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First published on the Breaking Views blog and written by Mike Butler. Republished here with permission.

The British Empire – a force for good, a new book, is a refreshing antidote to the current zeal for decolonisation, which encourages us to reimagine history as “a morality play in which white men are the baddies”.

Author John McLean, a writer and publisher, who has a MA in history and a Bachelor of Law from Victoria University in Wellington, and did Bar finals at Grays Inn in London, tells the stories of Britain’s 101 colonies established over 400 years, capturing the boldness and zeal of the pioneers who built the empire.

The story of the British Empire starts during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I.

“Her defeat of the Spanish Armada in 1588 gave her people pride, patriotism, and self-confidence which led them to believe that in that buccaneering age they could do great things for themselves and their country”, McLean wrote.

At that time, south and central America had already been carved up by Spain and Portugal, and Pope Alexander VI had issued a papal bull which established the Doctrine of Discovery which drew an imaginary vertical line west of the Azores that gave to Spain all land to the west of it, and to Portugal all land to the east.

Britain, which was in the Elizabethan age no longer part of the Pope’s Catholic empire, took territories in North America, claimed by proclamation by Sir Walter Raleigh, the adventurer who brought tobacco and potatoes from the new world to the English Queen.

After a failed attempt to build a colony at Cape Cod in Massachusetts, three ships carrying 105 colonists set out for Virginia, arriving on May 6, 1607.

That first colony at Jamestown was the trigger for all future British colonisation, and a variation of this basic pattern was used in New Zealand 233 years later.

The first charter to the Virginia Company outlined the basic plan for British colonisation. The British Crown never wanted to bear to cost of colonial projects so directed such efforts to private enterprise.

The monarch, who was at that time James I, assigned land rights to colonists (as sub tenants) for the creation of a settlement which could be used as a base to export commodities to Britain and to create a buffer to prevent Spanish control of the coasts of North and South America.

The Virginia Company financed the project, recruited settlers, and developed the colony which was governed by a council in London, used English law, spoke English, and operated on Christian beliefs and ethics. The monarch took a 20 percent cut of all profit.

Subsequent schemes that adapted to locations and international relations at the various times different colonies were established, refined organisation so that colonies were increasingly self-governing with international relations controlled from London and protection implied by Britain’s extensive armed forces.

British colonies were the building blocks of the British Empire, spreading the English language, customs, law, property rights, and Christianity to more than 100 locations around the globe, creating much of the developed world that we live in today.

That is one reason why McLean can write without fear of contradiction that the British Empire was a force for good.

McLean provides further evidence of this force for good in 20 pages on slavery, and on the sustained efforts Britain took, at great expense, to stamp it out.

Slavery was made illegal in Britain in 1772, the Slave Trade Act 1807 made it illegal for British ships to transport slaves, and from 1808 to 1867, Britain spent 1.8 percent of its GDP every year to seize slave ships and free slaves, McLean wrote.

Britain’s role in reducing slavery is now hardly mentioned while former British territories where slavery had existed hundreds of years ago are claiming trillions in compensation, McLean wrote.

Even more evidence of lasting benefits is the number of engineering projects that the British completed and which remain long after the Empire faded, namely railways in Canada and Uganda, bridges at Victoria Falls and Sydney Harbour, the Ganges Canal, the Hong Kong Airport, and the Otira Tunnel.

At around 600 pages, McLean’s book looks like a time-consuming read. It is easy to read with the information accessible in short chapters with each story briefly told, in a lively style, and to the point, and opiniated.

McLean covers the first 13 colonies in North America lost in the revolutionary war. He points out that this was a war over the right to retain slaves under the cover story of taxation without representation.

Canada, the Caribbean, and West Africa are discussed next. Britain was attracted by Sierra Leone’s large harbour. Freetown there was created in 1787 and settled by 400 former slaves from Britain freed in 1772.

Colonies in north, east and southern Africa are covered before moving on to the Atlantic Islands, the Mediterranean, the Middle East (the founders of Israel get a kicking), India, territories in the Indian Ocean, south-east Asia, Hong Kong, Australia, New Zealand, and the Pacific.

