Empire

What was going on to turn Britain from the world’s leading enslaver to the world’s leading emancipator? The answer lies in a fervent religious revival, the epicentre of which was, of all places, Clapham.

Indeed, it might be said that the moral transformation of the British Empire began in Holy Trinity Church, on the north side of Clapham Common.

It is indeed one of the richer ironies of the Victorian value-system that the same navy that was deployed to abolish the slave trade was also active in expanding the narcotics trade.

In the days of sail it had taken between four and six weeks to cross the Atlantic; steam reduced that to two weeks in the mid-1830s and just ten days in the 1880s. Between the 1850s and the 1890s, the journey time from England to Cape Town was cut from forty-two to nineteen days. Steamships got bigger as well as faster: in the same period, average gross tonnage roughly doubled.†

The telegraph cable and the steamship route were two of three metal networks that simultaneously shrank the world and made control of it easier. The third was the railway.

Time and again, in the inter-war period, this was a pattern that would repeat itself. A minor outbreak of dissent, a sharp military response, followed by a collapse of British self-confidence, hand-wringing, second thoughts, a messy concession, another concession. But Ireland was the test case. In allowing their very first colony to be split in two, the British had sent a signal to the Empire at large.