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The sovereign's relationship with the Commonwealth derives from Britain's imperial history. For, nearly all of the members of the Commonwealth are formerly dependent territories of the Empire, which chose to cooperate voluntarily on a basis of full constitutional equality. Since 1953, the Crown has been divisible, and the Queen of Britain is now also Queen of 15 other Commonwealth monarchies, including Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Jamaica, etc. In those countries, the functions of the sovereign are, in practice, undertaken by a Governor‐General, appointed by the sovereign on the advice of the Prime Minister of the country concerned. But, since 1949, it has been possible for members of the Commonwealth to become republics, and the majority of the member states are now republics. They must, however, recognize the sovereign as `the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth’. But the position of Head of the Commonwealth is not an office but rather an expression of a symbolic character without any separate constitutional standing or capacity.

This chapter examines the history of Great Britain, the British Commonwealth, and the end of the British Empire in the twentieth century, suggesting that the twentieth century ended in Britain as it began, with the constitutional structure of the United Kingdom a contested and vital subject of public discourse. It concludes that the transitions that characterised the Empire-Commonwealth over the twentieth century were ultimately constrained within the due process of British constitutionalism.

The 20th-century British Empire cannot be understood without taking into account its Victorian origins. Thus, the volume begins with a chapter on the Empire before 1914, but the thematic design emphasizes the period from the outbreak of the First World War to the principal era of decolonization in the 1960s. In line with this, it highlights the contemporary view that the British Empire rested on sea power, that India was far and away its single most important component, and that the ‘Colonial Empire’ still included the Dominions as well as the colonies. This introductory chapter draws out of the regional chapters the dominating themes of nationalism and the granting of independence by the British. There are seven organizing themes that can be determined in the first half of the volume that help in understanding its overall design and purpose.

The word ‘historiography’ is used in the sense of the evolving or changing interpretations of the history of the British Empire. How did historians of the Empire go about their tasks and what were their assumptions? How were their accounts influenced by the political and cultural climate of their age? Above all, which of the historians of the Empire had the strength of intellect and personality to write works that have stood the test of time? This introductory chapter addresses itself to those questions through the historiographical revolution of the early 1960s. The issue of economic decline has been the specific Gibbonian theme applied to the history of the Empire. The focus of the present volume is principally on the work of professional historians since the 1880s. As this volume makes clear, the historiography of the Empire, as it entered a new century, was as rich and diverse as ever before.

This chapter seeks to reassert the importance of Britain's formal empire in the ‘unofficial mind’ of the late 19th-century City of London, suggesting that even if they did not initially see independent gold standard countries as more risky than colonies, investors learned through experience that they were. The reality was that membership of the British Empire was a more reliable ‘no default’ guarantee than adherence to the gold standard by itself. The political upheavals of the period before, during, and after the First World War revealed the limits of commitments to gold in the face of war and revolution. By the 1920s, bitter experience combined with a new regulatory environment to increase substantially the proportion of overseas investment going to the Empire.

In Malaya and India, the British devised a system of indirect rule whereby they relied on local norms, social organizations, and indigenous institutions of authority such as landlords and sultans who managed the daily lives of their subjects but were controlled by the British through treaties. Both the colonial states used patronage to rule, creating dependencies between local authorities and the colonial state, and also creating economic, legal, and social structures that, along with the patronage, divided the society vertically.

This chapter concentrates on the metropolitan economic structure of the British Empire. It also focuses on the British side of the equation because B. R. Tomlinson extends the discussion into the post-colonial era. During the 20th century, the British had to make a choice between an open, multilateral economic system, based on free trade between all countries, and a more or less closed Imperial economy. There were three main methods by which a modern Imperial state such as Britain might attempt to obtain special economic benefit from possession of colonies: by regulating their trade; by manipulating their monetary systems; and by investing in them. These main methods are specifically described. Moreover, a discussion on currency and the sterling area, capital investment in the Empire; commercial advantages of Empire before 1914, between the wars, and after the Second World War is provided.

