Lhe death of Queen Elizabeth II and the long national mourning that followed (and sometimes bordering on collective hysteria) are an opportunity to wonder about what remains today of the British imperial idea. The British Empire project took shape in the 16the century, under the Tudors, to compete with Spain and Portugal and, to a lesser extent, France, and it borrowed heavily from the institutions and practices of the Iberian world.
During the XVIIe century, the British Empire came in two versions: one, Atlantic, was largely based on colonization and the conquest of territories; and the other, Asian, was initially more trade-oriented, whether through the East India Company or private companies.
The Asian empire was transformed in the XVIIIe century: the conquest of vast territories and the accumulation of wealth in India prompted it to expand eastward using gunboat diplomacy. The Opium Wars with China were a result, but the British also tightened their grip on Southeast Asia.
The War of Independence waged by the American colonies from the 1770s would reduce Britain’s footprint on the Atlantic. The 19the century was nevertheless dominated by the empire, which was enriched by numerous territories in Africa and elsewhere. The result was an eminently ambivalent political regime, with a singular form of democracy in the metropolis and different forms of despotism in the colonies.
Reign strewn with pitfalls
It was in this context that decolonization took place in the 20the century. The process was not going to involve the big three “white settlements” which are Canada, Australia and New Zealand, but it began in a fourth of these colonies, Ireland. The main steps were taken after the Second World War, with the independence of the countries of the Indian subcontinent and then of most of the colonies in Africa, up to that of Zimbabwe at the end of the 1970s.
Some political leaders had to admit that the usual arguments about the benefits of pax british and the “enlightened despotism”, and the idea that the colonized peoples were big children, no longer held water. Much of the British political class, however, continued to believe that the empire had brought benefits, not only to Great Britain, but also to the colonies.
This vision of things manifested itself during the Falklands war against Argentina in 1982. It was about “to defend the cause of freedom”affirmed Elizabeth II in front of the American president Ronald Reagan. “The conflict in the Falkland Islands has been forced upon us by blatant aggression, and it goes without saying that we are proud of the way our soldiers serve their country. » In this habitual wooden language, the empire became synonymous with freedom. The majority of Her Majesty’s subjects favored intervention in the Falklands, visibly unaware that the“characterised aggression” was an integral part of the history of their empire.
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