What the imperialists left behind: six generations of Alan Faunce's family played a part in Britain's colonial history

For A Change, August-Sept, 1997 by Alan Faunce

Six generations of Alan Faunce's family played a part in Britain's colonial history He reflects on both the darker and the brighter facets of his country's imperial adventure.

In July 1623 one John Faunce, of Purleigh, Essex, reached Plymouth, New England, aboard the Anne, 140 tons. He joined the Pilgrim Fathers who had established a foothold on the shore of the North American continent three years before. A hundred years later, his son Thomas, then 94, had himself carried to the spot where the first Pilgrims landed in order to point out the Plymouth Rock, now a hallowed memorial, before it was buried under a new wharf.

Today there are more than 350 families in the USA descended from John and Thomas and their wives, Patience and Jane. A Faunce served as Minuteman at Lexington in the Revolutionary war; another, commanding a Federal warship, fired one of the first shots of the Civil War; yet another John Faunce--11th in line from John of Purleigh--returned to Britain to take part in the invasion of Normandy in World War II.

These men and women were part of a global phenomenon that over some 400 years flung Europeans out to every corner of the earth, at the same time uprooting millions from their African and Asian homelands and transporting them to the Americas and Caribbean.

In his acclaimed book, The rise and fall of the British Empire, Lawrence James wrote: `Its story is the sum of the lives of the men and women who built it and ruled it.' My own family exemplifies how individuals were caught up in this extraordinary phenomenon.

`For better or worse,' James continued, `the modern post-imperial world is the product of that age of empires which extended from the early 16th to the early 20th centuries. Britain got most, in every sense, from this surge of European expansion.' At its largest extent, at the end of the First World War, Britain's empire comprised over one quarter of the world's population and area.

Setting aside the Crusades (that heady brew of piety and plunder) and Vinland (the short-lived Viking settlement in North America) European expansion began in 1415 with the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta in North Africa. Into the European sub-continent, western appendage to the mighty Asian heartland, wave on wave of races had pressed down the ages--each contributing its mix of qualities. But now the European cul-de-sac became a pierhead. Better ships, improved navigation enabled bolder voyages into the western ocean that had hitherto circumscribed exploration. The fall of Constantinople to the Ottoman Turks in 1453 barred ancient trade routes to the east and prompted far-sighted mariners to look for an alternative.

On 12 October, 1492, Christopher Columbus, backed by the Spanish monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella, reached Watling Island in the Bahamas, discovering not a route to the east, as he expected, but a new continent. Five years later the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope and opened a sea route to India. In the next century Dutch, English, French and others followed in their wake to explore, trade, compete with one another and to evangelize. Where climate suited, permanent settlement took place and new nations, predominantly European in culture, arose.

The Americas, South and East Asia (except Japan and Thailand) and the islands of the Pacific became an annexe of Europe. China preserved a measure of independence, but at humiliating cost as western merchants, missionaries, gunboats, opium dealers and armies paraded their ancient land. In 1878 the Treaty of Berlin wound up the `Scramble for Africa' in which European powers awarded themselves vast territories, careless of traditional boundaries and kindreds. Only Ethiopia remained free, apart from the Italian occupation of 1935-41.

In human terms the price of empire was incalculable. Indigenous races were marginalized and in some areas virtually wiped out through violence and the introduction of European diseases, firearms and drink. Over 10 per cent of African slaves shipped across the Atlantic perished on the notorious Middle Crossing. The British alone dispatched two million slaves from Africa to the Americas between 1680 and 1786. The profits of the triangular voyages (manufactured goods to West Africa, slaves to the New World, raw materials to Britain) funded Britain's Industrial Revolution in which her own sons and daughters, penned in unhealthy tenements and tied to factory and mine, lived in conditions little removed from slavery.

Imperialists too paid a price. Philip Mason in The men who ruled India records that by 1947 there were two million British graves scattered throughout the sub-continent. West Africa was known as `the white man's grave'. Sea-power, on which empire depended, also took its toll. `If blood be the price of admiralty,' wrote Rudyard Kipling, `Lord God we ha' paid in full.' Colonial powers extracted vast wealth from their colonies, but they also expended vast amounts of blood and treasure to defend them. Britain maintained over half its army in its overseas colonies, as well as 23 battalions in Ireland.