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Jan Morris: Heaven’s Command - An Imperial Progress (abridged)

Read by Roy McMillan

Jan Morris: Heaven’s Command - An Imperial Progress (abridged)

Jan Morris: Heaven’s Command - An Imperial Progress (abridged)

Read by Roy McMillan

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About

The Pax Britannica trilogy is Jan Morris’s masterly telling of the British Empire from the accession of Queen Victoria to the death of Winston Churchill. It is a towering achievement: informative, accessible, entertaining and written with all her usual bravura. Heaven’s Command, the first volume, takes us from the crowning of Queen Victoria in 1837 to the Diamond Jubilee in 1897, moving effortlessly across the Empire, from the shores of England to Fiji, Zululand, the Canadian prairies and beyond. Truly gripping history.

Contents and tracklist

Jan Morris: Heaven's Command - An Imperial Progress (Abridged)
Work length7:29:36
  • Recording Venue: Motivation Sound Studios, London
Introduction by Jan Morris
Track length3:34
Part 1 The Sentiment of Empire 1837–1850
Track length7:00
Far away Lord Auckland laboured…
Track length5:44
Though slavery had been so old an imperial practice…
Track length5:25
At first the Royal Navy tried to end the traffic…
Track length4:54
So the first monuments of Queen Victoria's empire…
Track length6:05
The Boers of the Great Trek – The Voortrekkers…
Track length6:01
Retief was courteously received.
Track length7:48
They built the church they had vowed…
Track length3:34
On the dirt road west of Mirzapur on the Ganges…
Track length6:01
By western criminal standards these were motiveless crimes.
Track length6:13
The first big Victorian war was precipitated…
Track length7:18
The story of the war against the Afghans is full of omens…
Track length4:54
At this climactic moment there arrived upon the scene…
Track length4:18
Even now the Afghans expected reprisals…
Track length4:33
By the end of the fifth day the last of the sepoys were dead…
Track length4:34
On the other side of the world, on a summer day…
Track length6:41
By the 1840s, nevertheless, there was pressure…
Track length6:42
Some of the white settlers were already quite urbane.
Track length4:48
A very different kind of society was established…
Track length5:29
Such were two of the Empire's white settlement colonies.
Track length4:02
In the county of Cork in south-west Ireland…
Track length7:07
In the early 1840s, before the Famine…
Track length7:21
In the middle of it all O'Connell, aged and demoralized, died…
Track length4:13
Never again would the British shirk their imperial duties…
Track length6:33
Next the British power, with some false starts…
Track length6:04
All this in his thirties, at a time when the British services…
Track length6:34
Part 2 The Growing Conviction 1850–1870
Track length2:45
The Crystal Palace was made entirely of glass and iron…
Track length5:42
Many of the Empire's grandest monuments were railway works.
Track length5:33
Here is another memorable product of the imperial technology.
Track length4:58
High above the Jumna River at Delhi…
Track length6:21
But it was not a national revolution at all…
Track length6:11
It was Sunday next day, May 10, 1857…
Track length5:56
This pathetic action was to enter the mythology of the Empire.
Track length6:34
The other sacramental episode of the Indian Mutiny…
Track length6:57
At the end of October word filtered in…
Track length5:13
In 1861, work began on the construction of a new headquarters…
Track length7:26
All over the Empire this trend towards the aloof…
Track length5:08
On September 16, 1864, the spa of Bath in Somerset awoke…
Track length6:18
The compelling fascination of the Nile had exerted itself…
Track length5:01
But Speke went back with a very different companion…
Track length6:27
Livingstone, it seemed, did not in the least wish to be rescued.
Track length6:53
The conviction of Empire was increasingly reinforced…
Track length6:28
When the Anglican Bishop of Jamaica visited his flock…
Track length6:03
In Cape Town Bishop Robert Grey…
Track length5:21
These imperial disputes were comprehensible only to the elect…
Track length3:50
The British were now exporting to their dominions…
Track length6:26
The Metis were not forewarned of these developments.
Track length6:34
Trade was resumed.
Track length5:01
Wolseley was to talk about it for the rest of his life…
Track length5:50
Still the British as a nation were not conscious expansionists.
Track length5:06
Until recently the Fijians had been polygamous cannibals.
Track length4:10
Part 3 The Imperial Obsession 1870–1897
Track length5:13
Disraeli adopted the imperial cause deliberately.
Track length4:22
Disraeli did not of course invent imperialism…
Track length6:10
The profit motive, too, had subtly shifted its emphasis.
Track length3:37
In Africa stood Ashanti-land.
Track length6:34
It was only in the 1870s…
Track length5:30
In the end the Ashanti broke…
Track length4:54
Behind the Army stood the Royal Navy.
Track length6:00
Disraeli, who became Prime Minister for the second time…
Track length4:26
The South African scene had changed…
Track length7:16
The fascination of the Zulu War…
Track length5:47
Eleven heroes of Rorke's Drift were awarded the Victoria Cross…
Track length3:05
Except for the quiescent Orange Free State…
Track length7:37
Empire was race.
Track length6:15
Authority could not sanction the extermination of the natives…
Track length7:00
Through all these years Ireland festered.
Track length6:36
Nobody was more shut off from the life of the country…
Track length5:51
This led to the most spectacular of all Parnell's…
Track length5:12
But in the same month as the presentation…
Track length5:37
The British repeatedly claimed…
Track length6:03
On February 18, 1884, he reached Khartoum.
Track length5:21
'Who,' asked Ruskin once…
Track length4:48
In the last week of December 1895…
Track length6:15
Empires were fashionable everywhere now.
Track length5:21
Rhodes was an enigma…
Track length6:54
The failure of the Jameson Raid was an omen…
Track length6:10
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