The Empire Never Died

By Mark Curtis – May 19, 2025

The British Empire is still with us, in the UK’s island outposts and military bases, in the plunder of other countries’ resources, and in UK officials’ imperial mindset.

There’s long been a debate over whether Britain’s Empire – the largest the world has ever known – was a good or bad thing. There’s another question though – did it really end?

In some ways, obviously it did. Some 62 territories have gained independence from the UK in recent decades, mainly during the period from India’s fight for independence in 1947 until Zimbabwe’s in 1980.

But King Charles is still the head of state of 14 Commonwealth territories, from Australia to Saint Lucia, and the UK controls a further 14 ‘Overseas Territories’, such as Gibraltar and on the island of Cyprus.

The United Nations Special Committee on Decolonisation has a list of 17 territories which are “non-self governing”, or colonies in all but name. In 10 of them, the UK is the current administering power.

Many of the UK’s most important current military bases are in former colonies, such as Kenya and Belize.

UK-based multinational corporations, especially mining and oil companies, are still plundering the wealth of countries which used to be colonies and are now independent. There’s a strong correlation between where they operated then, and where they do now.

And money still being drained from those territories is regularly routed through UK-controlled island tax havens like the British Virgin Islands and Cayman Islands. Those territories are a true legacy of the City of London’s enormous commercial power in the era of formal colonialism.

Just as acute is the culture of intervention that still pervades the corridors of Whitehall – a mentality in officialdom of high-minded superiority that sees it as perfectly normal for Britain to send warships or aircraft to bomb foreign countries – like Yemen last month – supported by jingoistic mass media.

UK global might has certainly declined since it was the world’s superpower, a period which began with Britain’s defeat of the French and Spanish navies in 1805 until the second world war.

But Britain remains one of the world’s major military and soft powers, and one of the globe’s most influential countries, by some rankings.

So what the UK does still matters to millions of people around the world. And much of that influence remains pernicious.

New order
The “white man’s burden” that justified colonial and often outright racist brutalities has been replaced by upholding the fictitious “rules-based international order” as a cover for pursuing really basic goals.

These include: intervening at will in other countries (usually, now, as the deputy of the US); grabbing their resources in favourable commercial deals; prioritising geopolitical interests over human rights; propping up dictators who do Whitehall’s bidding; and showing off military might.

This is all done while policy-makers in London, in 2025 as in 1925, pretend all along they hold a moral high ground — invariably receiving the support of Britain’s national media.

Millions of people still live with the impact of Empire. Several of the most persistent border conflicts around the world are where people still suffer from lines on the map drawn up decades ago by colonial British officials.

One of those is Palestine. There, Britain’s policy of backing Israel’s genocide and its settler-colonial project over the rights of indigenous inhabitants of the region could barely be more nineteenth century.

Challenging the insidious aspects of current UK foreign policy – and there are numerous of them – means no less of a challenge than truly ending the British Empire.

Empire of bases
My colleague Phil Miller found in 2020 that the UK operates no less than 145 military base sites in 42 countries around the world. That’s quite an empire. But it is one that is surely unknown to most people outside the Ministry of Defence.

Many bases in former colonies act as training grounds for UK military forces for which Britain either pays nothing – as in Belize – or gets away with abusing local people – as in Kenya.

Other major UK military sites are in former “protectorates” (colonies in all but name) especially in the Gulf dictatorships of Saudi Arabia, Oman and Bahrain. Britain helped create the Saudi regime in the 1920s and 30s while the same families have ruled Oman and Bahrain since the eighteenth century, propped up by British troops.

The power balance in Britain’s relations with these regimes has certainly changed from the colonial era when tinpot dictators just did what London said or were otherwise overthrown. But the basic issue remains: London helps keep these repressive ruling elites in power in order to protect its military and commercial interests.

‘Covert surveillance’
Out of Britain’s Cyprus colony (which became independent in 1960) officials carved a new territory, now described by UK authorities as the “Sovereign Base Areas”. This comprises two parts of the island known as Akrotiri and Dhekelia which amount to three percent of Cyprus and house secret UK spy bases that GCHQ still refuses to publicly acknowledge.

