What were the forces that thrust the British Empire to its extraordinary position of greatness and then just as powerfully drove it into decline? And why is nearly every nation on earth, in one way or another, the consequence of the British Empire? In these 36 lectures, Professor Allitt leads you through four centuries of British power, innovation, influence, and, ultimately, diminishment - four profound centuries that literally remade the world and bequeathed the complex global legacy that continues to shape your everyday life. This is a remarkable lecture series; one that will give you fresh insights into world history in a wide range of areas - political, economic, technological, social, and more. And it will also give you a comprehensive overview you won't find offered anywhere else - a context into which you can integrate new knowledge about this country, as well as understand the background of current events in so many other countries that were once part of Britain's empire, from Ireland to China, and in Africa and the Caribbean. Indeed, it seems fair to say that one cannot truly understand the most important aspects of world history without a firm grasp of the history of the British Empire. In giving you that grasp, these lectures draw on a vast range of critical events, riveting personalities, revealing anecdotes, and eloquent quotations. Compelling, comprehensive, and astonishing in the force of its narrative power, each lecture will give you a refreshing new understanding of what made the British Empire both great in its achievements and vulnerable to its eventual downfall.
The Rise and Fall of the British Empire
Explore the Tudor-Stuart era: a captivating examination of the 229-year period from 1485–1714 during which England transformed itself from a minor feudal state into what has been called the first modern society. In making that transformation, England became the wealthiest and most powerful nation on Earth.
01: The Sun Never Set
Learn how history's greatest colonial empire came about not according to a master plan, but in response to great shifts in the currents that move nations. This lecture previews the roles played by military power, trade, slavery, industrialization, and many other forces in motivating Britain to acquire, maintain, and, ultimately, relinquish its empire.
02: The Challenge to Spain in the New World
Britannia didn't always rule the waves. See how jealousy over Spanish and Portuguese wealth combined with religious rivalry and advances in nautical knowledge to push England toward its own role in the New World.
03: African Slavery and the West Indies
Although a more enlightened Britain would eventually do away with both its African slave trade and then slavery itself, it originally looked on the issue as strictly economic. Gain a grasp of slavery's importance to not only Britain's New World colonies, but to its entire economy.
04: Imperial Beginnings in India
For its first 150 years, the British East India Company granted a monopoly by the queen in 1600 had no intention of becoming the political overlord of India. Explore how circumstances overrode that intention and set the stage for British rule.
05: Clive and the Conquest of India
See how a rapidly rising young officer named Robert Clive, who initially attempted to quell local instability, won a succession of victories that quickly earned him fame, power, and ill-gotten wealth. His actions laid the foundation for British domination of India.
06: Wolfe and the Conquest of Canada
Britain's victory over the French in the Seven Years' War redrew the world's map in Britain's favor including control over Canada but at great cost. The debt was so massive it would ultimately contribute to England losing her American colonies.
07: The Loss of the American Colonies
Britain's desperate need for revenue ended years of "benign neglect" of its increasingly prosperous American colonies. Colonial resentment of "taxation without representation" triggered the American Revolution that, with French help, inflicted a stunning defeat on the empire.
08: Exploring the Planet
Although it was trade that prompted Britain to build an empire, the path was marked by great strides in exploration, invention, and science. See how accelerating scientific knowledge in the late 18th and early 19th centuries connected directly to British exploration, mapping, and colonization of previously remote areas of the world.
09: Napoleon Challenges the Empire
The French Revolution, the overthrow of France's monarchy, and the rise of Napoleon created an unprecedented crisis for the empire. But Britain's domination of the seas and an innovative banking system that enabled it to fund more than two decades of war ultimately proved too much for even Napoleon.
10: The Other Side of the World
The Indian model "a massive indigenous population dominated by just a handful of colonizers" was only one model of British empire building. Learn how Australia and New Zealand illustrated the other indigenous population vanquished by disease and war, which cleared the way for large-scale white settlement.
11: Abolition of the Slave Trade and Slavery
With slavery widespread throughout history, the surprise is less that Britain used slavery than that it eventually decided to abolish it. This lecture gives you insight into the motives that led Britain to reverse course on what had become an economic pillar of its empire.
12: Early African Colonies
Britain first gained a colonial foothold in Africa by seizing Holland's Cape of Good Hope settlement during the Napoleonic Wars. See how its 1833 abolition of slavery intensified the still-simmering tensions between Britain and the region's Dutch settlers.
13: China and the Opium Wars
Witness the mid-19th century collision between the British policy of free trade (logical for a nation that enjoyed industrial and nautical supremacy) and the closed culture of the Chinese. It was a collision China could not win, as Britain used its military might to impose total domination on China and compelled it to accept the lucrative opium trade.
14: Britain - The Imperial Center
Watch as Britain emerged from the Napoleonic Wars as the most powerful nation on earth. Its industrial revolution, sophisticated banking and insurance techniques, political stability, and social mobility each contributed to its ability to project power around the world.
15: Ireland - The Tragic Relationship
In the first of two lectures devoted to Britain's troubled relationship with Ireland, you gain insight into how religion, politics, and social factors (including a catastrophic famine) combined to create this most puzzling and tragic element of British history.
16: India and the "Great Game"
Deepen your understanding of the intricate relationship between Britain and India. This lecture gives you the opportunity to examine both the changing face of British domination and the disastrous results when Britain tried to safeguard that regional dominance against Russian encroachment by invading Afghanistan.
17: Rebellion and Mutiny in India
Track the factors that contributed to a growing unrest, which finally exploded in an outright mutiny among Indian soldiers of the East India Company's army. British forces violently suppressed the uprising, after which the British government dissolved the East India Company in 1858 and undertook direct government of the subcontinent.
