What if?
Living in uncertain times has led to my thinking counterfactually - surely anything's better than the factual?
Given that we Brits were involved in, if not actually responsible for, more than our fair share of the enduring conflicts troubling the world today, a reappraisal and re-evaluation of our colonial/imperial history is long-overdue. I suppose it just depends on how far we want to go back.
I would start by going back to 1066 to ponder what might have happened had King Harold won the Battle of Hastings. Had he won it decisively (ie by dispatching William of Normandy on that fateful day) and seen off any attempts by his son, William 'Rufus' (aged nine at the time of the battle), to assert his rights to the English throne, the continuance of an Anglo-Saxon England might have been more beneficial to the world.
We shall never know, of course, but it's interesting to speculate. The kingdom of England, consolidated by Æthelstan in 927, became a wealthy and well-governed country. The Danes were a constant problem, of course, but as the royal families became intermarried a distinctly English form of government emerged, with the Witan governing council and forty shires each led by an eorl (earl) providing a stable administration.
The Normans (Norsemen) in northern France were part of the same Scandinavian ruling elite (1066 was basically a family feud) but they developed along very different lines, with markedly different legal and governance structures to the English, to say nothing of linguistics. This was why the Norman conquest proved such a shock to the native English - their writ was much harsher and more tyrannical than anything England had become accustomed to since Æthelstan's time and necessitated adapting to Norman French as the official language into the bargain.
Is it possible that England's later role in the world would have been a kindlier one had the Normans not prevailed? Under the Norman/Angevin/Plantagenet dynasty a nascent imperialist project emerged and rapidly gathered pace. William I carried out a brutal assault in the rebellious north of England (the Harrying of the North) and William II who, like his father, enjoyed a fight, had some successes against the Welsh and the Scots. This continued under his younger brother, Henry, who succeeded him on his untimely death (assassination?) in 1100 while out hunting in the New Forest.
When, much later, Edward I became king, in 1272, he already had control of most of Ireland from his father, Henry III, but went on to subjugate Wales. Subjecting Scotland to suzerainty earned him the soubriquet 'the Hammer of the Scots'. He considered the King of Scotland, John Balliol, a vassal and his troops killed the last native Prince of Wales, Llywelyn, in 1282, later bestowing the title on his own son, Edward, in 1301. Ever since then, the heir to the throne, who elsewhere in Europe would be styled Crown Prince, has borne the title Prince of Wales.
So it's apparent that England was an expansionist nation from an early stage. Maybe it was the Norse Viking seafaring tradition or due to its being an island nation, perhaps both, that led mediaeval England to turn its sights abroad, particularly to France. But as, over time, she inexorably lost her French possessions she became something of an outlier, impoverished and increasingly irrelevant on the European stage (who says history doesn't repeat itself?). This remained so until arguably into the early-modern era, under the Tudors and Stuarts, when she began to emerge as a world trading and colonising power.
This transition is usually thought to have begun under Elizabeth I, which is certainly true as far as it goes, but it's interesting to speculate about what might have happened had Elizabeth's elder half-sister, Mary, lived longer and borne an heir. She had married Philip of Spain in 1554 and during her lifetime he was styled King of England. He became King Philip II of Spain two years later and, had they had children together, the thrones of England and Spain would have been permanently united. England would presumably then have participated in Spain's growing maritme power and in the wealth of her growing Empire.
However, had England's energies been focused in that direction, and Henry VIII's Dissolution of the Monasteries been reversed by the devoutly Catholic Mary, maybe the Industrial Revolution would not have happened as it did, boosted by a surge of entrepreneurial energy released by the breaking-up of the monastic estates and the creation of a newly-landed Protestant gentry and mercantile class whose exploitation of the iron, coal and water of the former Catholic religious houses kick-started a process unique in the world. Had this not happened it's conceivable England might have eventually declined along with Spain to become a backwater rather than the industrial powerhouse and global superpower she did.
