argued that the Industrial Revolution happened at just the right time for everyone in the British Empire.
From the 1850s, railways, steamships and the electric telegraph allowed Britain and the scattered nations of her Empire to increase cooperation. Even better, said colonial administrator and historian Sir Charles Lucas, such innovations came too late for politicians in London to use them to tighten their control.
Sir Charles Lucas looked back at the role of the Government, the military and private enterprise during three centuries of British adventure overseas.
To end the six-volume ‘Oxford Survey of the British Empire’, Sir Charles Prestwood Lucas looked back over the history of England’s overseas adventures from time of Queen Elizabeth I to the end of the Victorian Age. He concluded that there had been three quite distinct eras, and began by looking at the character of our enterprise during the upheavals of the seventeenth century.