91) Eduard and the British Empire Written by Rainer: rainer.lehrer@yahoo.com Learn languages (via Skype): Rainer: + 36 20 549 52 97 or + 36 20 334 79 74

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Eduard and the British Empire Who has not read the book "Jane Eyre" by Charlotte Brontë or at least seen the film. A story packed with emotions of mediocre structure and style, which is ideally suited for a Hollywood-heart-sadness-film, hardly deserves to be mentioned in literary terms, but contains important information for the attentive reader about the wealthy middle and upper classes in the 1840s of the English flat land. The main character, an orphan named Jane, meets a man. And it is precisely this figure that should be the focus of our interest. Eduard Rochester is the second and younger male offspring of a wealthy family. The father wants to keep the family property together and makes the elder the sole heir. The younger, Eduard, is sent to the overseas colonies with some money to make his fortune. It was common throughout Europe that the nobility at that time handed everything over to the first son and the other male children had to try their luck elsewhere as clergymen or officers in the army, etc. But why did England send its boys overseas, to the Caribbean, to Africa, Asia or Australia? After the Spanish sovereignty at sea had been broken after 1588, the English island people began to expand their colonies all over the world. These projects were only sometimes started directly by the English crown, in most cases, these were private initiatives. The young wealthy looked for a ship, hired a crew and set off for their destination armed with a charter from the king or queen authorising them to take possession of so-called abandoned or uninhabited areas in the name of England. Once there, they staked out a certain area, killed or subjugated the natives, then coffee, tea, tobacco, cocoa, cotton, spices, etc. were grown with the almost free labour of the natives or slaves. If the project was successful, English merchant ships soon turned up to deliver the harvest all over the world. Others later settled in the neighbourhood and a port with a military base was built. After a certain time, various such colonies merged and founded their own shipping companies, such as the British East India Company, to handle the transport between different colonies and Europe. The private armies of these organisations or the British regular army were then responsible for upcoming problems with other colonial powers or natives. This is how the British Empire came into being. The list of colonies is almost endless, so only the most important are mentioned here: all of North America, Australia, New Zealand, Hong Kong Singapore, India, Pakistan, South Africa, many parts of the Ivory Coast etc. Back to list!

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