McLean shows the extent to which independence was a disaster for many colonies. He quotes a London Times report on May 8, 2000, which said that:

“Sierra Leone was among the most developed British colonies in West Africa, whose diamond wealth provided a high standard of living. But in the past 30 years, the lure of diamonds has proved to be the country’s undoing, leading to chronic instability, a 10-year uprising, and some of the worst atrocities in Africa. It is now the poorest country in the world and comes bottom of the UN misery index. Many thousands have been mutilated by rebel fighters. The capital, Freetown, has been repeatedly looted, and most of the country’s educated people have emigrated. The diamond mines have been largely wrecked.”

Sadly, that story of armed conflict, atrocities, looting, and white flight after Britain granted independence to numerous colonies has been repeated many times. Such is the legacy of decolonisation, that “morality play in which white men are the baddies”.

The British Empire – a force for good, John McLean, Winter Productions, 594 pages, illustrated, $50 (including postage within New Zealand), available at www.trosspublishing.com or trosspub@gmail.com.

A speech by John McLean at the launch of his new book, 27th May 2024.

So, why have I written this rather lengthy tome on the British Empire? The short answer is that I became increasingly annoyed by the false narrative about the Empire that is propagated by our air-headed media and biased academics with their limited “soundbite” education and their preference for the current fad of anti-imperialism rather than historical truth.

My interest in the Empire – and my pride in being part of it here in New Zealand – stems from when I was a schoolboy stamp collector, limiting my collection to Britain and the British dominions and colonies. Thus did dozens of distant colonies come to my attention and I have had an interest in them ever since.

The book begins where the Empire itself began – with the sailing of three small ships from the Thames to Virginia in 1606 to found the first permanent English settlement in North America. I then deal with each of the thirteen American colonies and the American Revolutionary War, which they call the War of Independence. This was less about taxation – as they claimed – than about having the right to keep their slaves – a right that was increasingly threatened by the growing anti-slavery movement in England which was trying to liberate them.

The chapter on Canada is interesting since the various colonies that were later to comprise Canada were given a huge boost as a result of the American Revolutionary War because so many Loyalists fled north to Canada – especially to Nova Scotia – rather than remain in the new American republic which was unforgiving to those who did not embrace the new republicanism. Thus for the next century and a half Canada was more or less defined by its resistance to the republicanism across its southern border.

There follow the Caribbean and African colonies that prospered and developed under the light touch of British rule that, unique among empires, had the knack of providing individual freedom within an orderly and safe society.

They were tough men who founded the colonies. Take Lord Lugard for example. In a battle with the King of Nikki’s forces in northern Nigeria he got a poisonous arrow in his head. His men dragged him around the ground by the arrow in their attempts to pull it out but to no avail until someone braced his feet on Lugard’s shoulders and the arrow was extracted with a sizeable piece of his skull attached. Lugard then chewed some antidotal roots to fight off the poison, then led a successful counter-attack and marched thirteen more miles before calling it a day.

In trying to improve and civilise the backward African colonies by building schools, hospitals, railways, ports, roads and dams, and providing clean drinking water and vaccinations against deadly diseases the British – through their doctors, teachers, engineers and colonial administrators – were giving great and long-lasting benefits to their various colonies, making life healthier and more comfortable for the people.

However, not a lot of this was appreciated after the Second World War when various alien forces – the United Nations, the Soviet Union and the United States – ganged up together in an effort to drive Britain out of her African colonies so that they would be ripe for either Soviet communism or exploitation of their resources by American companies. And, sad to say, the British governments from 1960 to 1980 – mainly Conservative – were too cowardly and too unprincipled to resist.

And so a premature – and in almost all cases disastrous – independence was pushed on to them by London without any regard for their readiness or otherwise to govern themselves. The futures and well-being of the masses, which Britain had always safeguarded so well, were now ignored so as to hand over power to whichever indigenous thugs screamed the loudest.

The one thing that Britain never tolerated in its empire was corruption but, as soon as the Union Jack was lowered, corruption began to rot every ex-colony in Africa with the single and honourable exception of Botswana, which alone has preserved the democratic principle and is governed in the interests of its people rather than the interests of the tribal elites as is the case elsewhere.

There is a chapter in the book on slavery, in which Britain was involved through the Atlantic slave trade, as well as a chapter on Britain’s long, selfless and principled campaign to abolish both he slave trade and the institution of slavery itself. No other nation or empire had the power or the will to abolish slavery and it took Britain nearly a century of expensive naval and other activity to do so. This, I believe, is the most noble achievement of the British Empire.

Book Review – The British Empire; A Force For Good

The British Empire; A Force For Good