18: How Canada Became a Nation
Learn how Canada, although remaining loyal to Britain during the American Revolution, also disliked being governed from the other side of the Atlantic without adequate representation. See how its provinces gained self-government and then unification without the need for large-scale revolution.
19: The Exploration and Settlement of Africa
Travel along with British explorers as they journey across Africa, mapping its mountains, tracing its river systems, and ultimately triggering a scramble among Europe's colonial powers to conquer Africa in the last three decades of the 19th century. The scramble intensified with the discovery of diamonds and gold in South Africa.
20: Gold, Greed, and Geopolitics in Africa
The 1886 discovery of gold near present-day Johannesburg transformed a pastoral backwater into a center of dynamic economic activity. The great wealth at stake ultimately brought military violence and even disease-ridden concentration camps in an ominous premonition of 20th-century warfare.
21: The Empire in Literature
The empire influenced British literature as much as it did British life. A fascinating tour through works both celebrated and obscure - including Shakespeare's "The Tempest," Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe," and Jean Rhys's "Wide Sargasso Sea" illustrates the colonies' role in introducing new ideas, new forms of wealth, and difficult moral questions to British audiences.
22: Economics and Theories of Empire
Throughout the 19th century, advocates of the empire claimed they were bringing progress to backward peoples: the blessings of honest government, Christianity, education, railways, medicine, and commerce. Above all, however, they were "making money," and in this lecture you learn about the 19th-century debate over the ethics and economics of empire.
23: The British Empire Fights Imperial Germany
Follow the First World War from the perspective of Britain's colonies as you track the participation of colonial populations, the role of the colonies in providing necessary supplies, and the impact of the war on the empire itself.
24: Versailles and Disillusionment
Learn how Britain and France secured the vengeful peace treaty they desired, circumventing Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points, which would have brought the European powers' colonial empires to an end. Nevertheless the war undermined British confidence in its imperial mission, even as independence movements began to arise in many colonies.
25: Ireland Divided
Return to Ireland and learn the history of its battle for self-government. You conclude with the 1922 creation of the Irish Free State and the loyalist North, and the ensuing civil war in the Free State between those who accepted partition and those who rejected it.
26: Cricket and the British Empire
Enjoy a fascinating look at the game that was both the sport of the British Empire and a metaphor for many of the ideals Britain saw itself spreading. Even as colonies struggled for independence, they often used cricket analogies to force the British to admit the contrast between their ideas of fair play and the harsh reality of their use of power.
27: British India between the World Wars
Follow the early career of Mohandas "Mahatma" Gandhi, as he led the struggle for independence. Although since World War I the British had conceded in principle the idea of eventual Indian self-government, they still retained all the apparatus of repression.
28: World War II - England Alone
Hamstrung by strong antiwar feelings after World War I, Britain began World War II woefully behind in munitions and research and development. Early defeats and a humiliating retreat from Dunkirk brought Winston Churchill to the premiership with a grim determination to prevail.
29: World War II - The Pyrrhic Victory
Follow the progress of the war - the tide of which turned in 1942 with a British victory at El Alamein and an American victory over the Japanese at Midway. Despite the Allies' ultimate triumph, the 1945 election brought a jarring shock as Churchill was defeated and the new Labour government of Clement Attlee began to dismantle the empire.
30: Twilight of the Raj
Watch as India's long-awaited 1947 independence comes at a ghastly price: the death of a half-million people in Hindu and Muslim massacres before and after the historic date and the assassination of Gandhi.
31: Israel, Egypt, and the Suez Canal
Learn how Britain's attempt to partition Israel and Palestine in 1948 "a strategy unsuccessfully attempted in both Ireland and India" suffered a similar fate. See also how the Suez Crisis of 1956 demonstrated that Britain was no longer capable of unilateral imperial action.
32: The Decolonization of Africa
Although postwar Britain had once harbored hopes of preserving its African colonies in spite of India's and Israel's independence, the Suez crisis prompted a shift in policy. Britain began to offer early independence to its ill-prepared African colonies, with politicians from both major parties feeling they had no real alternative.
33: The White Dominions
Gain fresh insights into the 20th-century evolution of Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. All three countries tried to balance the increasing allure of America as their principal partner in questions of trade and defense against the sentiment, loyalty, and ethnic traditions that bound them to Britain.
34: Britain after the Empire
After World War II, Britain had to decide what its primary international partners would be once the empire had gone, choosing between its former colony the United States or the rest of Europe. See how Britain ultimately recognized the need to take its place in a Europe fast becoming commercially and politically united.
35: Colonial and Postcolonial Literature
Returning to the world of literature, learn how the literature of the 20th-century British Empire and its aftermath dealt in dramatic contrasts, passionate extremes, ideas about exoticism, and questions of divided loyalty. Professor Allitt offers several examples from some of Africa and India's finest writers, including Alan Paton, Chinua Achebe, Nadine Gordimer, V. S. Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie.
36: Epitaph and Legacy
An opportunity for added perspective: Was the British Empire just a disgraceful episode of greed, exploitation, and racism? Was it an unmatched achievement in the advancement of Western civilization? Or was it some potent combination of both? And what does that say about the nature of empires and the prospect that they will persist?
Overview Course No. 8480
About
Patrick N. Allitt is Cahoon Family Professor of American History at Emory University, where he has taught since 1988. He received his PhD in American History from the University of California, Berkeley, and completed postdoctoral fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and Princeton University. He is a widely published author whose books include A Climate of Crisis: America in the Age of Environmentalism; The Conservatives: Ideas and Personalities throughout American History; and Religion in America since 1945: A History.
