BRITAIN'S LEGACY
BRITAIN'S FORGOTTEN TERRITORIES


The Empire brought blood and tears and dispossession to millions of people, but it also brought roads and railways and education.

For good or ill, much of the world is as it is today because of the Empire. From the way it looks to the sports people play. From the religion they practice to the language they speak. 

It has changed the very genetic makeup of Britain. If only we can look at it clear-eyed, it can tell us a lot about who we are. It’s a story that belongs to all of us.

We’ve been through pride, we’ve been through shame, nowadays we seem to mostly be in denial. But if we really want to understand who we are, it’s time we stopped pretending the empire was nothing to do with us.
 

Jeremy Paxman's 2012 BBC series Empire

 

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Tales of adventure from the furthest corners of the earth excited me as a child, and since then I have developed a fascination with Britain's fallen empire. It is almost 30 years since the symbolic end to the British Empire in Hong Kong, something I remember but didn't fully understand at the time.

I have begun a multimedia project to document the remains of the biggest empire the world has ever seen.

In school I was taught about the Vikings and Romans, the great imperialists of their time. We didn’t learn enough about the British Empire -such as the horrors of slavery, colonialism and imperialism - or the stories, like the Mutiny of the Bounty and the descendants of the mutineers that still live on the Pitcairn Islands. Whether British people believe the Empire was generally positive or not, we cannot change our past. We should not forget or try to dismiss the effects that it had - and continues to have - on the UK and abroad.

I am exploring Britain’s relationship with its overseas territories and how we continue to support - with financial and conservation aid, which all Britons contribute - individual cultures such as Montserrat, the Pitcairn Islands and Tristan da Cunha in the South Atlantic, the most remote archipelago on earth. Britain continues to play important roles in disputed territories like Gibraltar and the Falkland Islands.

Should Gibraltar be returned to Spain? Was the Falklands war - 8000 miles from the UK justified? I do think that 500 years or so of our history should be taught in greater detail.  

We should be proud to have such strong links with these fascinating islands and nations, but well educated about the negative impacts of colonialism and slavery that continue to this day, in Britain and around the world.

 
 
 
 

CAMP BAY / GIBRALTAR