Maintaining these military bases was described by UK officials in declassified files in the 1990s as “an overriding national interest” since “possession of them contributes significantly to the transatlantic relationship”, i.e, it also gives the US a forward operating base.

Akrotiri provides the current launch site for hundreds of UK spy flights providing intelligence to Israel during its genocide in Gaza. It has long provided such a function.

The MoD described Akrotiri in a formerly secret 1971 analysis as “a base from which to conduct surveillance operations, including intelligence gathering”, in addition to supporting “UK naval and amphibious operations in the Eastern Mediterranean”.

“There are great advantages in being able to carry out covert surveillance from UK sovereign territory”, the MoD noted.

Across the globe
Another current colony is the so-called British Indian Ocean Territory – or Chagos Islands, in the Indian Ocean – which was illegally detached from Mauritius by Britain in the 1960s to make way for a US/UK military base.

Conservative MPs are currently up in arms about Britain “giving up” this territory to Mauritius despite knowing that Britain’s occupation of the territory is illegal. But international law mattered little in the nineteenth century, and matters little now, except for the cameras.

Also vital to Whitehall is Gibraltar, which was captured in 1704 from Spain by the British, who never left. The strategically-located territory at the mouth of the Mediterranean houses several UK military installations on its less than three square miles.

A formerly secret MoD analysis notes that “the strategic value of Gibraltar stems from its dominating position at the entrance to the Mediterranean” and that it is “conveniently located” as a base for sea and air activities in the region including “strike/attack operations”.

The British Antarctic Territory (BAT) is another, and perhaps little known, of the 14 British Overseas Territories where the UK claims sovereignty but over which there are overlapping claims by Argentina and Chile. The BAT’s land area, which is mainly glaciated, is around seven times larger than the UK.

The BAT has no indigenous population and presence in the territory is provided by the British Antarctic Survey, which operates three scientific stations. The Royal Navy maintains an ice patrol vessel in the area during the austral summer and the territory has its own legal system and legal and postal administrations.

The Falklands in the south Atlantic were captured by Britain in 1833 and remain the subject of contention at the UN as well as in Argentina.

The UN’s 24-country Special Committee on Decolonisation — its principal body addressing issues concerning decolonisation — repeatedly calls on the UK government to negotiate a resolution to the dispute with Argentina over the status of the islands.

The British government consistently rejects this call, saying that the choice of the islanders to remain British is paramount.

In 2016, however, the UN Commission on the Limits of the Continental Shelf issued a report finding that the Falkland Islands are located in Argentina’s territorial waters.

‘Second empire’
Britain converted a land empire into an ongoing global commercial empire, with the City of London at its head. Testimony to this is the UK’s current leading role in facilitating global tax abuse, which the Tax Justice Network (TJN) calls its “second empire”.

TJN produces a Corporate Tax Haven Index which ranks jurisdictions in terms of their complicity in helping multinational corporations underpay corporate income tax. Its latest listing has the British Virgin Islands, Cayman Islands and Bermuda – all UK overseas territories – as the top three.

The tax losses inflicted on the rest of the world by these three British territories is more than $87bn a year, according to TJN – over five times larger than the UK’s overseas aid programme.

TJN notes: “Together with its network of crown dependencies and overseas territories, the United Kingdom represents the world’s largest facilitator of cross border tax abuse. Indeed the UK’s ‘spider’s web’, as it is often known, was developed as a global system of economic extraction during the retreat of its formal colonial empire.”

Declassified files show how much UK ministers have long admired the financial “services” these countries provide.

For example, Tony Blair wrote to then premier of Bermuda, Pamela Gordon, in November 1997 stating that “Bermuda is close to our hearts and its achievement in becoming one of the world’s leading financial and business centres has our full admiration”.

Other countries’ resources
A few years ago, I did a deep dive into the operations of the companies listed on the London Stock Exchange (LSE) which had mining interests in Africa.

The research found that 101 companies, which were mainly British, had mining operations in 37 of the 49 sub-Saharan African countries. These companies controlled an identified $1.05 trillion worth of resources in just five commodities — oil, gold, diamonds, coal and platinum.

