When (if ever) did the Sun set on the British Empire?
what-if.xkcd.com
what-if.xkcd.com
"The sun never set on the British Empire because the British Empire is in the East and the sun sets in the West"
They've been doing the rounds for a loooong time; I think I read these the first time before the web was a thing!
¹ https://www.cs.cornell.edu/info/people/fcc/humor/history.htm...
The BIOT is perhaps best known in these circles for its .io domain names, or elsewhere as the site of a genocide of the natives by the British armed forces in the 1970s.
The next British territory west of the BIOT is Akrotiri and Dhekelia in Cyprus. [0] The next territory east is Pitcairn.
When it's 06:30 in Cyprus in the winter, it's 20:30 in Pitcairn. The sun will have set about 75 minutes previously on the latter [1], and won't rise for another 15 minutes in the former [2], so there's an hour and a half each day where the BIOT, not Pitcairn, is the only British territory where it's daytime.
And... there's a total solar eclipse coming up there as soon as 2027! [3] Unfortunately it's in the summer, in the evening, and it won't be total over the whole territory at the same time (though another eclipse could be). So it doesn't quite qualify, but to fully answer this question, the BIOT needs to be considered.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Overseas_Territories
[1] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/biot/diego-garcia?month=12&y...
[2] https://www.timeanddate.com/sun/cyprus/nicosia?month=12&year...
[3] https://www.timeanddate.com/eclipse/in/biot?iso=20270802
this made me chuckle
When Britain stopped enforcing their economic and political superiority with military action, was the end of the "British Empire."
A country with overseas territories is not an empire. Lots of countries have them, but its hard to consider somewhere like New Zealand as governing an empire.
It highlighted both to the colonised and the colonisers that the empire was way over-extended.
There was a lot of free movement within the empire other than to the UK too. Many people left India, in particular, for west Africa, SE Asia. Some of my ancestors moved to Sri Lanka.
My grandfather was a "home child", basically a war orphan indentured, his contract sold to a farmer in Canada, while his brother went to Australia, never to be seen again.
But at the time, even for normal moves to Canada or other places, people were worried that their children would not be Subjects of The Empire.
So promises were made, that if subjects moved to a colony, their Grandchildren would be British". This was still a pledge in the 20s when my grandfather arrived in Canada, and thus I am eligible for a UK "Ancestry VISA".
This only works if your grandfather was born in the UK, amd went to a colony, and my point?
Well, eventually the last person capable of exercising this right will be gone. Maybe 30 years?
It is another point in the end of empire.
There's a tale that likely ended in tears.
British war orphans sent to Australia largely fell into the clutches of the Christian Brothers . . .
* https://kelsolawyers.com/au/paedophile_offenders/brother-kea...
* https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2017/mar/02/child-migran...
We've never been able to track him down, or their sister down (she was still at the orphanage, too young to ship off when they were broken up).
My grandfather was lucky in Canada. He worked dawn to dusk, but was fed well, sheltered from the elements, and learned how to manage a farm. He came out of it reasonably well.
People often say there is a history of treating Natives poorly in Canada, colonies. Yet we did it to ourselves, too.
Especially the churches.
Anyone with any grandparent born in the UK is eligible, whether that grandparent went to a colony or not.
Indian, Canadian, etc etc troops marching in step. Within a decade so many gone.
But I agree I think, that the 50s seem too soon.
Still, that last march is an important symbol.
(3 decades sounds long to me, but it would allow a royal wedding and the recovery of Las islas Malvinas to be the last gasp of empire?)
I would personally put it earlier than that, because HK was one small territory and seems to stretch the definition of empire for the same reasons.
There's no "empire" in the Royal titles any more, but the King remains "head of state" for Commonwealth nations, including Canada and Australia! https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/the-kings-style-and-tit...
Yes, but that is just not changing the names of the awards because people know what they are.
> the King remains "head of state" for Commonwealth nations, including Canada and Australia
He is separately head of state of each of those Commonwealth nations. That shows that those nations are no longer in any sense part of the empire and it places them at the same level as the UK in terms of their relationship to their monarch.
Its a legacy of empire, but not evidence of empire - rather the opposite.
Maybe the independence of Brunei (1984) would be a better date to mark the end of the empire.
> The Pitcairn Islands have a population of a few dozen people, the descendants of the mutineers from the HMS Bounty.
Ah that seems so beautiful...
> The islands became notorious in 2004 when a third of the adult male population, including the mayor, were convicted of child sexual abuse
Oh
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2008/01/pitcairn200801
>The criminal charges stemmed from a longtime island practice of “breaking in” girls as young as 10.
> Colleen McCullough, the Australian author of The Thorn Birds and wife of a well-known Pitcairn descendant, harshly criticized the British for prosecuting what even the Foreign Office grudgingly conceded was a “cultural trait.” She said, “It’s Polynesian to break your girls in at 12.”
....oh.
Well. OK. That was NOT in Moana.
Although archaeologists believe that Polynesians were living on Pitcairn as late as the 15th century, the islands were uninhabited when they were re-discovered by Europeans.
In 1790, nine of the mutineers from the British merchant ship HMS Bounty, along with the native Tahitian men and women who were with them (six men, 11 women, and a baby girl), settled on Pitcairn Island and set fire to the Bounty.
All in all it was a bit of a Ripping Yarns style Boy's Own Adventure with indentured sex workers.
Do you think the Tahitians were free and equal settlers, or yet more Pacific Islanders blackbirded by the British?
It's cultural exports and influences are felt all over the world and to date, all other countries still need its consideration, approval and/ or support in their own foreign policies, and that includes Britain.