Jan Morris: Pax Britannica - The Climax of an Empire (Abridged)
Introduction read by Jan Morris
Pax Britannica – The Climax of an Empire
Within two minutes we are told…
The Diamond Jubilee crystallized the new conception of Empire…
Most Englishmen asked what it was all about…
To other nations the imperial methods often seemed…
The British had invented submarine cables…
The movement of people out of the British islands…
As for the flora and fauna…
Beneath a low kopje on the Makabusi River…
The Company had been, it is true, under a cloud…
But far lower even than the vagrants in the social scale…
The infatuated British public did not greatly concern itself…
Trade was a steadier imperial impulse…
Such was the profit-mechanism of Empire…
Many years before Dr. Livingstone had laid another trail…
The evangelical mood was now past its prime…
And there was one more stimulus to splendour…
Another cause of racialism was fundamentalist religion…
The British distrusted the product of this system…
We have been speaking of the general…
Like many another island fortress…
Socially St. Lucia tended to dwell upon a past…
'No Caesar or Charlemagne,' Disraeli once said…
Below Parliament, and subject to its Secretaries of State…
It was an imperial maxim that the administrators of Empire…
All over the Empire these administrators…
Some of the greatest British jurists had presided…
Consider the island of Ascension…
The imperial complexity was all too apparent…
When Kipling first went east from India…
By now the merchants of Empire, no less than the governors…
Among the white settlers everywhere…
The age of the great explorers was almost over…
There were only three British soldiers whose personalities…
Two politicians of very different stamp set the pace…
Northward from the Punjabi village of Kalka…
The British Government in India was a despotism…
The Viceroy knew that his was a unique imperial trust.
The New Imperialism was born out of a medley of moods…
They liked their creature comforts…
Throughout the length and breadth of the Empire…
They had developed to a new pitch of finesse…
Much of the driving force of imperialism…
But there was to this great communal exploit…
It was by their buildings that earlier Empires were most…
One day in 1836 Colonel William Light…
The British had a genius for parks.
Most of the statues in the British Empire…
The difficulty about imperialism as a literary motif…
Yet the third of our writers, a short-sighted journalist…
In literature as in art, the British settlers overseas…
Among the waters of the Indus Basin…
But this was the railway age – its tail-end in Britain…
They were making a start with tropical medicine.
In 1897 the most-frequented route into the goldfields…
Canada was still a colony of the British Empire…
The first Europeans in Canada were the French…
The Pax Britannica was not a boastful fraud.
But also at the Queen's command stood another army…
The great shrine of the epic…
To every right-thinking Englishman the Army was only…
In materiel, too, the Royal Navy was deficient in some…
Let us ourselves, guide in hand, wander around London…
The New Imperialism was too new, and too sudden…
A shifting population of colonials moved through London.
But cause and effect were often muddled…
By Telford's road or Stephenson's railway line…
The British in Ireland did not think of themselves…
Of all the cities the British had created across the waters…
Where there was not actual opposition…
If precedents were anything to go by…
Some of its foreign critics were merely jealous.
The fashionable New Imperialist theory…
Was it a Christian Empire?
Buried away among it all was a conviction…
The British missed no opportunity to demonstrate the wealth…
In these years African chiefs of savage splendour…
But if in some corners of the British Empire…
Queen Victoria went home happy on her Jubilee Day.
