Following the debate about the existence or otherwise of “American empire,” the study of imperialism is back on the map in a big way.1

Much recent discussion has concerned two issues: first, why empires survive over long periods of time, and second, how their inheritance continues to influence the conditions of our modern world.

Even at the most superficial level, the memory of the British Empire continues to inform and embitter public discussion in today's global media, more so indeed than in the 1970s and 1980s when it was written off by most commentators as an anachronistic relic, whose importance lay only in the nostalgia it evoked among the former ruling class. Now, by comparison, the colonial and postcolonial have moved to the center of academic studies in history, literature, and sociology.

¹ Chapter 33 originates as a lecture that C. A. Bayly delivered on a number of occasions, first in Barcelona (wherefore a couple of reference and allusions to this location have been retained in the text), then in Copenhagen for his inauguration as affiliated professor at the Saxo Institute, University of Copenhagen, in September 2010, and finally in Sydney.

C. A Bayly, Deconstructing the British Empire In: The Oxford World History of Empire. Edited by: Peter Fibiger Bang, C.A. Bayly, Walter Scheidel, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780197532768.003.0033. Meanwhile, public intellectuals battle in speeches and conferences over the legacy of empire. For many in the left-wing circles of the American and Third World media, empire was a long and brutal occupation, characterized by economic ex­ploitation, “epistemic violence,” and periodic genocide against indigenous cultures. For others, among Anglo-American neoliberals and a few quietly spoken voices in the post-colonies themselves, empire was a bearer of modernity and modern globalization, forging a system of world trade and bringing—contrary to the intentions of many of its rulers—modern education, science, and democracy to the rest of the world. Some, like Niall Ferguson, the Oxford and Harvard historian, see the British Empire as a precursor to today's American hegemon.^[2192] Ferguson argues that America is only half an empire, though. If it committed resources and troops on an appropriate scale, as the British Empire once did, the contempo­rary disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, in Rwanda or Somalia, could have been avoided.

My aim in this lecture is to explain why the British Empire survived so long in conditions of massive change. I argue that it was, in fact, remarkably heteroge­neous as a system of political economy and, even more importantly, as a system of ruling ideologies.^[2193] For generations, these several systems and ideologies were, however, mutually reinforcing. The decline or atrophy of one “element of em­pire” merely set the scene for the emergence of another way of projecting power and legitimacy. As for the legacy of the British Empire in the modern world, I also want to emphasize ideology, while not detracting from the significance of empire's political and economic consequences. I think that the leading so­cial and economic ideologies in the modern world, from neoliberal economics through Third World nationalism, to Islamic, Hindu, and Buddhist revivalism, have all been deeply affected by the heritage of the British Empire, its ideologies and structures of power. Even as the economic legacy of empire in Asia's—if not Africa's—rural underdevelopment begins to disappear, this ideological inherit­ance remains with us.

Before I continue, I need to address the moralizing discussions that I mentioned earlier: the stereotypes of empire as genocide or empire as unintended liber­ator. I am the first to concede that many episodes in the history of the British Empire remain morally repugnant: the slave trade (the formal ending of which has been celebrated this year [1807-2007]), the extirpation of indigenous peo­ples in the Americas and Australasia, inaction in the face of the great famines that ravaged Asia, the vicious police actions against the Mau Mau in Kenya and Malayan communists in the 1950s. This said, however, I find no merit in totalizing denunciations of empire. Empire, the intervention of one state in the sovereignty of another, has been a feature of all recorded history. Moralizing denunciations of empire tout court, as occurred in the old Communist regimes or in some parts of American academia today, serve little purpose.

The British Empire, for a start, was often most violent, not when it was at its strongest, but when it was weakest. That was true from the 1776 American mas­sacre at Lexington, through the brutal suppression of slave revolts, and the mas­sacre of Indians at Amritsar in 1919 to the suppression of Mau Mau in Africa in the 1950s. The British Empire was constantly hampered by its dependency on indigenous intermediaries. Sometimes it used those intermediaries against their own countrymen; sometimes it turned on the intermediaries themselves. In 1857 in India the British massacred their Indian sepoy army after its revolt. In 1919 at Amritsar it was Gurkha troops from Nepal that the British used to mow down unarmed crowds. A few months ago I saw this headline in the British newspaper the Daily Telegraph: “Gurkha spirit triumphs in the siege of Nawad.”^[2194] Nawad is a town in the Helmand province of Afghanistan. The empire achieved neither hegemony, in Gramsci's sense, nor dominance in the sense used by today's Indian subaltern historians, the self-styled historians of the masses.^[2195] Empire secured only patchy allegiance and partial control. It was most brutal where and when control was failing. It often appeared as a melee of conflicting factions and interests.

It is to this multifaceted character of empire to which I now wish to turn as I address our two leading issues: the longevity of empire and its contemporary resonances. One could easily establish many complex typologies of elements within the British Empire and their leading ideologies. But I will propose four. First, there was the empire of royal fortresses, sea-l anes, and islands; second, the empire of “white” settlement colonies; third, the empire of direct territo­rial control; and, finally, the empire constituted by dependent non-European monarchies or native states. I will discuss the growth of each of these and their leading ideologies in turn. I should explain that these elements are “ideal types.” Most colonies embodied aspects of two or more of these elements in a complex relationship.