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Rating: 
Summary: Extraordinarily informative
Review: ... It is a classic that should be required reading for all travel journalists and travelers. It is incredibly informative and sometimes hilarious. Mr. Winchester is to be commended for crafting a superb collection of vignets about the remaining colonial holdings of the once mighty British Empire. This book is a keeper -- and my only regret is that I loaned my copy out and never got it back -- so here I am on the Amazon website ordering a used and slightly tattered replacement.
Rating:
Summary: Both entertaining and somber account of Empire today
Review: Inspired by a newspaper article about a British island he had never heard of, author Simon Winchester made a grand tour of the modern British Empire (the book was published in 1985). Like many, he originally thought that the Empire was no more, that most of the colonies and protectorates had long gone independent. His research revealed that the British Empire still included 200 named islands of any size (and thousands of smaller ones), that according to the 1981 census 5,248,728 people were citizens of the Crown colonies (5,120,000 in Hong Kong, 128,000 in the remaining 15 possessions). Winchester resolved to visit each colonial possession that had a permanent population, a trip that took three years, in which he covered some 100,000 miles. Winchester visited the remote British Indian Ocean Territory (or BIOT), thousands of miles from the mainland. The territory, made up pretty much of the Chagos Islands, was at one time home to over 2,000 islanders (more than the population of the Falkland Islands), earning their livelihood from a French-run copra and coconut oil company and possessing schools, churches, roads, and the inhabitants having lived there for generations. In the saddest part of the book, Winchester described how the islanders were all more or less deported to Mauritius, 1,800 miles from their former home, even though they were under supposedly British protection, all in the interests of establishing an American military base in Diego Garcia (sometimes called either the Footprint of Freedom due to the island's vaguely foot-shaped appearance, or the Rock by those posted there who hate its isolation). Winchester visited several remote South Atlantic islands. Tristan da Cunha, 1,800 miles southwest of Cape Town, was a fascinating place, very difficult to reach or even get onto owing to rough seas, weather, and no real harbor. The island essentially one massive volcano (which erupted in 1961, forcing the islanders to temporarily retreat to the UK), in its isolation has produced a unique group of people, all comprised of just seven family names, these Tristinians speaking a unique dialect of English. Ascension Island was he writes once officially dubbed HMS Ascension and treated bureaucratically as a ship! Originally annexed as a place for a transatlantic cable station, today it serves as an electronic listening post and military base, largely for the Americans. St. Helena is an island inhabited by a proud but kind people ("Saints" to outsiders, "Yamstocks" to each other), their language a mixture of various dialects and somewhat akin to what one might find in Dickens novel. Famous as the final place of exile for Napoleon Bonaparte, it has served as a prison for others, including the Chief of the Zulus and many Boers; now the islanders feel imprisoned by their remoteness from the outside world, a problem exacerbated by the lack of an airport. The Falkland Islands of course get attention in the book, Winchester having visited the islands on the eve of the Falkland Islands War and even served some time in prison in Argentina. Winchester visited the five colonies of the Caribbean, with a far nicer climate and less remote but perhaps not any better off than the South Atlantic territories. The Turks and Caicos Islands - two distinct archipelagos- are the third largest inhabited colonial possession (after the Falklands and the BIOT), the Turks deriving their name from a local fez-like red cactus, the Turk's head, the Caicos derived from the word cay. The Turks were once major exporters of salt, though have fallen on hard times since losing that industry to a Bahamian factory. The British Virgin Islands (more properly simply the Virgin Islands) he visited as well, a slower paced - and poorer - counterpart to the U.S. Virgin Islands. Anguilla we find was subject to a massive invasion in 1969 - Operation Sheepskin - that involved two Royal Navy frigates and over 300 soldiers, all in an attempt to put down what was feared a rebellion by the 6,000 islanders. Instead it was a miscommunication, there was no rebellion, and not a shot was fired, much to British embarrassment. Britain's newest inhabited colony, choosing to remain with the UK when St. Kitts became independent, Anguilla demonstrates that some colonies are not yet ready to go independent, or maybe never will. Montserrat we find is another volcanic island, one that just missed out on being the only Irish colony in the Caribbean! Finally we visit the Cayman Islands, the most famous of the British possessions in the Caribbean, home to an (in)famous offshore banking industry, and not much else. Winchester visited also Gibraltar, Bermuda, and Hong Kong, but decided against visiting Pitcairn Island. So what states does Winchester find the British Empire in his grand tour? Not in a very good one unfortunately. He finds the colonies an "unhappy collection of peoples and places, wanting in imagination,...policy,...a future,...money,...sympathetic administration,... [and]...talented leaders." London he wrote didn't seem to care that drug money was being laundered in the Cayman Islands, or that the Turks and Caicos Islands were a transshipment point for drugs from South America. Several colonies had - at the encouragement of London - developed in the past one-crop economies, and when they failed those colonies - whether it was salt in the Turks and Caicos Islands, flax in St. Helena, or the dockyard in Gibraltar - faced bleak economic futures. None of this was aided by the fact that Whitehall seemed quite begrudging of monetary aid and quite slow to respond to any requests made by the colonial administrations. Winchester felt though that a more grave injustice was done by the passing of the British Nationality Act in 1981, whereby only those who lived in the Falkland Islands and Gibraltar were full British citizens, able to come and go to the Great Britain as they please and even settle there if they liked. The remainder of the colonists cannot settle in the UK proper with such ease, and for all intents and purposes are aliens in that respect. This book was both entertaining and somber.
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Summary: One of the Best Travelogues Ever!
Review: This book simply is an excellent read, a book you cannot put down once you start reading it. It will make you want to pack your bags and travel to the distant ends of the earth!
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