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In 2005, Stephen Jones, great-grandson of the founder, became BJU's president. Bob Jones III then took the title Chancellor. In 2008, the university declared itself "profoundly sorry" for having allowed "institutional policies to remain in place that were racially hurtful". That year, BJU enrolled students from fifty states and nearly fifty countries, representing diverse ethnicities and cultures, and the BJU administration declared itself "committed to maintaining on the campus the racial and cultural diversity and harmony characteristic of the true Church of Jesus Christ throughout the world". In his first meeting with the university cabinet in 2014, the fifth president Steve Pettit said it was appropriate for BJU to regain its tax-exempt status because BJU no longer held its earlier positions about race. "The Bible is clear," said Pettit, "We are made of one blood." By February 17, 2017, the IRS website had listed the university as a 501(c)(3) organization, and by May 2017, BJU had forged a working relationship with Greenville's Phillis Wheatley Center. In 2017, 9% of the student body was "from the American minority population".
Student life. Religious atmosphere. Religion is a major aspect of life and curriculum at BJU. The BJU Creed, written in 1927 by journalist and prohibitionist Sam Small, is recited by students and faculty four days a week at chapel services. The university also encourages church planting in areas of the United States "in great need of fundamental churches", and it has provided financial and logistical assistance to ministerial graduates in starting more than a hundred new churches. Bob Jones III has also encouraged non-ministerial students to put their career plans on hold for two or three years to provide lay leadership for small churches. Students of various majors participate in Missions Advance (formerly Mission Prayer Band), an organization that prays for missionaries and attempts to stimulate campus interest in world evangelism. During summers and Christmas breaks, about 150 students participate in teams that promote Christian missions around the world. Although a separate nonprofit corporation, Gospel Fellowship Association, an organization founded by Bob Jones Sr. and associated with BJU, is one of the largest fundamentalist mission boards in the country. Through its "Timothy Fund", the university also sponsors international students who are training for the ministry.
The university requires the use of the King James Version (KJV) of the Bible in its services and classrooms, but it does not hold that the KJV is the only acceptable English translation or that it has the same authority as the original Hebrew and Greek manuscripts. The university's position has been criticized by some other fundamentalists, including fellow conservative university Pensacola Christian College, which in 1998 produced a widely distributed videotape which argued that this "defiling leaven in fundamentalism" was passed from the 19th-century Princeton theologian Benjamin B. Warfield through Charles Brokenshire to current BJU faculty members and graduates. Rules of conduct. Strict rules govern student life at BJU. The 2015–16 Student Handbook states, "Students are to avoid any types of entertainment that could be considered immodest or that contain profanity, scatological realism, sexual perversion, erotic realism, lurid violence, occultism and false philosophical or religious assumptions." Grounds for immediate dismissal include stealing, immorality (including sex between unmarried students), possession of hard-core pornography, use of alcohol or drugs, and participating in a public demonstration for a cause the university opposes. Similar "moral failures" are grounds for terminating the employment of faculty and staff. In 1998, a homosexual alumnus was threatened with arrest if he visited the campus.
Men are allowed to wear polo shirts or dress shirts on weekdays until 17:00. Effective in 2018, women are no longer required to wear skirts or dresses and can now wear pants. They are also required to attend chapel three days a week, as well as at least two services per week at an approved "local fundamental church". Other rules are not based on a specific biblical passage. For instance, the Handbook notes that "there is no specific Bible command that says, 'Thou shalt not be late to class', but a student who wishes to display orderliness and concern for others will not come in late to the distraction of the teacher and other students." In 2008 a campus spokesperson said that one goal of the dress code was "to teach our young people to dress professionally" on campus while giving them "the ability to...choose within the biblically accepted options of dress" when they were off campus. Additional rules include requiring resident hall students to abide by a campus curfew of 11:00 pm on class days and 12:00 am on weekends. Students are requested to not go to movie theaters while in residence; however, they may watch movies rated G or PG while in the residence halls. Students are requested not to listen to popular contemporary music. Male students and graduate students may have facial hair that is neatly trimmed and well maintained at approximately ½ inch or less. Women are expected to dress modestly and wear business casual style clothing to class and religious services.
