The Lie of the Land

B. Great British Lines on Maps After a brief look at a few global and historic case studies, this large section focuses on the causes, choices and consequences of British rule and diplomacy. When Pax Britannia ruled the world, say 1815 to 1939, the Redcoats were the world’s policeman, the map was mostly pink, and Brits drew the outlines of the modern world, in splendid isolation or in cahoots with others. Much of this is surprisingly not well known by British, especially English, people. The traditional teaching of history in English secondary schools tends to be patchy, at best. A glorious narrative that largely starts with Julius Caesar and Willy the Conq. on the beaches zips along and tells of the Hundred Years War with France, handily remembering Azancourt, Crecy and wine imports, but omitting the fact that we lost; basks in the deeds of a few Edwards, Henrys, Scots hammerings, Drake and Liz I (much buttressed by Shakespeare’s brilliant but factually way off beam storytelling), includes gaining and losing America, etc, and tends to run out of curriculum time at the end of Year 9 (10th Grade) during the high point of Queen Victoria’s heyday and vast swathes of the globe. For further reading, see “1066 And All That”. What is not terribly well covered is the long sweep and perspective of how a small, fractious and usually rather weak England became The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland; and then the world’s greatest and most powerful empire. This last is indisputable. The world map showing Empire, colonies, dominions, possessions and vassal states, any time between 1880 and 1939 proves it. Britain hit maximum output of steel, coal, cotton, wool, railways, banking dominance and much, much more, all of which peaked very close to 1913. London was THE world city, despite the best efforts of Paris and New York. The English language was clearly the world’s ‘lingua franca’ for a century before the rise of America (literature, power, TV, business, the internet) took over the dominant role, in the process, of course, wrecking good spelling and the knowledge of the difference between adjectives and adverbs, along the way. This is an impression. Perhaps you, dear reader, could do the proper research, and test the notion that by both volume and quality, “English” has had close on a century and a half of literary dominance; with the centre of gravity wobbling joyously between and among, in sequence, England, Ireland, the USA and most recently South Asia, Africa and the Anglophone Caribbean. In short, somehow, the minor might of Tudor England managed to bestride the globe, paint it pink, and shrink again. How did this happen? This topic has been touched on elsewhere, just a bit, and is being re-considered (for starters, currently, the picture is at last having ‘colour’ added, not before time). Rather than several huge tomes, lets paraphrase: sailing – first use of coal – the first industrial power – colonial armies - the Royal Navy, also known as ‘gunboat diplomacy’. Britain was (sic) the first truly GLOBAL power. Primacy ended with the industrial growth of Germany, France, the USA and later Russia, Japan and China. Dominance, financial, military and territorial, was destroyed by the two World Wars (1914-18, 1939-45). What interests us here is how this period shaped the world map, and with what consequences, which will take another century to work through. + + + 8 ‘The Scramble for Africa’ following the Congress of Berlin 1884/5 Africans invaded the Middle East/SW Asia and thence the Caucasus and on into Europe some 200,000 years ago. The Arabs invaded northern Africa (‘The Maghreb’) and sailed down the east coast in their dhows for about a thousand years (7th to 18th Centuries) before Europeans got going. Vasco da Gama only reached The Cape (of Good Hope) in the late C.15th. But in the C.17th and C.18th, they more than made up for it. By 1885, the whole continent was repainted in the flags of seven European empires, led by the British and French. This chapter explores the effects. The slave trade decimated Africa’s peoples, and its productive potential. Across the Atlantic, and in Europe, whole economies, especially the growing of cotton, sugar and tobacco, depended on an endless – and expendable – supply of cheap, forced labour. Slave trading was only outlawed in the UK in 1807, and slavery abolished, or at least made illegal in 1833. The importance of slave labour at home, and of unnaturally cheap imports of raw materials to British industry – by 1913, the UK was the world’s largest produced of manufactured cotton goods, although cotton does not grow in NW Europe – is only now starting to get the attention it deserves. Once lauded ‘great’ Britons, such as Colston in Bristol, Tate & Lyle (of art gallery and sugar fame) and Rhodes (with then two countries named after him) are now the subject of intense debate. The vast, mass movement of people happens in cycles, globally. In Africa, there was and inrush of colonial settlers before and after 1884. Nowadays, a late but very rapid ‘demographic transition’ combined with the climate crisis slashing population ‘carrying capacity’ across Africa, but especially the Sudano-Sahel belt, means the start of a huge outflow of people. The details and consequences of this are examined in Ch.15. 8.1 Elements of African Geography Geography matters. Hugely. Africa would be different if any of its size, shape, topography, climate, geology, ecology, demographics (historical and current) and relative location were not as they are. Before we start, know that globally, there are four reliable predictors of poverty. These are astonishingly obvious and simple, and as such are much too often ignored. They are: • Summer temperatures >260C; • Being Landlocked.  no access to the sea; • Bad Government: colonial or military rule; • The Resource Curse: finding oil, diamonds or similar. None are determinant causes – each can and has been avoided/circumvented; but each is a predictor that increases the chances of poverty, with odds multiplied when combined with any of the others. Note that Africa ticks most of the boxes; by contrast, W Europe few of them…..