For this book the 18th century has been extended at both ends. Although strict uniformity has not been imposed on all chapters, this volume is for the most part set between two dates traditionally taken as marking eras in British history: 1689, the year of the Glorious Revolution, an event seen by most English people as a time which ensured their liberties, and 1815, the year of Waterloo, the last battle in wars between Britain and France that had begun in 1689. During the first half of this century, occasional British ships defied Spanish claims to a monopoly of the navigation of the Pacific. In the second half, voyages of exploration were despatched to the Pacific, most notably those of James Cook. The British Empire of the first half of the 18th century was essentially an Atlantic one, peopled by inhabitants of British origin, and held together by economic and cultural ties with Britain, as much as by the exertion of authority. By the end of the 18th century, British economic interests were certainly becoming increasingly ‘global’, in the sense that they were spreading beyond the limits of the Empire.

This chapter aims to note how both the essential constitutional doctrines and the major rules of private law could fare in the process of adapting the common law to its novel environments; for, among other things, that suggests the extent to which English common law was dependent upon its own circumstances of time and socio-political development.

This chapter situates Milton's vehement anti-imperialism at the beginning of a poetic tradition, stretching as far as Shelley and beyond, which was global in sensibility and in which opposition to empire was a central form of imagination. It argues that the major poets of this era not only articulated a powerfully anti-imperial vision of the world, but also contended that artistic culture could not flourish under the political conditions of modern imperialism. This is partly a historical claim, and one which assumes that poetry in this period played an important role in the public contestation of Britain's changing place in the world; but it is also a literary claim about the continuing salience of the classical and early modern traditions which governed poetic forms of imagination right up to the Romantic age. The purpose is not simply to record a series of improvised poetic responses to the growth of the British Empire. Rather, it is to show how a poetry grounded since the Renaissance in universal habits of thought and expansive modes of territorial vision was transposed onto an evolving historical reality, and how this process of imaginative transposition took on a heightened sense of political urgency as the implications of Britain's imperial activities broke upon public consciousness.

The idea of trusteeship in international society originates in late 18th century British India. The purpose of this chapter is to examine the emergence of trusteeship as a justification of political power in territories administered by the East India Company. The chapter has five sections: From Merchant to Sovereign in British India; The Claim to Rule; The Relations of Ruler and Subject; The Purpose of the Office of Government; and Providing Protection, Directing Improvement.

This chapter argues that Victorian Britain was not so committed to laissez faire as some historians have suggested. Although railways were privately promoted they needed to be authorized individually by Local & Personal Acts of Parliament. Railways were only one of a number of innovative types of project promoted in Victorian Britain; others included ports and harbours, and gas, electricity, and water schemes. Railways connected mining and manufacturing districts to ports, and connected major towns and cities to London. Together with ocean shipping, they formed a crucial part of the steam-powered inter-modal international system of transport on which the British Empire was based.

Throughout most of the period covered by this volume, the British Empire was essentially an Atlantic one. There are changes that constituted a fundamental reordering of the Empire which make it appropriate to talk about a first British Empire giving way to a second one. The British Empire of the 1830s or 1840s was very different from that of the mid-18th century. There can be no doubt that the character of the British Empire was changing in the late 18th century, or that the loss of America and the rise of British industry exerted considerable influence on these changes. The success of the American Revolution had exposed glaring defects in the way in which the British Empire was governed. In general, it is possible to see that at the end of the 18th century what was still recognizably the pattern of an earlier Empire was being engulfed by the scale of the additions being made to it. Old and new Empires were coexisting, but the new was outgrowing the old.

The change in the size and the nature of the British presence in three continents had important repercussions on the way in which the Empire was perceived in Britain and Ireland, and on the ways in which the British and Irish perceived themselves. The expansion of empire, its changing character, and its domestic impact also had a profound effect on the old Empire, notably the North American colonies, which, along with the West Indian islands, had formed the most important element of the King's overseas dominions at the beginning of the War of Jenkins' Ear, but occupied a more uncertain place in the aftermath of the Seven Years War. This chapter explores attitudinal shifts — particularly in Britain, but also in North America — to help explain the apparent paradox that the growth of the Empire led, in a mere twelve years after 1763, to war with most of the British North American colonies, and in 1776 resulting in their Declaration of Independence from the British Crown.