The Bureaucracy on Which the Sun Never Sets
This interactive map traces the journeys of thousands of civil servants who travelled across the globe to administer the British Empire. It turns out that extracting the wealth and resources from the rest of the world required an astonishing amount of bureaucracy. The British Empire was the largest empire in history, at its height governing around a quarter of the world's land surface and population. Administering territories spread across every inhabited continent required more than military power. It depended on a vast bureaucracy of governors, district commissioners, customs officials, judges, engineers and countless other civil servants who kept the machinery of empire running. Two hugely impressive new interactive maps explore both where these officials served and how they were trained. An Atlas of Imperial Careers reconstructs the working lives of around 46,000 officials employed by the Colonial Office and India Office between 1820 and 1966. Using annual Colonial Office Lis...
