Jan Morris: Pax Britannica - The Climax of an Empire (Unabridged)
Introduction by Jan Morris
Pax Britannica – The British Empire 1897
Chapter 1: The Heirs of Rome
2: The crowds outside waited in proud excitement…
3: Many and varied energies had swept the British…
Among the better-informed…
4: Within two minutes, we are told…
5: More gratifying still was the tribute of the Empire itself.
6: The procession itself was a superb display…
7: Everybody agreed it was a great success.
Chapter 2: Palm and Pine
2: Outside this heterogeneous mass there shone…
3: All this the British people surveyed…
4: So they were motley origins…
5: Never since the world began, Seeley had written…
6: So it looked to the British.
Chapter 3: Life-lines
2: A favourite map of the time was the kind that showed…
3: Elaborate systems of supply, defence and communication…
The British held key ports and maritime fortresses…
4: Backwards and forwards along the imperial shipping lanes…
5: The British had invented submarine cables…
6: All this vast expertise, of ships and mails…
Chapter 4: Migrations
2: Emigration to the Empire was officially popular.
3: If the Empire dispersed the British…
4: As for the flora and fauna…
5: It multiplied so fast that its progeny became a plague…
6: Saddest of all, in their irrepressible impulse to control…
Chapter 5: Pioneers
2: It was a sign of the imperial times that Rhodesia…
3: 'As for us,' said the Rhodesia Herald…
4: The Company had been, it is true, under a cloud…
5: These were the homely pleasures of a frontier town…
6: But far lower even than the vagrants in the social scale…
7: Salisbury was scarcely a sentimental town.
Chapter 6: The Profit
2: In the 1890s this atavistic view of imperial profit…
3: Trade was a steadier imperial impulse…
The free ports of the Empire…
4: It was a common belief among the late Victorians…
5: Such was the profit-mechanism of Empire…
6: So all these various instincts and impulses of profit…
Chapter 7: The Glory
2: The Empire was at its zenith…
3: Dreams of private glory, too, forced the imperial play…
4: What incentives they were!
5: Many years before Dr. Livingstone had laid another trail…
6: The evangelical mood was now past its prime…
7: On a Governmental level…
8: And there was one more stimulus to splendour…
Chapter 8: Caste
The joke that 'niggers began at Calais' was not entirely a joke.
3: But to be coloured was something else.
4: By the nineties the attitude had hardened.
In England those who believed the East could be…
5: The immediate problems of race arose only…
6: Yet this very class of Anglicized Asians and Africans…
7: Among the settlers and planters of the tropical Empire…
8: A vassal could qualify for respect…
9: On the banks of the Hooghly River in Calcutta…
10: For it was not viciousness, nor even simply conceit…
11: Steevens's unspeakable conceit might speak…
Chapter 9: Islanders
2: Like many another island fortress it had endured…
3: It was a colony exceptional in its beauty…
4: It was quite an elaborate little Government…
5: A mile or so from Government House…
6: Often, when a merchant ship approached the entrance…
7: St. Lucia's Diamond Jubilee accordingly…
8: But then a feu de joie, commented the Voice sourly…
9: Brigade-Surgeon Gouldsbury never returned to St. Lucia…
Chapter 10: Imperial Order
2: The one immoveable thing about it was the Crown.
3: The Crown at the very summit…
4: From the graceful little iron suspension bridge…
5: It was an imperial maxim…
6: Steeped in the traditions of the team spirit…
7: Top jobs in the Empire sometimes went to grandees…
8: The law was different.
9: Loftily above it all, the supreme fount of imperial justice…
10: Not the law as such, but the rule of law…
Chapter 11: Imperial Complexity
2: At one end were the great self-governing colonies…
3: Nothing was uniform.
4: Consider the island of Ascension…
5: Here are a few less spectacular anomalies of Empire.
6: And oddest of all the imperial phenomena was Egypt.
7: Paddling up the Nile with Oxford marmalade…
8: It was all bits and pieces.
Chapter 12: Imperialists in General
2: Nobody, of course, runs so true to type as that.
3: The aristocracy of Empire was the official class…
4: Poor Anglo-Indians!
5: They walked dolorously to and fro under the glare…
6: Among the white settlers everywhere…
7: The maverick patrician escaped all this…
Chapter 13: Imperialists in Particular
2: The age of the great explorers was almost over…
3: There were only three British soldiers…
The second soldier of the Empire was…
4: Alone among the admirals of the imperial Navy…
5: Of the proconsuls in the field of Empire that summer…
6: Two politicians of very different stamp…
Salisbury was a remote enigma to the British public.
7: The men Kipling called 'the doers' were mostly unknown…
Rhodes was first of all a money-maker.