To make matters worse, of those 101 LSE-listed companies, one quarter were incorporated in tax havens, allowing them to shift profits to low- or no-tax jurisdictions.

London is the centre of the global mining industry, hosting giant corporations such as Rio Tinto, Glencore and Anglo American. British high street and investment banks, pension funds and insurance companies invest hundreds of millions of pounds a year in scores of mining projects across the globe.

These projects can, under certain circumstances, benefit developing countries yet many are notorious for creating environmental disasters while producing profits for shareholders but bypassing local people.

Britain’s petroleum
In the colonial era, private corporations like the East India Company, which captured and ruled large parts of India – massively exploiting it in the process – substantially drove UK foreign policy. Today, the interests of UK oil giant BP and also Shell, on which Declassified has done a lot of work, substantially shape UK government decision-making.

From Iran to Azerbaijan, Iraq to Nigeria, Russia to Venezuela, the UK prioritises BP’s profits over a foreign policy that might, with different priorities and institutions shaping it, promote human rights or democratic governance.

Various British wars and coups in the postwar era can be explained by the government championing BP’s oil interests.

It’s no surprise that BP and government departments have an ever-turning door of personnel and indeed that the corporation has strong connections to the UK intelligence services: Sir John Sawers, a former MI6 chief, has sat on BP’s board since 2015.

Somaliland: British Colony, Palestinian Concentration Camp?

Resource drain
How much does the resource drain from the poorer world to the richer one add up to? Jason Hickel of the London School of Economics calculates that countries in the global South lost a staggering $62 trillion during 1960-2018 from “unequal exchange”.

Billions of tonnes of raw materials and billions of hours of human labour per year – embodied in primary commodities, high-tech industrial goods like smartphones, laptops, computer chips and cars – have come to be overwhelmingly manufactured in the South.

A hidden transfer of wealth takes place because prices paid for these are systematically lower in the South than in the North.

“Drain from the South remains a significant feature of the world economy in the post-colonial era; rich countries continue to rely on imperial forms of appropriation to sustain their high levels of income and consumption”, Hickel argues.

It’s hard to estimate what proportion of this Britain might be responsible for, but given its extensive global commercial role, one might conclude – “large”.

Lines on a map
There are other ways the empire is still with us. Some of the world’s most pervasive current border disputes have their origins in British officials’ carving up the world according to their imperial interests.

In early 2023 nearly 200,000 people fled a city in Somaliland in east Africa caused by a battle over a group’s resistance to a colonial-era border created by Britain in 1960.

In 2020, a bloody confrontation took place between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan valley of the Himalayas, over a border demarcation between the British Raj and China drawn up by colonial planners.

The so-called McMahon Line, devised in 1914 by Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary in British India, has never been recognised by China.

Although 1962 saw the last fully-fledged border war between India and China, tensions and a likely source of future conflict remain.

As they do elsewhere, such as over the Durand Line that shapes the border between Pakistan and Afghanistan, which was drawn up by a British diplomat and the Afghan emir in 1893.

Other major conflicts such as between India and Pakistan, especially over the partitioned territory of Kashmir, also have their origins partly in British border demarcations.

The creation of Israel and forced dispossession and ethnic cleansing of 750,000 Palestinians in 1948 owed much to Britain’s 1917 declaration pledging a homeland for Jews and subsequent support for Zionism.

As Rashid Khalidi, and many others, argue, Israel is a settler-colonial project – essentially a continuation of European colonial expansion into an era of formal decolonisation – continuing to be backed by Whitehall.

Closer to home, the future status of Ireland – not to mention Scotland – will remain a hot issue in the coming years.

Over 100 years on from the creation of Northern Ireland, a rising number of people in the province (although not the majority) support the unification of Ireland: 34% in 2024 compared to 27% in 2022, according to one poll.

