British Empire Construction & Administration PDF

49. Construcción y administración del Imperio colonial británico en los siglos XVII y XIX. J. Conrad y R. Kipling 1. Introduction. British Empire - an overview 2. First and Second Empire 3. Why Britain? 4. Administration 5. British Empire and Literature 6. Classroom Implications Morgan K. (2010) Th...

49. Construcción y administración del Imperio colonial británico en los siglos XVII y XIX. J. Conrad y R. Kipling 1. Introduction. British Empire - an overview 2. First and Second Empire 3. Why Britain? 4. Administration 5. British Empire and Literature 6. Classroom Implications Morgan K. (2010) The Oxford History of Britain Alexander M. (2007) A History of English Literature Porter A. (1999) The Oxford History of the British Empire Fowler A. (1987) A history of English literature 1. British Empire - an overview At its height, the British Empire consisted of nearly one-quarter of the earth’s land surface. Following the acquisition of new colonies in Africa, the Middle East, and the Pacific in the wake of the First World War, Britain was responsible for ruling 500 million people, over a fifth of the earth’s population. Measured on indicators of power such as political, economic, and strategic reach, the British Empire was the world’s sole superpower and it retained this position until the Second World War. At its most easily grasped level, the British Empire was a collection of overseas territories governed by offices of the British State or its representatives, though the degree of control varied - there was never a one-size-fits-all colonial experience. From the eighteenth century until the 1950s it was the world’s largest political entity, a powerful military and strategic alliance, and an economic bloc. Of the world’s 203 nation-states around a third, at one point or another, experienced British rule or significant British influence. The territories that formed the British Empire ranged from tiny islands to vast segments of the world’s major continents. Stretched across each ocean and time zone, the proud claim that ‘the sun never set on the British Empire’ was actually true. 2. First and Second Empire Historians have written of a ‘first’ British Empire all the way to a ‘fourth’ in seeking to describe the changing nature of imperial power. The first British Empire was largely destroyed by the loss of the American colonies in 1776, followed by a ‘swing to the east’ and the foundation of a second British Empire based on commercial and territorial expansion in South Asia. The British Empire grew in stages over the course of many centuries: from ‘internal colonisation’ within the British Isles in the Middle Ages to seventeenth-century growth in North America and the West Indies, through phases of expansion in South Asia and Australasia in the eighteenth-century, and in Africa, the Pacific, and South-East Asia in the nineteenth-century. A final flourish of empire-building occurred in the Middle East in the early twentieth century. The Empire’s character shifted over time, from an original emphasis on settler communities and a mercantile economic system to a multi-ethnic, global conglomeration powered by an industrial economy. 3. Why Britain? European empires began to explore and colonise the world in the 15th century, with Portugal and Spain being the first ones, but it was Britain who quickly took the lead in global colonisation and established a long-lasting colonial empire. There were many factors that contributed to British expansion. Its population increased significantly throughout 17th and 18th century and an abnormally large ‘middle class’ emerged which meant that there was a rapidly growing domestic market ready to be satisfied by overseas products. There were then the geographical facts of Britain’s location, its long coastlines fostered seafaring skills and its island status provided a significant degree of security against invasion. The British Empire was more individualistic than the centrally controlled, state religion-dominated Catholic empires, its commercial enterprises and chartered companies freer to act unhindered by church or state. The crown exercised some rights of appointment and supervision, but the colonies were essentially self-managing enterprises. Another definitive feature was the shift from an empire of commerce and the sea to a territorial empire of conquest and settlement. What further marked it out from rival European empires was the impact of Britain’s industrialisation and the shift from mercantilism to free trade. There was then the unprecedented drive for overseas markets as Britain became the first industrialised nation. Britain was the world’s strongest industrial power and became the workshop of the world and needed raw materials provided by the colonies. 4. Administration The Empire was a mass of territories ruled from London with varying degrees of direct and indirect control, and administered on the ground by British who came to rule the indigenous inhabitants with only minimal control or regulation from Britain itself. The highest imperial authority was the British parliament and the monarch. Those who administered the Empire on the ground were bureaucratic institutions and civil servants. Members of the colonial service were actually employed by the relevant colonial government they worked for, not the British government direct. The administration of the empire was undertaken by a relatively small number of officials who were able to tax people, claim their labour, and send them to war, but were barely visible. This was partly because British rule rested upon alliance with indigenous leaders and elites who did much of the actual day to day governing, and with the implicit threat of military intervention if there was trouble. 5. Empire and literature In English literature of the 19th century, Empire and the colonisation are often present. Sometimes they appear in the margins, like in Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, but in other texts, they features more prominently. Joseph Conrad and Rudyard Kipling were one the most importar writers to include these topics in their works, from apparently completely different perspective. No author saw the effects of imperialism and colonisation as clearly as Joseph Conrad Korzeniowski. Born in Russian-occupied Poland in 1857 Conrad worked as a sailor on merchant trading vessels for many years before settling in England. There, he wrote a series of novels in his second language – English – that established him as one of the leading novelists of the day. Transforming his personal experience in the Belgian Congo and the East Indies into fictional tales, Conrad offers a damning accusation of the colonial system, from the exploitation of the Belgian Congo (Heart of Darkness) to the personal follies and shame of serving British sailors in the Malay Archipelago (Lord Jim). Conrad’s perspective on Empire however was singular. In Lord Jim he challenges the imperial image of the colonialist as a wise, benign father protecting his savage dependents. The pessimistic assessment of the colonialist’s motives and cruelty finds full expression in Heart of Darkness. And in Nostromo Conrad explores the human dimensions of large-scale capitalist intervention in the colonial world, finding no cause to celebrate imperialism which he described as a robbery with violence, aggravated murder on a great scale. Rudyard Kipling took the opposite side. He was born in 1865 and grew up in India, where his parents worked, and later worked there as a journalist. He was renowned for his literature, his works spanned many different styles, including novels for both adults and children as well as short stories and a great number of poems but a great part of his life was devoted to the British Empire. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1907. He believed it was the responsibility of all “civilised” people to bring indigenous people out of “darkness” and into the age of empire. He used poems like “The White Man's Burden” to rationalise and justify colonialism not only in Britain, but also in the United States. Kim, a spy novel, can be regarded as a good example to illustrate whiteman’s moral supremacy in India. Finally, the Jungle Book, a book for children about Mowgli, a child raised by animals in an Indian jungle, is re-read today by many postcolonial critics as a description of an Englishness as a site of power and racial superiority. 6. Classroom implications The popular and well-known stories such as Heart of Darkness can be easily used in the ESL classroom. Extracts from the novel, carefully chosen in their original version or a version by the teacher, provide opportunities for multi-sensorial classroom experiences and can appeal to learners with different learning styles. Texts can be supplemented by audio, music, film clips or podcasts, all of which enhance even further the richness of input that students receive. Literary texts often offer a rich source of linguistic input and can help learners to practise the four skills - speaking, listening, reading and writing - in addition to exemplifying grammatical structures and presenting new vocabulary. Literature lessons can also lead to public displays of student outputs through posters, poems, stories, comics or short performances of plays. Therefore, for a variety of linguistic and cultural reasons, literary texts can be more motivating than the referential ones often used in the textbooks. `