8: There were other exceptional imperialists…
Chapter 14: Proconsuls
2: Simla in 1897 was one of the most extraordinary places…
3: In the morning Simla seemed different again…
4: Seven thousand feet up, eighty miles from a railway line…
5: The British Government in India was a despotism…
6: So from top to bottom…
7: But however original the young officers in the field…
8: The Viceroy knew that his was a unique imperial trust.
9: It was a bad year in India…
Chapter 15: Consolations
2: Sport was the first.
3: Drink came next – food did not interest them half so much.
4: They liked their creature comforts…
In Australia the clubs very early became strongholds…
5: Throughout the length and breadth of the Empire…
6: They had developed to a new pitch of finesse…
7: They enjoyed themselves with tourism.
8: One easily detects pathos in these pleasures.
Chapter 16: Challenge and Responses
2: But one of the most enviable advantages…
3: For a century living dangerously, or alone…
4: Into the mystique of every British settlement…
5: But there was to this great communal exploit…
Chapter 17: Stones of Empire
2: Supreme in every imperial city stood the house of God…
3: Next to the house of God, the home of the Empire-builder.
4: Public buildings of the most august elaboration…
5: One day in 1836 Colonel William Light…
6: The British, who generally neglected their waterfronts…
7: 'The Maharajah gave the order…'
The British had a genius for parks…
8: The garden instinct of the English did not always survive…
Chapter 18: Tribal Lays and Images
2: No English Delacroix arose…
3: Few other professional painters made the Empire…
4: Most of the statues in the British Empire…
5: But they were mostly of the Queen.
6: Marches and oratorios, fanfares and even ballets…
7: The difficulty about imperialism as a literary motif…
8: Out of the frenzy three writers emerge…
Yet the third of our writers, a short-sighted journalist…
Nobody saw more clearly through the petty pretences…
9: In literature as in art…
Chapter 19: All by Steam!
2: The British Empire was a development agency…
3: Some of the imperial works really were on the colossal scale.
4: But this was the railway age…
5: There was no grand plan for the railways of the Empire.
In India especially…
6: In the last three decades of the century…
7: They were making a start with tropical medicine.
8: One gets the unfortunate impression…
9: The natives saw this millennium, and it worked.
Chapter 20: Freedmen
2: Canada was still a colony of the British Empire.
3: The imperial hegemony was tactfully exerted.
4: Canada had become a nation, of a sort…
5: The first Europeans in Canada were the French…
6: The British Canadians were loyal to the Crown…
7: An English Canadian, W.H. Drummond…
8: They did not, for example, throw squibs at the Jubilee…
9: It was not a contented country.
Chapter 21: On Guard
2: The land forces of the Empire were drawn…
3: The Army List of 1897 records only nine…
4: This was not a promising formula for modern war…
5: But also at the Queen's command stood another army…
6: It was in India that the martial heroism of Empire…
7: No other imperial war had left memories so hallowed…
8: Between them the two armies of the British Empire…
Chapter 22: At Sea
2: The Royal Navy did not lack self-esteem.
3: These were the extravagances of a lost age…
4: The social structure of the Navy…
5: British naval strategy, such as it was…
Chapter 23: Imperial Effects
2: Let us ourselves, guide in hand, wander around London…
3: And if, like every other visitor, we finally strolled…
4: The New Imperialism was too new…
5: Half without knowing it, the British had picked up…
6: In 1882 there appeared in the list of English cat breeds…
7: A shifting population of colonials moved through London.
8: If the physical imprint of Empire was slight…
9: The New Imperialism was potent politics.
10: But cause and effect were often muddled…
11: So the foreigner's first impression was right in a way.
Chapter 24: Overlords
2: Implanted in this melancholy setting were the Anglo-Irish…
3: Many Anglo-Irish were understandably distressed…
4: The Cadogans stood, ex officio…
5: This queer regime remained undeterred…
6: Much more permanent were the barracks…
7: Of all the cities the British had created across the waters…
8: Ireland was the only one of the Queen's dominions…
9: 'Everything was orderly and peaceable,'…
10: The Irish Times blushed.
11: The noblest cause? Treason or patriotism?
Chapter 25: Omens
2: If precedents were anything to go by…
3: Would the barbarians one day take over?
But it was the sea that counted.
4: On Jubilee evening the Governor of Bombay…
5: In Egypt almost nobody wanted the British to stay…
6: Everything was under control…
7: Was it all worth it?
8: But in that celebratory summer any weakening…
9: It was not to be.
Chapter 26: 'The Song on Your Bugles Blown'
2: Was it a Christian Empire?
3: Yet there was no rule to it.
4: A less involved imperial principle…
5: Plain Englishness, in those days, was a principle.
6: To many Britons this was not enough.
7: But if in some corners of the Empire…
8: This was the saving flaw of British imperialism…
Chapter 27: Finale
2: So their pride was understandable…
3: The New Imperialism quickly subsided.
