White House Chronicle

News Analysis With a Sense of Humor

How Technology Built the British Empire

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As someone who grew up in the last days of the British Empire, I am often asked how it was that so few people controlled so much of the world for so long?

The simple answer is technology underpinned the British Empire, from its tentative beginnings in the 17th century to its global dominance in the 18th and 19th  centuries and most of the first half of the 20th century.

The first great tech leap forward was the steam engine, perfected in the 1760s by James Watt, but originally developed to pump water in coal mines by Thomas Newcomen in 1712. Steam was the workhorse of the Industrial Revolution, and the enabler of the management and expansion of the empire for Britain.

With steam, ships which had taken months to reach India got there in weeks and the great railways, whether in southern Africa or India, which were one of the hallmarks of the empire, were built.

Another invention which made communications throughout the empire possible was the electric telegraph, perfected by Samuel Morse in 1838.

But if there was one silver bullet, one invention that set Britain’s imperial ambitions ahead, it was the invention of the longitudinal chronometer, the first design of which was completed in 1730, but many modifications followed. The government had offered a substantial reward for a clock that could help its captains accurately establish their longitudinal positions. John Harrison’s chronometer gave British ships a great advantage: they knew where they were. 

Other technical innovations included copper-sheathed hulls and eventually steam engines and iron hulls, leading to steel ships. Henry Bessemer made steel an available commodity with the Bessemer furnace in 1860, and soon British steel hulls upgraded naval fleets.

In 1733, the flying shuttle was invented which made Britain rich and enabled British fabric mills to process local wool and cotton from around the world, including America, India and Egypt.

Imperial Britain was a mercantile country (government working hand in hand with commerce) that insisted that all raw materials had to be transported to Britain to be processed, including cotton and jute, and even agricultural products like tea. To this day, tea is packaged in Britain and Ireland but grown in China, India, Sri Lanka, Africa and other countries.

Weaponry, importantly, also got the Brit-tech boost and played its role in the expansion of the empire. First came rifling of muskets to improve accuracy. Then came breech-loaded artillery and toward the end of the 19th century, the deadly Maxim Gun, a forerunner of the machine gun. Mass weapons manufacture assured British dominance.

Advances in medicine were important as well, especially in treating malaria and understanding tropical diseases. The use of quinine enabled troops in malarial areas, particularly in Africa, to recover. Keep the troops healthy and ready for combat.

My paternal grandfather was one of those. He was shipped from London to India and then to South Africa where he was demobilized at the end of the Boer War, which is how I came to grow up in the last vestiges of the empire and to understand some of the complexities of British rule.

For example, when it came to local administration, one size did not fit all. India was the Raj, the jewel in the crown. Southern Rhodesia, where I grew up, was the only self-governing colony in all but external affairs. Kenya Colony was just that; Malawi (Nyasaland) was a protectorate, as was Zambia (Northern Rhodesia) and Bechuanaland (Botswana). If in doubt about a rock or a country, the Brits claimed it fell under the monarch’s suzerainty. Good enough. It was red on the map.

Despite some imperial rumblings lately, America shouldn’t want and wouldn’t benefit from trying to assemble even a modest empire this late in the game. But America has had the tech benefits of empire since the British one faded, starting with India’s independence in 1947.

America filled the gap left by Britain as the dominant force in the world, admired, copied and envied. But underpinning that state of esteem and financial ease was tech leadership, medical leadership, and cultural leadership through film and television. America became the techno supremo.

Now government research funding is being butchered across the board from advanced energy to, most shameful of all, the philistine slashing of the National Institutes of Health’s research budgets. 

Changing times doomed the British Empire, America’s future is at stake and it will be determined by technology and medicine. If we underfund research, the future is known.

Put the Kettle on, Sarah Palin

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Sarah m’dear, it’s not about the party. It’s about the tea.

For those of us of the British persuasion, tea is black tea. It was the tea on which the British built the empire.

It was also, I might add, the tea that Margaret Thatcher served at No. 10 Downing Street. I enjoyed some with her there. A Conservative traditionalist, she served it with milk for certain and sugar as an option.

Thatcher did not ask her guests, as bad hotels do now, what kind of tea they would like. Tea to Thatcher was black tea, sometimes known as Indian tea, though it might have been grown in Kenya, South Africa, Zimbabwe or Sri Lanka. It was neither flavored nor some herbal muck masquerading as tea.

The former prime minister knew that good tea is made in the kitchen, where stove-boiled water is poured from a kettle onto tea in a pot, not tepid water poured from a pot on a table into a cup with a tea bag.

Boiling water in a kettle, or pot, on the stove is important in making good tea. In a microwave, the water doesn’t bubble. Tea needs the bubbles.

While the Chinese drank green tea hundreds of years before Christ, the British developed their tea-drinking habit in the 17th century. In 1600, Queen Elizabeth I granted permission for the charter of the British East India Company, establishing the trade in spice and silk that lead to the formal annexation of India and the establishment of the Raj.

Initially, tea was a sideline but it became increasingly important and started to define the British. The coffee shops–like the one that launched the insurer Lloyds of London around 1688–continued, but at all levels of society tea was becoming the British obsession.

