This scepter’d isle… England that was wont to conquer others

Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire by Charlotte Lydia Riley (Harvard University Press, 2024)

Reviewed by Elizabeth Stice

Few lines about England are as famous as John of Gaunt’s deathbed speech, in Act II, Scene I of Richard II:

This royal throne of kinds, this scepter’d isle,

This earth of majesty, this seat of Mars,

This other Eden, demi-paradise,

This fortress built by Nature for her self

Against infection and the hand of war,

This happy breed of men, this little world,

This precious stone set in a silver sea

Which serves it in the office of a wall

Or as a moat defensive to a house,

Against the envy of less happier lands,

This blessed plot, this earth, this real, this England,

This nurse, this teeming womb of royal kings,

Feared by their breed and famous for their birth,

Renownèd for their deeds as far from home

For Christian service and true chivalry

As is the sepulchre in stubborn Jewry

Of the world’s ransom, blessed Mary’s son.

This land of such dear souls, this dear, dear land,

Dear for her reputation through the world,

Is now leased out—I die pronouncing it—

Like to a tenement or pelting farm.

England, bound in with the triumphant sea,

Whose rocky shore beats back the envious siege

Of watery Neptune, is now bound in with shame,

With inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.

That England that was wont to conquer others

Hath made a shameful conquest of itself.

Yet what John of Gaunt considered England’s greatness—its renown “for deeds as far from home,” its status as a “seat of Mars,” that “England that was wont to conquer others”—is precisely what so many people have defined in the last fifty years as the opposite of greatness. In the opening pages of Imperial Island: An Alternative History of the British Empire, Charlotte Lydia Riley writes that the history “of British Imperialism is not a happy one. The rise of a small nation to global power is a story of plunder, exploitation, oppression, and violence” (7).

The British Empire may seem to mostly be over, but many people are not over it. Many people may not even be outside of it yet. Riley’s Imperial Island is a work exploring imperial culture. It follows in the footsteps of works like those by Antoinette Burton and John MacKenzie. Imperial Island demonstrates the ways in which British identity has been, and is, shaped by the British Empire. Where some other works focus primarily on tracing that influence in earlier time periods, Riley focuses on the more recent past, World War II to the present. She also sets out to reckon with that influence of empire and equip others to do so. She writes that this history should “set out why people in Britain today should care about their nation’s imperial past and its unexpected echoes through their contemporary culture, and what others can learn from that history” (13).

Riley gives many examples of ways in which the Empire shaped British identity even as it was in territorial decline. She writes about various immigration waves and policies, like the 1948/9 Nationality and Citizenship Act. Riley explains the links between the British Empire and the 1956 Suez Canal Crisis, the Notting Hill riots, the Salman Rushdie affair, and Brexit. The arrival of the ship Empire Windrush in 1948 with Caribbean immigrants, the so-called Windrush Generation, is almost a red thread through the text. Imperial Island takes readers from the presence of black American GIs in England to the Falklands War to Brexit. Throughout, Riley integrates the experiences of individual immigrants and immigrant communities, because “this book seeks to dignify unpowerful, unfamous people’s lives with the idea that they mattered and, furthermore, that they still matter; a meaningful national history should not be a retelling of tales about the powerful and their victories but the recovery of voices from the past who might otherwise be forgotten” (15).

Imperial Island exists in a liminal space between academic and non-academic books. It is published by a university press and is clearly a work of cultural history, but Riley explicitly seeks to bring to the public the kinds of conversations that academics have been having for some time (234). This book is a good overview of the kinds of events and acts and incidents since World War II that can be tied to the British Empire and which help explain the role of empire (especially immigrants from it) in contemporary British culture. For those unfamiliar with the events or accustomed to only assigning empire to the past, the book could be revelatory. For those who work in cultural history and/or imperial culture it is a nice addition to the field.