Extracurriculars. After BJU abandoned intercollegiate sports in 1933, its intramural sports program included competition in soccer, basketball, softball, volleyball, tennis, badminton, flag football, table tennis, racquetball, and water polo. The university also competed in intercollegiate debate within the National Educational Debate Association, in intercollegiate mock trial and computer science competitions, and participated at South Carolina Student Legislature. In 2012, BJU joined Division I of National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA) and in 2014 participated in intercollegiate soccer, basketball, cross-country, and golf. The teams are known as the Bruins. The university requires all unmarried incoming first-year students under 23 to join one of 45 "societies". Societies meet most Fridays for entertainment and fellowship and hold weekly prayer meetings. Societies compete with one another in intramural sports, debate, and Scholastic Bowl. The university also has a student-staffed newspaper ("The Collegian"), and yearbook ("Vintage").
Early in December, thousands of students, faculty, and visitors gather around the front campus fountain for an annual Christmas carol singing and lighting ceremony, illuminating tens of thousands of Christmas lights. On December 3, 2004, the ceremony broke the Guinness World Record for Christmas caroling with 7,514 carolers. Before 2015, the university required students and faculty to attend a six-day Bible Conference instead of a traditional Spring Break. However, the university announced that beginning in 2016, it would hold the Bible Conference in February and give students a week of Spring Break in March. The Conference typically attracts fundamentalist preachers and laypeople from around the country, and some BJU class reunions are held during the week. Athletics. The Bob Jones (BJU) athletic teams are called the Bruins. The university is a member of the National Christian College Athletic Association (NCCAA), primarily competing in the South Region of the Division II level. The Bruins previously competed as a member of the NCAA Division III ranks, primarily competing as an NCAA D-III Independent from 2020–21 to 2022–23.
BJU competes in 11 intercollegiate varsity sports. Men's sports include basketball, baseball, cross-country, golf, soccer, and track & field, while women's sports include basketball, cross-country, soccer, track & field, and volleyball. History. In 2012, the university inaugurated intercollegiate athletics with four teams: men's soccer, men's basketball, women's soccer, and women's basketball. The university added intercollegiate golf and cross-country teams during the 2013–2014 school year. Men's and women's shooting sports were added in 2016. Men's baseball began in the spring of 2021, and women's beach volleyball started in the spring of 2022. Director of athletics Neal Ring resigned in 2023; he had overseen Bruins Athletics since inception. Through its first 11 seasons, the athletic department amassed 22 NCCAA National Championships, nearly 100 All-Americans, and over 200 Scholar-Athletes. Bruins Athletics also received six straight Presidential Awards for Excellence, honoring the most successful NCCAA DII athletics program.
Move to NCAA Division III. In 2018, BJU explored National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) membership and applied for it in January 2020. The Bruins were accepted as Division III provisional members in June for three years, making it the only Division III school in the state. The school has been searching for a conference. Notable people. Alumni. A number of BJU graduates have become influential within evangelical Christianity, including Ken Hay (founder of "The Wilds" Christian camps) Ron "Patch" Hamilton (composer and president of Majesty Music) Billy Kim (former president of Baptist World Alliance), and Moisés Silva (president of the Evangelical Theological Society). BJU alumni also include the third pastor (1968–1976) of Riverside Church (Ernest T. Campbell), the former president of Northland Baptist Bible College (Les Ollila), late president of Baptist Bible College (Ernest Pickering), and the former president of Clearwater Christian College (Richard Stratton). BJU alumnus Asa Hutchinson served as the governor of Arkansas and also served in the U.S. Congress; his brother Tim Hutchinson served in the U.S. Senate. Others have served in state government: Michigan state senator Alan Cropsey, Pennsylvania state representative Gordon Denlinger, Pennsylvania state representative Mark M. Gillen, former Speaker Pro Tempore of the South Carolina House of Representatives Terry Haskins, member of the South Carolina House of Representatives Wendy Nanney, Pennsylvania state representative Sam Rohrer, member of the Missouri House of Representatives Ryan Silvey, Maryland state senator Bryan Simonaire and his daughter, state delegate Meagan Simonaire, and South Carolina state senator Danny Verdin.
