Paxo Britannica
Paxman’s thesis can be reduced into a string of his trademark soundbites. British imperialism was a ‘protection racket’, based on the conceit that a handful of well-equipped soldiers and well-educated officials could provide stable government for the feckless potentates of India, Africa and the Middle East. Any challenge to British interests was ‘met with savage retaliation’, which invariably resulted in expansion.
The answer, then, to the problem of imperial security was deeper and further subjugation. (This was indiscriminate of race or creed. The Boer War and the concentration camps into which non-combatant Boers were interned is the most compelling riposte to those who say that British conquest was a racist endeavour.) Paxman is scathing of a lust for 'power’ for its own sake...
The policy failed. Historians from A.J.P. Taylor to Judith Brown have argued, to varying degrees, that the British Empire collapsed because it ran out of money. Ruinously expensive (in every sense of the term) world wars hastened the process, but the root cause was that the workshop of the world had moved.
Economic decline remains the predominant feature in British politics, and a major foreign policy consideration...
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