Imperial Island, and many books like it, implicitly exists in opposition to another book about imperial culture, Bernard Porter’s 2004 work, The Absent-Minded Imperialists. According to Porter, despite the power and significance of the British Empire, most British people were not regularly or consciously thinking about empire. Yes, British lives were shaped by the tea and other goods imported from empire and English slang was affected by empire and world wars were won with the help of colonial subjects, but most British people just did not think much about empire despite all of that. As a result, empire ought not to be considered close to the most formative force in shaping British identity. Among those who explore British imperial culture there is a deep divide between those who agree, at least partially, with Porter’s assessment and those who oppose it enough to find it abhorrent.

One of Porter’s major critiques of many other works of imperial culture was that they overemphasize certain facts or consider as representative that which was not. In the case of Imperial Island, that may be the most significant critique. In some cases, Riley’s arguments are very convincing. For example, on the Falklands War as evidence that “imperial culture continued to suffuse British society long after many people had stopped thinking consciously about empires at all” (158). In other cases, some of the examples seem potentially anecdotal in comparison to the population at large. How many people were affected by, or aware of, the Overseas Pensioners Association? How aware was the public of the Home Office physical inspection of South Asian fiancées on visas? How many people were affected? Were feelings about the Ethiopian Famine really also about British Empire? A big question for Imperial Island is if empire is always the best lens through which to interpret English racism? Is everything racial also imperial?

If Porter’s critiques raise some questions, scholars like Riley can also counter Porter’s critiques quite well. How could a country absent-mindedly, perhaps accidentally, acquire an empire so large that the sun never sets upon it? When the majority of non-white immigrants come from former parts of the empire, is it a stretch to believe that opinions about those immigrants are tied to ideas surrounding imperialism? In some cases where scholars like Riley see the significance of imperial culture in Britain, the rhetoric is even very explicit among the historical actors.

Imperial Island also faces the challenges that exist for all works of cultural history. There is no way to accurately gather the opinion of an entire country at any moment in time, on anything—despite the wealth of information we have from Mass Observation. Do print culture and film reflect the beliefs of the population or simply reflect what the population is being sold? What can be reasonably considered representative for a culture at large? How many op-eds with the same view are required to reflect something like cultural consensus? Each author does their best to put forward compelling arguments and provide enough evidence to convince readers.

A less unavoidable critique has to do with the occasional tone in Imperial Island which implies moral judgment of the past (and present). Riley seems disappointed that Brexit demonstrates that “the debate over who belongs in Britain and who does not, who in its past should be celebrated and who demoted…has only grown more fervent and more divisive” (237). A reader might feel able to guess Riley’s position on where the Koh-i-Noor diamond should reside. Riley criticizes the Life in the UK test for presenting history as a “march toward progress” while the test “does not seek to be accurate, nor does it matter to its aims that British people themselves could not pass it” because the test seeks “to inculcate certain values and beliefs in the prospective British citizen” (232, 233). She writes that “history is not being explained or examined but used as propaganda” (233). This may well be true, but there is a sense of lament about it all in Imperial Island. Riley’s relationship to historicism will make the work more or less palatable to some readers.

Like all history, British history is not a consistent tale of progress and triumph over undesirable cultural elements. Whig history was incorrect and recent events have only served to reinforce the argument that underlies Imperial Island—empire may seem to be over in some senses, but it is far from over in others. Present day news cycles continue to address the debated statue of Cecil Rhodes, the implications of Brexit, and visible links between the royal family and the empire. As Riley concludes, “British politics, culture, and identity are still being worked out under the shadow of an empire that has not existed, really, for half a century” (256). Imperial Island is a solid introduction to the ways in which that is true, exploring the history of the scepter’d isle in a format superior to “inky blots and rotten parchment bonds.”

Elizabeth Stice is a professor of history at Palm Beach Atlantic University and the author of Empire Between the Lines: Imperial Culture in British and French Trench Newspapers of the Great War (2023).