By the 18th century, tea drinking was classless in Britain. Duchesses and workmen enjoyed it alike.

Tea was the fuel of the empire: the war drink, the social drink, the comfort drink and the consolation drink. Coffee had an upmarket connotation. It wasn’t widely available and the British didn’t make it very well.

Also as coffee was well established on the continent, it had to be shunned. To this day the British are divided about continental Europe and what they see as the emblems of Euro-depravity: coffee, garlic, scents and bidets.

Although tea is standardized, the British play their class games over the tea packers. For three centuries, most tea has been shipped in bulk to various packing houses throughout the British Isles. But the posh prefer Twinings to Lipton.

Offering tea with fancy cakes, clotted cream and fine jams separates the workers from the ruling classes. One of Queen Victoria’s ladies in waiting, Anna Maria Stanhope, known as the Duchess of Bedford, is credited as the creator of afternoon tea time; which the hotels turned into formal, expensive afternoon “teas.” The Ritz in London is famous for them.

The British believe that tea sustained them through many wars. “Let’s have a nice cup of tea. Things will get better.” I’ve always believed that America’s revenge against the British crown was to ice their beloved tea. Toss it into Boston Harbor, but don’t ice it. If you should have the good fortune to be asked to tea at No. 10, or at Buckingham Palace, don’t expect it to be iced.

Incidentally tea bags are fine, and it’s now just pretentious to serve loose tea with a strainer. Of course, if you want to read the political tea leaves you’ll have to use loose tea.

If you’re serving tea to the thousands at your tea parties, Sarah, remember that unlike politics, tea is very forgiving. It can be revived just with more boiling water.  –For the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate

The Long Shadows of the British Empire

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Corruption in Kenya? Blame it on the British and the psychological damage of colonialism. The partition of Cyprus? Step forward the social engineers in London, who underestimated the depth of feeling in the Turkish minority when the British were finally forced out.

When it comes to the Middle East, one can really get exercised about “Perfidious Albion.” The British had their fingers in every territorial dispute: They created whole countries and, with the help of the French, imposed borders from Morocco to China.

Trouble with Iran? Even before the CIA started meddling there in 1953, it was Winston Churchill who, as First Sea Lord in 1913, decided the Royal Navy would move faster, cleaner and have greater range if it switched from coal to oil. So he partially nationalized the Anglo-Persian Oil Company, the forerunner of BP, to exploit the newly discovered oil fields in Iran. Later, this led to a surge in Iranian nationalism and the CIA plot to restore the Shah.

On to Pakistan and the British legacy in the autonomous tribal lands, now home to the Taliban and al-Qaeda. Put the British colonial administration of the 18th to 20th centuries in the dock. Yes, three centuries of British commission and omission.

The British interest in Afghanistan, which they failed to subdue in a series of wars, was largely as a buffer between British India and the growing territorial interests of the Russian Empire. It was here that The Great Game was played: the romanticized espionage that flourished in the region. The British divided the traditional Pashtun lands with the Durand Treaty of 1893, creating a northwestern border for British India, and later Pakistan. It amounted to a land grab. However, the British did recognize the separateness of the people in the Northwest Territories and left them to their tribal and religious ways.

With independence and the partition of India in 1947, the incoming Pakistani government had enough problems without encouraging ethnic strife between the largely Punjabi Pakistanis and their difficult Pashtun brothers in the territories. So the government in Islamabad continued the British policy of benign indifference to the Pashtuns, with whom they were more closely linked by religion than ethnicity or politics.

Yet, the border dispute smoldered and periodically erupted. Kabul and Islamabad do not agree, both blaming the border drawn by the British.

What neither the British nor the Pakistanis wanted was a strong movement for a Pashtun state that would carve out territory from Afghanistan, as well as the tribal territories in Pakistan. There was a failed attempt to bring this about in 1949. Segments of the Pakistani army and the intelligentsia have feared this ever since. They are haunted by another stateless people living on both sides of a border: the Kurds who straddle the border between Iraq, a largely British creation, and Turkey and Iraq and Iran.

The message is that simply being Muslim does not wipe out tribal and ethnic identity any more than borders drawn by others create a new identity. If it were so, Cyprus would not be divided; Yugoslavia would have held together, as would have Czechoslovakia; and Britain would not be considering the possibility of an independent Scotland–after 300 years of union.

The current hostilities in the Pakistani tribal areas, U.S. drone strikes on suspected Taliban strongholds and renewed determination from the Pakistani army to crush extremists in the region could renew a sense of nationhood among the Pashtuns, and a movement toward the creation of Pashtunistan across the British-drawn border between Pakistan and Afghanistan.

In the long reaches of the night President Obama’s special envoy to the region, Richard Holbrooke, may wish one of the following had happened in the days of the British Raj: 1. the British had stayed home; 2. the British had insisted the Pashtuns submit to central authority; 3. the British had created a new country, Pashtunistan; or 4. the British had never created that troublesome border.

One way or the other, he can blame the Brits.