In 1904, George Bernard Shaw wrote a play about Ireland. He called it John Bull’s Other Island. With a memorable title like that, Shaw – if he were alive today – could have got himself signed up for a whole BBC series. Even in 2016, John Bull still has plenty of other islands and enclaves scattered about the world. And, as a presenter, Shaw prancing about the world in his tweed plus-fours would leave even Dan Snow or Lucy Worsley standing.

The attacks in France show that its colonial past endures | Natalie Nougayrède Read more

These other islands and coastal enclaves rarely impinge on the collective consciousness. But when they do, they can pack a punch. Few British people knew or cared about the Falklands before the war of 1982. But they do now. To this day, Britain is still spending £20,000 per head on the defence of every Falklander every year.

In other cases, these distant possessions nag away like an untreated sore tooth. Britain’s exile of the Chagos islanders to enable the US air force to build its Diego Garcia base in the 1970s rumbles on unresolved on a series of Indian Ocean atolls claimed by Mauritius. The shambolic saga of the £285m St Helena airport in the south Atlantic – practically unusable because it is built in a place where strong winds make landing unsafe – is one of the most absurd UK government blunders of the modern era.

But it’s not just Britain that clings on – sometimes in rueful bemusement, but at other times defiantly – to a scattering of islands and other bits of territory it acquired long ago around the globe. Almost every global power of the recent past continues to have its own collection of wanted and unwanted outcrops, territories and coastal stations, the flotsam and jetsam of imperialism.

France is the most unabashed of these hoarders. It has Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean, Réunion in the Indian Ocean, and even St Pierre et Miquelon off Newfoundland, and a clutch of others in the Pacific. Some are even fully part of the European Union – their inclusion doggedly recorded at France’s insistence on every euro banknote – and they send deputies to sit in the national assembly in Paris.

Spain takes the same view of the Canaries, as well as of its north African possessions Ceuta and Melilla. The Netherlands clings on to Curaçao and Aruba off the coast of Venezuela.

This post-imperial untidiness is not of purely European origin. The US retains Guam, American Samoa and other islands in the western Pacific, along with Puerto Rico and the Virgin islands in the Caribbean – not forgetting its Guantánamo Bay base on Cuba. But the most assiduous hanger-on to its ill-gotten imperial gains remains Russia, with annexed possessions ranging from the Baltic Kaliningrad enclave on the Baltic in the west to the Kuril islands off the north of Japan.

Vladimir Putin is definitely not rueful or bemused about these possessions. For him, they are emblems of power and strength. A month ago, he announced that he was moving cruise missiles to Kaliningrad. Last week, Putin’s visit to Tokyo turned frosty after Japan failed to secure expected concessions from him over the southern Kurils, islands that are no more Russian than the Hebrides.

It’s easy to become beguiled by the quirky stories of these often disputed oddments of land. There are still hundreds of them in every corner of the globe. They may seem a bit like spots or scars on the human body, things we’ve all got and, unlike Putin, that we don’t think about much or often. Yet, just as spots and scratches can sometimes turn serious for the health, so the islands and enclaves can erupt in global politics, not least because a fair number of them are military and naval bases or offshore tax havens.

Uncovering the brutal truth about the British empire | Marc Parry Read more

A resonant new book by the Birkbeck historian Jan Rüger tells the story of one of the quirkiest and least known, certainly to the British, of these possessions. Unless you remember the shipping forecast sea area before they renamed it German Bight in the 1950s, or you’re a student of the less frequently performed music of Anton Bruckner, who wrote a choral work about it in 1893, you may not have heard of Heligoland.

Yet this cluster of rocky islands 50 miles off the German coast was a British possession for most of the 19th century. Seized from Denmark in 1807 to prevent Napoleon from capturing it, then ceded to Germany in 1890 in return for unchallenged access to Uganda and Zanzibar, Heligoland is an extreme example of the European possessions that the British tend to forget they once controlled. It’s a list that includes not just the well-known examples of Gibraltar, Cyprus and Malta, but also Corfu and Minorca, and even Calais.

As Rüger makes clear, Heligoland’s history is also a prism through which to view the entire span of Anglo-German rivalry, conflict and, eventually, reconciliation. It would be a warming and seasonal thought to suppose that the kind of reconciliation that Heligoland now embodies – “No more Heligolands,” as the heroine puts it in Shena Mackay’s 2003 novel named after the islands – could be generalised to help resolve all the other historical and political territorial anomalies that still dot the map of the world.

Sadly, with the United Nations so paralysed, it isn’t likely to happen. Yet why not try? Why doesn’t Britain launch such an initiative? We have an Antarctic treaty and an outer-space treaty. Why not an islands and enclaves treaty? Even Putin, facing sanctions over Crimea, has something to gain from a global grand bargain which, at least in the imagination, might see these imperial relics transformed into a network of internationally administered or joint sovereignty agreements forming part of a collective global assault on the super-rich’s hateful tax havens.