Whatever Happened to the Brits?

Once upon a time, there was an empire…

There used to be a Starbucks at Camden Market in London. It’s gone. The last time I had coffee there was in March 2020. When I went back in August, 2022, it was gone. When I was back in June 2023, even more of Camden market place had disappeared. Own picture.

I was born into the British Empire. At school, as South Africa was a colony, our currency was pounds, shillings, and pence. We learnt that the sun never set on the British Empire — meaning that when it was night in one British colony, it was daylight in another British colony. The maps of those days were painted red wherever a country was under British occupation.

The British Empire began with England’s overseas settlements and trading posts between the late 16th and early 18th centuries. At its height, it was the largest Empire in history. By 1913 the British Empire covered 35.5 million sq km or 13.7 million sq mi (24 percent of the planets’ total land area). In 1920, the Empire’s population was over 413 million people (23% of the world population). Source

The text tells how wonderful the British Empire is. Public Domain

The British Empire, more or less, came to an end at the end of the 60s. About five years after that, in the mid-70s, Margaret Thatcher signed on for the beginnings of the European Union. My point here is that the U.K. never had a time period during which it was just a very small island with no power of its own. When it signed up for the European trade…