Opinion: The British Empire: A legacy of violence?
To be a successful empire it must be a land where it is easy to travel, where the weather is mild most of the time, where there are few people who are not of the Empire’s nation; and where it is easy to acquire many different types of goods and services. The European historian Edward Gibbon was at the time of writing his first published work of history, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in 1776, the year before the American Revolution. This was a period of extraordinary turmoil and change within the European sphere. This was also a time of great upheaval for the British Empire.
The world of the British Empire at the end of the 18th century is not fully seen in Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall’; rather it is portrayed in ‘The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire’, by Gibbons friend, Samuel Palmer (1753-1808), who published his first book, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire at the beginning of the 18th century. Gibbon wrote about the ‘fall’ of Rome and not the empire.
The collapse of the Roman Empire was a consequence of the Roman’s inability to cope with the constant wars and invasions that were being waged on the Eastern half of the Roman Empire. The wars in North Africa were ongoing whilst the armies of the Muslim Arabs were invading the Levant (Syria, Palestine and Jordan). The Romans were unable to defend the lands they controlled. When the Roman army was outnumbered at the Battle of Cannae it was overwhelmed. The final outcome of the battles was that the Roman Empire was finally defeated, this was called the collapse of the Roman Empire.
The collapse of the Roman Empire left a very fragmented empire and Europe’s history is divided into two halves – the Roman and Byzantine Empires. The new British Empire (which would eventually become the United Kingdom) was founded in the year of 1707, when King George I of Great Britain granted the land of