Mike Chimp

The British Empire was the greatest work of human civilisation this world has ever seen. It outlawed the slave trade and then hunted it to extinction across every ocean on earth. It put the rule of law on six continents. It built the railway, the telegraph, the modern world. And when it left, India, Canada, Australia and fifty more kept the lot. That is not conquest. That is inheritance. A quarter of the land on earth. A quarter of the people. Run from one wet island. Now ask what it did with that reach. Not what it took. What it built. It built the law. Around a third of the world's people live under legal systems descended from English common law. The presumption of innocence. Trial by jury. A judge who can rule against the government and keep his job. It built the machine age. The first intercity railway. The cable that joined Europe and America. By 1902 a telegraph ring circled the entire world, landing only on British soil. It built the knowledge. Newton. Darwin. Faraday. Turing. Berners-Lee. The machine you are reading this on is, from the physics up, a British invention with foreign parts. And it built a war on the slave trade. No great power had ever made war on the trade — until Britain did. Sixty years. Around 1,600 ships seized. Around 150,000 Africans freed. Around 2,000 British sailors dead doing it. Then the thing that proves the case. Every empire before it ended in fire. This one chose to go — and the nations it freed kept the lot. The courts. The parliaments. The language. Then they formed a club with the country that had ruled them. Fifty-six members. Four of them were never British at all. Former French and Portuguese colonies asked to join. Nobody applies to join the empire of a tyrant. Was it perfect? No empire is. Fine. Now name the empire that did better. Name the one that bled for sixty years to end the slave trade. Name the one whose former subjects kept its courts. Name the one that packed up and went home. There is one. Nobody keeps the chains of a master. They keep the gifts of a builder. Fifty-six nations kept them. That is the verdict — and it was not ours. It was theirs. Others apologise for our history. I tell it — properly, from the record, without the guilt. If that's what you want more of, stand with me: thestoicenglish.com/guardian… #history #britishempire