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the Colonial Office: nobody could be sure whether they were intended for Sierra Leone, a colony for liberated slaves on the west coast of Africa, or for St Lucia, an island in the West Indies ceded by France under the Treaty of Paris, where the laws were mostly French, the food was mostly Creole, and the mongoose had recently been introduced from India in an attempt to keep down the rats.
    1 Charles Dilke (1843–1911) was a rare kind of politician, a radical imperialist. His book Greater Britain‚ written at 23 after a world tour, was an immense popular success, offering educated Britons a new vision of themselves as a benevolent master race. Dilke’s distinguished career as a Liberal republican was ruined by a famous divorce case in 1886, in which he was accused of adultery with the wife of another M.P.
    2 The Expansion of England was a series of lectures delivered by Seeley (1834–95) as Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. It dealt with the period 1688–1815, but served to give the British a wider view of their imperial mission, and was one of the source books of the New Imperialism, remaining in print until 1956—the year the British realized that their expansion had ended.
    1 Progenitor, too, of the New Imperialism. Disraeli (1804–81) had first given glamour to the imperial idea, with gestures like the acquisition of Suez Canal shares, strokes of policy like the movement of Indian troops to Malta to confront Russia, and phrases like: ‘The key of India is not Herat or Kandahar, the key of India is London.’
    1 The Scotsman was Harry Aubrey de Vere Maclean (1848–1920), who played the bagpipes and the guitar and was an indefatigable amateur inventor. The Irishman was Robert Hart (1835–1911), resident in China for fifty-four years and virtually the creator of the Chinese maritime customs service.
    The Vesuvius funicular, the subject of the song Funicul ì Funiculà, was destroyed in the eruption of 1944, and Cook’s sold its remains after the Second World War, retaining a share in the ownership of the chairlift that has replaced it.
    1 This traditional function is still going strong. Its guests, proceeding to the Residency from their air-conditioned villas, generally think they are merely celebrating the passage of another year of exile, but in fact they are honouring the proclamation of Victoria as Queen-Empress on January 1, 1877.

CHAPTER THREE
Life-lines
    Sons, be welded, each and all
    Into one imperial whole‚
    One with Britain, heart and soul!
    One life, one flag, one fleet, one Throne!
    Britons, hold your own!
    Alfred, Lord Tennyson

3
    T HE Roman Empire was self-contained. The Spanish Empire was concentrated. The Russian Empire was continental. The British Empire was broadcast across the earth, and communications were the first concern of its late Victorian rulers. The electric telegraph and the steamship had transformed the Pax Britannica. Fifty years before the imperial offices in London had been geared to time-lags of months or even years. Now the mail took four weeks to Australia, and there were only a few remote or recent colonies to which the Queen’s Jubilee message finally made its way in the pouch of a native runner. The whole Empire was suddenly accessible, and every new link seemed to be welding it into something more muscular and permanent. The communications of the world were overwhelmingly in British hands. It was a preoccupation of the British to keep them so, and to ensure that every territory of the Empire was linked to London by British routes—All-Red Routes, in the jargon of the day. Cecil Rhodes’s idea of a Cape-to-Cairo railway line was more than just a speculator’s dream: it vividly expressed the national vision of British-controlled highways crisscrossing all the continents.
    Of course the control would be asserted, the British emphasized, for the benefit of everybody: but as the Russian Foreign Secretary remarked, when told in 1889 that the British were opening up