As it was, of course, Mary died childless in 1558 and under the Protestant Elizabeth (a true Pirate Queen if ever there was one) England's privateers and slavers such as Drake, Hawkins and Raleigh, knighted by her to confer respectability on their thoroughly disreputable actions, stole the Spanish gold instead of working for it. The destruction of the Spanish Armada in 1588, whether through luck or good tactics (mostly the weather I think) set the seal on England's emergence as a maritime power, in propaganda terms at least if not in reality at this stage.
At which point it's perhaps worth fast forwarding into the 18th century, skipping over the further depressing consolidation of English hegemony in the British Isles with the Union of the Crowns of England and Scotland under James VI and I in 1603, his subsequent Protestant Plantations into Catholic Ireland, the calamitous Civil Wars throughout the kingdom under his son, Charles I, and the eventual genocidal cruelties of the victor, Oliver Cromwell, against the subjugated Irish.
In 1707 political union was agreed between Scotland and England, not that the Scots were left with any option having effectively been forced into bankruptcy by the collapse of their disastrous investments into a Scottish colony in Darien (Panama), engineered with English connivance. The terms of a bailout were contingent on the Scottish parliament winding itself up and Scottish MPs decamping to Westminster. Follow the money.
My particular interest is what happened later in the century with Britain's thirteen colonies in America. Had she agreed a more generous settlement with her colonists prior to 1776 it's conceivable that they might not have felt moved to declare independence in the first place, much less fight a bloody war to secure it. It's interesting to imagine America developing instead, rather like Australia or Canada, into a much less belligerent, more pacific, nation. Had that happened, it's possible to imagine a different outcome for France, whose own Revolution was aided by the new United States following France's assistance in the American Wars of Independence in order to thwart the British. Be careful what you wish for.
Had that been so, it's equally possible to imagine Britain not feeling driven to take control of the Indian subcontinent having been deprived of its American colonies. The French East India Company had been established in 1673 and France only officially withdrew in 1962, fifteen years after the British renounced their Raj. When touring India and being subjected to the ubiquitous 'English' breakfast of 'toast-butter-jam' I used to think, selfishly, how much preferable would have been the croissants of French Pondicherry. But, then, France's later role in Indo-China was nothing to be proud of either.
If the British had never occupied the Indian subcontinent, it's also highly unlikely that the disastrously rushed Partition of 1947 would have occurred, at least in the way it did, and millions of lives might have been spared as a consequence, along with the lasting antagonism created between modern India, Pakistan and Bangladesh. Also, talking of Pondicherry in Tamil Nadu, I'm reminded that had the Britisn not transplanted Indian Tamils into Ceylon (Sri Lanka) to work their tea plantations the catastrophic ethno-religious conflict of the Civil War, which raged from 1983 to 2009 and cost hundreds of thousands of lives, would likely have been avoided.
Botched partition was also a factor in Ireland, with a British enclave of six of the nine Ulster counties adding Northern Ireland to the United Kingdom in 1921 as part of the negotiations for an Irish Republic following the Easter Rising of 1916. The British fixation with drawing lines on maps provided a fraught legacy for Ireland which played out tragically in 'The Troubles', thirty years of murderous conflict from 1969 to 1998 only finally calmed, though not yet finally resolved, by the Belfast or Good Friday Agreement brokered by the United States.
And then, coming right up-to-date, there's Palestine! The history of Britain's role in the secret Anglo-French Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916, the Balfour Declaration of 1917 and the British Mandate for Palestine of 1919, is hardly an honourable one. The horrendously mismanaged founding of the Jewish state of Israel in 1948 under the aegis of the British, resulting in what Palestinians still refer to as Al-Naqba, The Catastrophe, where hundreds of thousands of Palestinian Arabs were displaced from their ancestral lands to make room for a national homeland for European Jews after the Nazi Holocaust of the Second World War, should be a cause of national shame. Strangely, it seems not to be.
But, given our history, where would the shame start - or end?