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Imperial experience has taught the British a lot. Britain now believes that an agile balance of concede and conserve can transform a restless empire into a friendly commonwealth. The process makes the British empire hard to define because, as British Historian Eric Walker wrote: "It is the rearward portion of a procession, a large part of which has long since crossed the flood that divided dependence from autonomy, and part is crossing now."
Thirty-five British colonies in five continents, and dotting the seven seas, are still ruled directly from Whitehall. Among them are the massive tracts of Tanganyika and Nigeria, the island arcs of the Solomons and the Lesser Antilles, such pinprick naval bases as Malta and Ascension (35 sq. mi.), which was administered for 107 years as one of Her Majesty's warships.* Britain's colonies were picked up, along with the commonwealth, in what the British like to call "a fit of absence of mind." Most of them were the concomitants of sea power and the search for overseas markets, but some were political accidents, like the colony of Pitcairn Island, where mutineers from the Bounty settled in 1790.
The faster Britain's empire has dwindled, the more precious the rest of it has become. The loss of the vast Sudan last year brought a hardening of British attitudes in Suez and Kenya. Communist revolt in Malaya made drastic action certain when other Reds made trouble in British Guiana. Not surprisingly, postwar Britain has turned to its colonies to 1) recoup its economy, and 2) restore its prestige. British Africa, with the bulk of the empire's area and population, gets top priority.
Since 1945 Britain has poured billions into African development. Spread among so many who need so much, it sparked no great boom, yet in copper-rich Northern Rhodesia, one town grew so fast that its public-health officials were temporarily officed in a disused public lavatory, with boards nailed over the toilet seats to provide desks and chairs. Across the continent, Gold Coast and Nigeria are becoming useful dollar earners and an important British market.
Officially, the British encourage self-government in all their colonies. Where the populations are all one color, e.g., Gold Coast, the gamble pays off. But in white-settled colonies, such as Kenya, it has often led to trouble because the white minority, with Whitehall's restrictions relaxed, turned down the screws on the blacks.
THE FRENCH EMPIRE
Eighteenth-Century France lost one empire—in India and North America—to British sea power. Her modern empire, still the world's largest, comprises Indo-China and a series of colonies strewn across the westward bulge of Africa in an area the size of the continental U.S. Total population: 79 million, one-third of which is in Indo-China.