Ольга Кравцова - Английский язык для специальных и академических целей - Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1

DEBATE

Holding a debate on a politically relevant topic (for details see p. 36 )

TERM PRESENTATION

Making a power point presentation based on one's analysis of an issue relevant to the topic (Britain: From Empire to Democracy) (for details see p. 31)

PROJECT WORK

Doing research as a team and presenting results (for details see p. 38)

1. Do you think Britons should be proud of the British Empire?

2. What, in your view, is the legacy of the Empire?

THE BRITISH EMPIRE'S LEGACY (Based on Conclusion Chapter from Empire. How Britain Made the Modern World by Niall Ferguson. Penguin books LTD, London, 2004)

The British Empire is long dead; only flotsam and jetsam 1now remain. What had been based on Britain's commercial and financial supremacy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and her industrial supremacy in the nineteenth was bound to crumble once the British economy buckled under the accumulated burdens of two world wars. The great creditor became a debtor. In the same way, the great movements of population that had once driven British imperial expansion changed their direction in the 1950s. Emigration from Britain gave way to immigration into Britain. As for the missionary impulse that had sent thousands of young men and women around the world preaching Christianity and the gospel of cleanliness, that too dwindled 2 2 Flotsam and jetsam — rubbish floating in the water after a ship has been wrecked and rubbish washed on to the land 3 3 To dwindle — diminish gradually in size, amount, or strength , along with public attendance at church. Christianity today is stronger in many of her former colonies than in Britain itself.

It cannot be denied, however, that the imperial legacy has shaped the modern world so profoundly that we almost take it for granted. Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that the institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of states in the world, as they are today. India, the world's largest democracy, owes more than it is fashionable to acknowledge to British rule. Its elite schools, its universities, its civil service, its army, its press and its parliamentary system all still have discernibly 4 4 Discernible — able to be seen, noticed, or understood British models. Finally, there is the English language itself, perhaps the most important single export of the last 300 years. Today 350 million people speak English as their first language and around 450 million have it as a second language. That is roughly one in every seven people on planet.

Of course no one would claim that the record of the British Empire was unblemished 5 5 Unblemished — without any faults or mistakes to spoil your reputation or record . On the contrary, I have tried to show how often it failed to live up to its own ideal of individual liberty, particularly in the early era of enslavement, transportation and the ‘ethnic cleansing' of indige-nous 6 6 Indigenous — originating in and characteristic of a particular region or country; native peoples. Yet the nineteenth-century Empire undeniably pioneered free trade, free capital movements and, with the abolition of slavery, free labour. It invested immense sums in developing a global network of modern communications. It spread and enforced the rule of law over vast areas. Though it fought many small wars, the Empire maintained a global peace unmatched before or since. In the twentieth century too it more than justified its existence, for the alternatives to British rule represented by the German and Japanese empires were clearly far worse. And without its Empire, it is inconceivable that Britain could have withstood them.

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy

There would certainly not have been so much free trade between the 1840s and the 1930s had it not been for the British Empire. Relinquishing 1Britain's colonies in the second half of the nineteenth century would have led to higher tariffs in their markets, and perhaps other forms of trade discrimination. The evidence for this need not be purely hypothetical; it manifested itself in the highly protectionist policies adopted by the United States and India after they secured independence, as well as in the tariffs adopted by Britain's imperial rivals France, Germany and Russia in the 1870s and after. Britain's military budget before the First World War can therefore be seen as a remarkably low insurance premium against international protectionism. According to one estimate, the economic benefit to the UK of enforcing free trade could have been as high as 6.5 per cent of gross national product. No one has yet ventured to estimate what the benefit to the world economy as a whole may have been; but that it was a benefit and not a cost seems beyond dispute, given the catastrophic consequences of the global descent into protectionism as Britain's imperial power waned 7 7 To relinquish — to give up, abandon, surrender 8 8 To wane — to decrease gradually in size, decline, approach an end in the 1930s.

Nor would there have been so much international mobility of labour — and hence so much global convergence of incomes before 1914 — without the British Empire. True, the United States was always the most attractive destination for nineteenth century migrants from Europe; nor did all the migrants originate in the colonising countries. But it should not be forgotten that the core of the US had been under British rule for the better part of a century and a half before the War of Independence, and that the differences between independent and British North America remained minor.

It is also worth remembering that the significance of the white dominions as destinations for British emigrants grew markedly after 1914, as the US tightened restrictions on immigration and, after 1929, endured a far worse Depression than anything experienced in the sterling bloc. Finally, we should not lose sight of the vast number of Asians who left India and China to work as indentured 9 9 Indentured — наемный labourers, many of them on British plantations and mines in the course of the nineteenth century. There is no question that the majority of them suffered great hardship; many indeed might well have been better off staying at home. But once again we cannot pretend that this mobilisation of cheap and probably underemployed Asian labour to grow rubber and dig gold had no economic value.