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

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.

My own forebears, many serving in the armed forces, were involved over six generations in this imperial saga. Between 1750 and 1950, 22 Faunce men served abroad, 12 in Asia, five in Africa, others in Australia, North America and the West Indies. Including wives, at least 40 family members lived and worked abroad during this period, of whom ten--one in four--died while doing so.

They followed the flag: one fought under Wolfe at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham; four generations served the Raj on the Indian sub-continent; another became a pioneer Australian; four more served in Africa where one died fighting white, and another black, opponents in South Africa, and a third worked as a missionary. The fourth, my grandfather, took part in some of the last colonial wars in West Africa. Many families could tell a similar story.

As a child in the inter-war years, I had a favourite book in which a brother and sister toured `the empire on which the sun never set'. I learnt that the British Empire was not only the greatest the world had ever known but also the best; it was for the good not only of ourselves but of all those under its rule. Now I know better--or at least differently.

The enslavement of millions, the subjugation of ancient civilizations, the callous disregard for indigenous peoples, the immense cost in lives--these have left a legacy of poverty, bitterness and division not yet fully acknowledged, let alone requited.

Imperial attitudes die hard. `Our Victorian heyday still dominates our national imagination,' writes novelist and historian Len Deighton. It leads us to exaggerate our own influence and underestimate others'; it also affects our attitude to other races.

In the West Indies as a boy, I attended a multiracial school; but at home lived apart from non-white neighbours. At university in Britain I avoided black students--till a stab of conscience pierced my reserve. Working in India, some years later, made me look afresh at how we treat incomers to Britain: Indians' welcome to an Englishman whose forebears served the Raj differed markedly from the coolness we often show Asians and others who make their home in Britain.

Yet empire had positive attributes: the ending of the slave trade; the dissemination of Western industry, technology, medicine and democratic ideals; the shaking into new life of ancient societies. `Are we to complain,' wrote free India's first Prime Minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, `of the cyclone that uproots us and hurls us about, or the cold wind that makes us shiver? The British ... represented mighty forces which they themselves hardly realized.'

I cannot condemn my ancestors any more than I can condone everything they did: they were men and women of their times. Kipling's cryptic epitaph for journalists seems apt: `We served our day'. But I do deeply regret the suffering my countrymen have caused, with consequences we still live with: `The evil that men do lives after them'--especially in the memories of the oppressed.

Facing the past is part of coming to terms with the future. Ireland, the slave trade and the Industrial Revolution have cast long shadows of class and race prejudice, national and communal conflict into the 20th century. Hong Kong returned to its motherland this year; India and Pakistan became independent 50 years ago, and most of Africa during the 1960s. But areas of disputed sovereignty remain: the Falklands/Malvinas, Gibraltar and Northern Ireland.

The British Empire changed the world, wrote James Morris in his brilliantly impressionistic Empire trilogy. It acted as `a gigantic goad or catalyst, stirring dormant energies across the continents ... the principal agent of ... the distribution everywhere of industrial civilization'.

Aime Cesaire, a pioneer of black consciousness from Martinique, voiced a different perspective:

`Listen to the white world:

How their steel blue speed is paralyzed in the mystery of the flesh ...

Mercy! Mercy for our omniscient, naive conquerors.

Hurray for those who never invented anything.

Hurray for those who never explored anything.

Hurray for those who never conquered anything.

Hurray for joy, hurray for love.

Hurray for the pain of incarnate tears.'

Europe's imperial adventure is too close for balanced judgement; and this article can only express a personal, provisional view. Let Rudyard Kipling, poet and also prophet of empire, have the last word. For the apogee of the British Empire, Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee 100 years ago this year, he wrote:

`The tumult and the shouting dies;

The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

An humble and a contrite heart.'