“Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire”, by Simon Winchester

 

400 pages, Harper Perennial, ISBN-13: 978-0060598617

Originally published in 1985, Simon Winchester’s Outposts: Journeys to the Surviving Relics of the British Empire chronicles the author’s journey to find what’s left of the empire “on which the sun never sets”. This edition is a reprint from 2003, and the introduction alone is enough to display just how much changed in the 18-or-so years between editions. While I don’t always read the Introduction to a book, I’m I glad I did this time as Winchester shows just how much the unofficial “Empire” of Globalization has wreaked havoc on the nations of the Earth, not just of what is left of Rule Britannia. Don’t skip it.

As for the rest, Outposts is a fascinating travelogue for its era as we follow the author as he visits all the remaining territories of Great Britain, many of them obscure places about the globe – such as Tristan da Cunha in the Atlantic and Boddam in the Indian Ocean – populated by people who have been more-or-less forgotten by the British government. One of the best chapters is on the Falkland Islands, where Winchester arrived a few days before the Argentine invasion and where his description was particularly evocative, describing as he does a society stuck in a 1950s time-warp but where the work ethic had been utterly lost.

Winchester makes a number of cogent points about the governance of these places, showing how while French citizens in her overseas territories elect representatives to the Assemblée nationale, the people of Britain’s territories have no representation in Parliament whatsoever, even though they are generally staunch patriots. Furthermore, Winchester emphasizes how unfair it is that people in predominantly white territories have the right to move to Britain but those in non-white territories are treated as foreigners not permitted to do so (apparently some reforms have occurred since the book was written in 1985. I should damn well hope so).

But the main theme of the book is melancholy, as Winchester visits these remnants of what was once the greatest Empire the world had ever seen – 412 million people, or 23% of the world population at the time; 13,700,000 sq mi, or 24% of the Earth’s total land area – reduced to the original home islands and a few bits or land spread here and there. But oh, what bits: British Indian Ocean Territory, Tristan, Gibraltar, Ascension Island, St Helena, Hong Kong, Bermuda, British West Indies, The Falklands, Pitcairn…and the fact that list has shrunk yet more since this book was originally published makes it sadder still.

A fascinating double-history – of the remnants of a once-proud and, in some-respects, still-extant empire; and also of a vanished world not even 40-years gone – Outposts was an enlightening historical travelogue about the impermanence of Man’s accomplishments.