the empire: nothing to larf or ha ha about ,

Laughing about, larfing away, or just dismissing - with a 'satirical' ha ha - the brutal extent of ( in this case, the British Empire)  is  an easy way to attempt a 'white'wash of the ways of  Empires . Ways that are now the current American highway leading to world encircling Military bases (euphemistically called 'lily pads')  that the new, carefully continued Empire, inflicts on the world. 

Military might is just the tip of the Empire's raw reality. It's Macdonalds soft power - backed by McDonnell bombers, Godlike Reaper Drones, Hellfire missiles and CIA backed Diplomacy- probably leaves no corner of the earth beyond reach,  and uncolonised.  

The other countries must feel so left out. New research shows that practically everyone has been invaded by British troops at one point or another. A "staggering 90% of the world's nations" have been overrun by the turbulent Brits – Sweden, Mongolia and the Vatican City are among the 22 to have been tragically overlooked.

If you think this is a facetious tone to adopt, it is nothing compared with the knockabout, what-a-larf tone of some of the coverage that has been lavished on this new book. In a way, this is what the book set out to accomplish. As its author says, it is lighthearted fun, and it claims not to take a moral stance on Britain's empire.

National pedagogy always proceeds along two temporal axes. On the one hand, the nation is always coming into being but not yet fully itself, hence the need for it to be educated about itself. On the other, it has always already existed, is eternal, and its people are linked with one another in a linear fashion through history, hence the need for the nation's past to be vindicated.

For that reason, the invariant tone of the national revival and the empire peddling that came with it, was "yes, there is much to regret, but overall we should be proud of Britain's past and awed by its imperial accomplishments". This is unsurprisingly the underlying thrust of the coverage yielded by this book, and the tone of its publicity.

Even so, the research certainly has some pedagogical value. For one thing, it shows the scope of empire's activities to extend well beyond the formal boundaries of the colonial sphere. It takes into account the activities of pirates and privateers acting on behalf of the crown just as much as invading armies. This does not just disclose the sheer scale of the enterprise of empire, shocking as it may be. It indicates that there may be much more to empires than the establishment of formal colonies, and that the time of empire may sprawl well beyond its previously delimited boundaries. Indeed, as the historian Julian Go has shown, there are far greater similarities between the modalities of British imperial control and governance and those of the US than have previously been recognised.

Just as importantly, while the study of invasions gives us an insight into a cross-section of empire's scope, it is in one respect quite narrow and misleading. Invasions are an important punctuation in the development of an imperialist strategy, an initial means by which political or economic control is asserted, but they are not the point of the exercise. It is difficult, simply by looking at invasions, to understand how they are related in a wider ensemble of practices of imperialist power.

But a story of that kind is not conducive to the easy conviviality of imperialist revival. It is less a story of adventure and intrigue, such as this latest book promises to be, than one of the banality of evil. It is routinised, institutional cruelty. And that just isn't a good larf.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/nov/06/british-invaded-90-per-cent-world