As Colony Is Let Go, It’s ‘Been There, Done That’ for British

Britain waved goodbye to Hong Kong with nostalgia but few tears.

“Does it matter to us British? Not much,” said empire historian Jan Morris, who is writing daily newspaper accounts of the hand-over. Morris is in Hong Kong, and that’s where the hoopla is, not in Hackney, Holborn or Hammersmith.

The colony’s return to China marks the last major act in a voluntary, prolonged dismemberment of modern history’s greatest empire. Sic transit gloria imperii.

In London, Liverpool and Birmingham, where Chinese populations are particularly strong, fireworks, parades, fairs and singing and dancing marked hand-over observances. About 2,500 former expatriates who had lived in the colony reminisced as they watched large-screen coverage from Sandown racecourse north of London.

But as with most British government leaders in Hong Kong itself, reaction in London was muted. National newspapers headlined the hand-over with a mix of self-deprecation and optimism. “Chinese Promise of Early Elections” was how the Times heralded it.

Mike Tyson edged Hong Kong from the front page of most of Britain’s tabloids, although Daily Express commentator Peter Hitchens found room to lament “an empire lost by fools.”

The conservative Daily Telegraph marked the event with a nostalgic comment by a Cambridge history professor, John Casey, titled “Time for Tears,” mourning that with Hong Kong’s passage, “our last great window on the world closes.”

Great ceremony and national stock-taking marked the 1947 partition and independence of India, the great jewel of the empire. But by the time fireworks lighted Hong Kong half a century later, the British had seen it all and the Commonwealth of former colonies stood 53 nations tall.

“I’m with those historians who think the empire never really had much impact on the masses--it was always an elite thing,” said John Kent at the London School of Economics. “Europe is much more important to mass perceptions today than the empire was. And the most anti-Europe now are those who would have been most pro-empire.”

It’s a different era, a different country, and the Brits are a people with a different self-image. After Hong Kong, remnants of empire survive as curiosities--or nuisances.

“Nothing became the British as a people of empire like their leaving it,” said historian John Keegan.

Britain’s first empire collapsed in humiliation and military defeat at Yorktown, Va., in 1781, Keegan notes. Whatever the moral judgments about the creation of Empire II, says Keegan, the British were smarter about leaving the second time around. They avoided the French and Portuguese mistakes of fighting to control colonial peoples anxious to go their own way.

And with good results, in Keegan’s view. Canada, Australia and young democracies in Asia and the Caribbean share imperial histories and formation. India is the world’s largest democracy, South Africa the largest democracy on its continent. Malaysia, a distant supplier of rubber and tin as a colony half a century ago, would meet even the stringent requirements for membership in the European Union, 40 years after becoming independent.

“India was clearly the most important part of empire, and many people at home had trade or family ties there. Still there was no major outcry, even among Conservatives, when India was given up,” Kent said.

Two million British graves there testify to memories that India still evokes. Interestingly, affection runs in both directions.

In the aftermath of empire, people in former colonies tend to like Britons and things British. The rich still send their children to school here. Millions from Calcutta to Kingston take tea, listen to the BBC and expect their sons to excel at British games like cricket--often to British chagrin.

Statues to colonial heroes dot Britain, but leading the force that planted the Union Jack over a barren former pirates’ lair at Hong Kong did not win imperialist stardom for Capt. Charles Elliot of the Royal Navy. He was subsequently pensioned off as British charge d’affaires to the distant, obscure and short-lived Republic of Texas.

The legacy of empire thrives in Britain itself--and not just in the cosmopolitan swirl of big-city streets. It is rare to find even a small town without Indian and Chinese restaurants serving food that has become as much a part of the British palate as fish and chips--or, for that matter, post-imperial hamburgers and pizza.

At heart, the empire was a child of commerce, especially Hong Kong, a fragrant harbor big enough to shelter the whole Royal Navy and all the British opium runners it protected in the old days--and a spectacular city-state cash register today.

“Britain’s interest in Hong Kong does not end on June 30. Hong Kong is one of our biggest trading partners--we have more trade with it than with the whole of the rest of China,” Robin Cook, Britain’s foreign secretary, said before flying east for the ceremonies. “We also have a very real commitment to the 3 million people in Hong Kong [of 6.3 million] who will continue to be holders of British passports.”

Those special passports do not give their bearers the right of residence in Britain.

With the departure of Hong Kong, just 180,000 people remain in the 13 “dependent territories” that still fly the Union Jack: Those people would all fit in one Kowloon neighborhood. Until 1966, the Colonial Office oversaw Britain’s overseas colonies. Now, in the renamed Foreign and Commonwealth Office that is its heir, there is not even any central coordination of what one British newspaper dismissively called the “detritus of empire.”

Two of the remaining British possessions are contentious: Gibraltar is claimed by Spain, the Falkland Islands by Argentina (which calls them the Malvinas). But there’s no prospect that they--or any of the other dependent territories--will be left to shift for themselves in the foreseeable future, the Foreign Office says.

Bermuda, with 60,000 people, is the largest remaining territory, and it lives very well, thank you, off being warm, quaint and British. With a $600-million economy based on American tourists, Bermuda, about 20 square miles, rejected independence in a 1995 referendum.

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Other New World flyspeck colonies include Anguilla, the British Virgin Islands, the Turks and Caicos Islands, the banks-rich Cayman Islands and poverty-stricken, volcano-beset Montserrat.

In the extreme South Atlantic are the uninhabited South Georgia and South Sandwich Islands, and the British Antarctic Territory, home to a floating population of scientists.

In the mid-Atlantic lie St. Helena and its widely separated dependencies, Ascension Island and the islands of the Tristan da Cunha group.

South of India is the British Indian Ocean Territory of the Chagos Archipelago. All of its islands but Diego Garcia are uninhabited, and access is restricted there: The island is a joint British-U.S. military base.

Smallest on anybody’s list of colonies is the mid-Pacific Pitcairn Island, population 55. None of its residents is a British official, but the government here in London is quietly looking for a police officer willing to live on Pitcairn among the descendants of mutineers from the Bounty.

If surviving pieces of empire all want the British to stay, they all also want a better deal from the mother country. At present, only citizens of the two white colonies--Gibraltar and the Falklands--have the right to live in Britain. So it is that, even as an uncertain dawn breaks in departed Hong Kong, the remnants of empire are agitating for the same citizenship concessions.

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Sunset On the Empire

Victorians used to boast that the sun never set on the British Empire, but the hand-over of its Asian pearl, Hong Kong, to China ended a century and a half of colonial rule. At its height in 1919 the empire covered nearly a quarter of world territory--but now almost all of Britain’s former colonial possessions are fully independent

The Empire Today

* Gibraltar

* Falkland Islands

* Bermuda

* Anguilla

* British Virgin Islands

* Turks and Caicos Islands

* Cayman Islands

* Montserrat

* South Georgia & South Sandwich Islands

* British Antarctic Territory

* St. Helena

* Ascension Island

* Tristan da Cunha

* British Indian Ocean Territory

* Diego Garcia (joint military base with U.S.)

* Pitcairn Islands