Usually despatched in 2 - 3 working days. (Available now to download.)
The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’s masterly telling of the British Empire from the accession of Queen Victoria to the death of Winston Churchill. It is a towering achievement: informative, accessible, entertaining and written with all her usual bravura. Heaven’s Command, the first volume, takes us from the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, moving effortlessly across the Empire, from the shores of England to Fiji, Zululand, the Canadian prairies and beyond. Truly gripping history.
Jan Morris: Heaven's Command - An Imperial Progress (Abridged)
Introduction by Jan Morris
Part 1 The Sentiment of Empire 1837–1850
Far away Lord Auckland laboured…
Though slavery had been so old an imperial practice…
At first the Royal Navy tried to end the traffic…
So the first monuments of Queen Victoria's empire…
The Boers of the Great Trek – The Voortrekkers…
Retief was courteously received.
They built the church they had vowed…
On the dirt road west of Mirzapur on the Ganges…
By western criminal standards these were motiveless crimes.
The first big Victorian war was precipitated…
The story of the war against the Afghans is full of omens…
At this climactic moment there arrived upon the scene…
Even now the Afghans expected reprisals…
By the end of the fifth day the last of the sepoys were dead…
On the other side of the world, on a summer day…
By the 1840s, nevertheless, there was pressure…
Some of the white settlers were already quite urbane.
A very different kind of society was established…
Such were two of the Empire's white settlement colonies.
In the county of Cork in south-west Ireland…
In the early 1840s, before the Famine…
In the middle of it all O'Connell, aged and demoralized, died…
Never again would the British shirk their imperial duties…
Next the British power, with some false starts…
All this in his thirties, at a time when the British services…
Part 2 The Growing Conviction 1850–1870
The Crystal Palace was made entirely of glass and iron…
Many of the Empire's grandest monuments were railway works.
Here is another memorable product of the imperial technology.
High above the Jumna River at Delhi…
But it was not a national revolution at all…
It was Sunday next day, May 10, 1857…
This pathetic action was to enter the mythology of the Empire.
The other sacramental episode of the Indian Mutiny…
At the end of October word filtered in…
In 1861, work began on the construction of a new headquarters…
All over the Empire this trend towards the aloof…
On September 16, 1864, the spa of Bath in Somerset awoke…
The compelling fascination of the Nile had exerted itself…
But Speke went back with a very different companion…
Livingstone, it seemed, did not in the least wish to be rescued.
The conviction of Empire was increasingly reinforced…
When the Anglican Bishop of Jamaica visited his flock…
In Cape Town Bishop Robert Grey…
These imperial disputes were comprehensible only to the elect…
The British were now exporting to their dominions…
The Metis were not forewarned of these developments.
Trade was resumed.
Wolseley was to talk about it for the rest of his life…
Still the British as a nation were not conscious expansionists.
Until recently the Fijians had been polygamous cannibals.
Part 3 The Imperial Obsession 1870–1897
Disraeli adopted the imperial cause deliberately.
Disraeli did not of course invent imperialism…
The profit motive, too, had subtly shifted its emphasis.
In Africa stood Ashanti-land.
It was only in the 1870s…
In the end the Ashanti broke…
Behind the Army stood the Royal Navy.
Disraeli, who became Prime Minister for the second time…
The South African scene had changed…
The fascination of the Zulu War…
Eleven heroes of Rorke's Drift were awarded the Victoria Cross…
Except for the quiescent Orange Free State…
Empire was race.
Authority could not sanction the extermination of the natives…
Through all these years Ireland festered.
Nobody was more shut off from the life of the country…
This led to the most spectacular of all Parnell's…
Introduction by Jan Morris