7/7/2023 0 Comments A memory of empire![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Lost in all this are inconvenient facts too numerous to list in anything other than the most cursory way. The British empire was won, as the historian John Seeley famously claimed, “in a fit of absence of mind”, and given away in a fit of collective indifference. It’s an ingenious and uniquely British perspective, which achieves the seemingly impossible – casting Britain’s empire as a great moral achievement, and its collapse as an act of casual generosity, without any hint at the irreconcilability of the two. “There is only one empire where, without external pressure or weariness at the burden of ruling, the ruling people has voluntarily surrendered its hegemony over subject peoples and has given them their freedom,” said Clement Attlee in 1960, neatly summarising this belief. There is the way the empire ended – a gentlemanly release, far less violent and disruptive than the dissolution of France’s dominions, or so the self-congratulatory theory goes. ![]()
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