Legacies
The Empire had an enormous impact on the world and its legacies have been endlessly written about. The most tangible are physical structures such as cities, schools, hospitals, railway stations, and judicial and legislative buildings, across the world.But the most extreme impact was mass killing. Mike Davis has famously written of “late Victorian holocausts”. One recent study calculates that British rule in India resulted in the deaths of over 100 million people between 1881 and 1920, by draining wealth from the country and causing famine.Some writers claim that the presence of parliamentary institutions, law and order, and advances in health in former colonies are all legacies of Empire, but these claims often ring hollow.One study finds that British rule correlates positively with democracy when countries achieved independence, but not 30 years later. In other countries, like India, Amartya Sen notes that multiparty democracy and a free press only became possible after the British left.Other research finds that British colonial rule in Africa has fostered ongoing corruption of local chiefs, and that nationalist civil wars are three times more common in former British colonies than in other former overseas colonies.Culture of intervention
Leading US historian Caroline Elkins writes that the British Empire was substantially based on subjugation and coercion, leaving a “legacy of violence”.Indeed, “might is right” to many in Whitehall, two hundred years ago and now. My research for Declassified has counted 83 British military interventions in 47 countries since the end of the Second World War. The episodes range from brutal colonial wars and covert operations to efforts to prop up favoured governments or to deter civil unrest.In addition the UK has planned or executed 42 attempts to remove foreign governments in 27 countries since 1945. This has involved the intelligence agencies, covert and overt military interventions and assassinations.At the height of Empire, British colonial figures believed they possessed an innate superiority over the people of other countries, evidenced in numerous racist laws, attitudes and policies over decades. They are what justified, in their own minds, their repression of their victims.Such superior attitudes regularly persist into the present, showing themselves in various views, such as that Britain can go it alone in Europe, that it alone won the Second World War or that developing countries would be better off in Empire 2.0.

Elkins notes that “Britain’s imperial nationalism has endured and is underwriting Britain’s belief that the tiny island nation is a giant ready to stake its historically informed claim to the world.”

“In no other contemporary nation-state does imperial nationalism endure with such explicit social, political, and economic consequences”, she adds.

Self-defence
There are so many ways British officials betray their ongoing imperial mindset in foreign policies. Britain has just bombed Yemen claiming it was acting in “self-defence”, a self-proclaimed right that only applies to Whitehall officials and their allies.

See also how they denounce a country like Iran for attempting to acquire nuclear weapons – when they themselves have been increasing Britain’s nuclear arsenal, and remain silent about Israel’s.

The former head of the British army, General Sir Nick Carter, recently pondered: “Is this the moment where you could end Iran’s aspirations for a nuclear weapon through military action?”. Tehran would be accorded no such right.

Britain has just sent one of its aircraft carriers off to patrol Asia and send a “powerful message” of the UK’s naval and air power, in the words of the strike group commander, Commodore James Blackmore.

He adds: “It’s about supporting key trade routes that exist from the Indo-Pacific region to the UK, and supporting partners and allies in the region, showing that we are there as a capable and credible force should it be required.”

Blackmore’s comment could perhaps have been made in the 1850s when Royal Naval forces were bombarding Chinese ports in the Opium Wars.

The extreme state secrecy that exists in Britain – and contempt for the public right to know even basic things about what ministers are up to – is also part of that superior sense long inculcated in the minds of elites and steeped in history.

Ending Empire
For how much longer can the remnants of Empire continue? There are, for example, calls in several countries to remove King Charles as head of state and to become republics.

Jamaica plans to hold a referendum on becoming a republic later this year while there are prospects to hold similar votes in Belize and the Bahamas. Politicians in Grenada and St Kitts & Nevis have also mooted their countries cutting the connection to the UK royals.

Opposition is growing to Britain’s military presence on Cyprus, due its use by the Royal Air Force in supporting Israel during a genocide. In Kenya, MPs and lawyers are challenging the British military over killing local people and environmental destruction.

The UN continues its regular call for the territorial remnants of Empires to become truly-governing.

Iraq in 2003 and Gaza now have politicised different generations of Britons into more clearly seeing the true nature of UK foreign policy. They’ve been aided by live-tweeting and increasingly influential independent media, bypassing the largely slavish devotion of corporate media to official truths.

Britain’s Empire always had its challengers and detractors, even at its height, and it certainly does now. There are prospects to end it, and bring about, for the first time in our history, a decent foreign policy based on promoting universal values and genuine international rules.

Mark Curtis is the co-director of Declassified UK, and the author of five books and many articles on UK foreign policy.

(Declassified UK)