There were 30,000 undefended Boar farm houses. Every single one of them was burnt to the ground. This destruction left thousands of Boar civilians, mostly women and children, homeless. But Lord Kitchener had a plan for them as well. The British army rounded up around 160,000 women and children, crammed them into wagons or railway trucks and transported them to hastily improvised refugee camps, which, guarded by the army, quickly became outdoor prisons ... They became places of horror. Kitchener’s policy gave the world a new phrase – concentration camps. ibid.
Emily Hobhouse decided it was her duty to tell the people of Britain exactly what was being done out here in their name. And she spoke plainly. She talked of wholesale cruelty, murder to the children, and a war of extermination. And Emily Hobhouse was proved horribly right. 26,000 Boar women and children died in British concentration camps. 80% of them under the age of sixteen. ibid.
The Boars finally surrendered in May 1902. It had taken two and a half years, the equivalent of £20,000,000,000 and an army of 250,000 soldiers to defeat 60,000 Boar soldiers. ibid.
I can assure you that my idea is going to be to give this country a status in the world based on the righteousness of its action. Ramsay MacDonald
Our first site in Egypt, be it by larceny or be it be emption, will be the almost certain egg of a North African empire, that will grow and grow ... till we finally join hands across the equator with Natal and Cape Town, to say nothing of the Transvaal and the Orange River on the south, or of Abyssinia or Zanzibar to be swallowed by way of viaticum on our journey. William E Gladstone, Aggression on Egypt and Freedom in the East, 1884
A major consequence of the war was the slow death of European colonial empires. The first and the most dramatic step in this process was the decision by the British in 1947 to set aside the jewel in the imperial crown: India. World War II: The Complete History: The Presence of History, Discovery 2000
Singapore was the mythology of the British empire built into reality. A trading city where Europeans could amass fortunes quickly. It was the centre for maritime trade, a conduit for wealth, a huge naval base. World War II: The Complete History: Six Months to Run Wild
To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people as customers, may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers, but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers. Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations
If any of the provinces of the British empire cannot be made to contribute towards the support of the whole empire, it is surely time that Great Britain should free herself from the expense of defending those provinces in time of war, and of supporting any part of their civil or military establishments in time of peace, and endeavour to accommodate her future views and designs to the real mediocrity of her circumstances. ibid.
This is Antigua ... ‘I detest this country’ [Nelson] ... Who is buried here on the Antiguan coastline and why? Sam Willis, Nelson’s Caribbean Hell-Hole, Yesterday 2015
This magnificent harbour was a cesspit ... Life on those ships must have been unbearable. ibid.
The island was wholly given over to the brutal business of industrial scale sugar cultivation ... The hundreds of thousands of slaves who were sent here from west Africa. ibid.
A history of foreign invasion, smouldering racial tension and violent struggle against imperial power. After more than a hundred years of colonial rule in 1941 the flames of independence were lit when Japan bombed Singapore. Singapore 1942: End of Empire I, BBC 2012
It was a call to arms that echoed within the ranks of the British army, causing 20,000 British Indian army soldiers to switch sides and fight for the Japanese. ibid.
Singapore: the bastion of the British empire fell in just 70 days. It was Japan’s greatest victory and Britain’s most humiliating defeat of World War II. The fall of Singapore changed the face of South-East Asia for ever, and heralded the beginning of the end for the British empire. ibid.
Many locals Malays began to help the Japanese. ibid.
The bicycle brigades were a vital asset of the Japanese army, and the routes were planned long before they invaded. ibid.
Penang fell unopposed to the Japanese. ibid.
There were less than a hundred Argyles who hadn’t been killed or captured. ibid.
On 8th December 1941 with World War II raging in Europe, Japan seized the opportunity to launch a brutal campaign to expand its empire and expel the white colonials from Asia. Singapore 1942: End of Empire II
Many deserted under fire. The so-called impregnable fortress had been breached. ibid.
The fanaticism of the Japanese soldiers shocked the empire troops. ibid.
Those left stranded on the wharf were left to face the fearsome occupying force now at the gates of their city. ibid.
Over 3 years in captivity. 30,000 British, 15,000 Australian and 40,000 India troops joined 30,000 POWs already taken in Malaysia. ibid.
The Japanese promised the Malays independence but it never came. Instead they increasingly behaved like a harsh new Colonial power. ibid.
Britain finally granted Malaysia independence on 31st August 1957. ibid.
Among the local Singaporeans, what little respect remained for the empire forces would quickly be dispelled. ibid.
An estimated 50,000 Chinese-Singaporeans were executed by the Japanese. ibid.
On 12th September 1945 the British returned to Singapore. It was the Japanese’ turn to be marched through in the streets in front of the locals. ibid.
For the people of South-East Asia things had changed. ibid.
They throw in Drummer Hodge, to rest
Unconfined – just as found:
His landmark is a kopje-crest
That breaks the veldt around;
And foreign constellations west
Each night above his mound. Thomas Hardy, Drummer Hodge
The Boar War was a wake-up call to British commanders. Professor Saul David, ‘Bullets, Boots and Bandages III: How to Really Win at War: Raising Arms’, BBC 2012
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love? Derek Walcott, A Far Cry From Africa, 1962
Elizabethan imperialism would transform and often devastate the lives of indigenous people abroad. Vanessa Collingridge, Queen Elizabeth I: A Timewatch Guide, BBC 2016
At that point the militia opened fire on the crowds … The army was unleashed … Some were executed. It was a brutal act of vengeance even by the low standards of the nineteenth century. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History III: A Moral Mission, plaque, BBC 2016
In memory of over 1000 Jamaicans brutalised or killed following the Morant Bay Rebellion. ibid. plaque
The great battle of ideas that divided country and empire. ibid.
I was fourteen when my family were attacked in a house; one night bricks came through the window and on one of the bricks was an elastic band, was a note that said, ‘Wogs, go home’. And then a few nights later the same thing happened. David Olusoga, Black and British: A Forgotten History IV: The Homecoming
The Victorian era when the empire was nearing its height, an age in which skin colour separated the coloniser from the colonised, the ruler from the ruled. ibid.
Rhodes got rich in the South African rush for gold and diamonds. ibid.
Rhodes was sowing the seeds of racial segregation. ibid.
There’s been a black community in Liverpool since the 1700s due largely to the shipping industry and the slave trade. ibid.
These Georgian terraces in the heart of London convey a forgotten chapter in Britain’s history: a new study of a government archive from the 1830s reveals that many of these houses were once the homes of Britain’s slave owners … These records transform our image of the slave owner; they reveal that thousands of them lived all over Britain, and they show how the profits from slave ownership ran deep in British society. David Olusoga, Britain’s Forgotten Slave Owners I: Profit & Loss, BBC 2018
A huge sum of money was raised by the British government: that money – the modern equivalent of £17 billion – was paid out in compensation not to the slaves but to the slave owners. ibid.
Their money helped lay the foundation of our modern world. ibid.
1834: These are the files from the Slave Compensation Commission: they record all the claims for compensation. ibid.
46,000 slave owners came forward. ibid.
The slave system was ruthlessly enforced right from the start. ibid.
It details the slave owners’ reprisals for acts of resistance. ibid.
It was system based on terror; it was a system that was medieval in its mentality. ibid.