British Empire The British Empire comprised the dominions, colonies, protectorates, mandates, and other territories ruled or administered by the United Kingdom and its predecessor states. It began with the overseas possessions and trading posts established by England in the late 16th and early 17th centuries, and colonisation attempts by Scotland during the 17th century. At its height in the 19th and early 20th centuries, it became the largest empire in history and, for a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913, the British Empire held sway over 412 million people, of the world population at the time, and by 1920, it covered , of the Earth's total land area. As a result, its constitutional, legal, linguistic, and cultural legacy is widespread. At the peak of its power, it was described as "the empire on which the sun never sets", as the sun was always shining on at least one of its territories. During the Age of Discovery in the 15th and 16th centuries, Portugal and Spain pioneered European exploration of the globe, and in the process established large overseas empires. Envious of the great wealth these empires generated, England, France, and the Netherlands began to establish colonies and trade networks of their own in the Americas and Asia. A series of wars in the 17th and 18th centuries with the Netherlands and France left Britain the dominant colonial power in North America. Britain became a major power in the Indian subcontinent after the East India Company's conquest of Mughal Bengal at the Battle of Plassey in 1757.
The American War of Independence resulted in Britain losing some of its oldest and most populous colonies in North America by 1783. While retaining control of British North America (now Canada) and territories in and near the Caribbean in the British West Indies, British colonial expansion turned towards Asia, Africa, and the Pacific. After the defeat of France in the Napoleonic Wars (1803–1815), Britain emerged as the principal naval and imperial power of the 19th century and expanded its imperial holdings. It pursued trade concessions in China and Japan, and territory in Southeast Asia. The Great Game and Scramble for Africa also ensued. The period of relative peace (1815–1914) during which the British Empire became the global hegemon was later described as (Latin for "British Peace"). Alongside the formal control that Britain exerted over its colonies, its dominance of much of world trade, and of its oceans, meant that it effectively controlled the economies of, and readily enforced its interests in, many regions, such as Asia and Latin America. It also came to dominate the Middle East. Increasing degrees of autonomy were granted to its white settler colonies, some of which were formally reclassified as Dominions by the 1920s. By the start of the 20th century, Germany and the United States had begun to challenge Britain's economic lead. Military, economic and colonial tensions between Britain and Germany were major causes of the First World War, during which Britain relied heavily on its empire. The conflict placed enormous strain on its military, financial, and manpower resources. Although the empire achieved its largest territorial extent immediately after the First World War, Britain was no longer the world's preeminent industrial or military power.
In the Second World War, Britain's colonies in East Asia and Southeast Asia were occupied by the Empire of Japan. Despite the final victory of Britain and its allies, the damage to British prestige and the British economy helped accelerate the decline of the empire. India, Britain's most valuable and populous possession, achieved independence in 1947 as part of a larger decolonisation movement, in which Britain granted independence to most territories of the empire. The Suez Crisis of 1956 confirmed Britain's decline as a global power, and the handover of Hong Kong to China on 1 July 1997 symbolised for many the end of the British Empire, though fourteen overseas territories that are remnants of the empire remain under British sovereignty. After independence, many former British colonies, along with most of the dominions, joined the Commonwealth of Nations, a free association of independent states. Fifteen of these, including the United Kingdom, retain the same person as monarch, currently King Charles III. Origins (1497–1583).
The foundations of the British Empire were laid when England and Scotland were separate kingdoms. In 1496, King Henry VII of England, following the successes of Spain and Portugal in overseas exploration, commissioned John Cabot to lead an expedition to discover a northwest passage to Asia via the North Atlantic. Cabot sailed in 1497, five years after the first voyage of Christopher Columbus, and made landfall on the coast of Newfoundland. He believed he had reached Asia, and there was no attempt to found a colony. Cabot led another voyage to the Americas the following year but did not return; it is unknown what happened to his ships. No further attempts to establish English colonies in the Americas were made until well into the reign of Queen Elizabeth I, during the last decades of the 16th century. In the meantime, Henry VIII's 1533 Statute in Restraint of Appeals had declared "that this realm of England is an Empire". The Protestant Reformation turned England and Catholic Spain into implacable enemies. In 1562, Elizabeth I encouraged the privateers John Hawkins and Francis Drake to engage in slave-raiding attacks against Spanish and Portuguese ships off the coast of West Africa with the aim of establishing an Atlantic slave trade. This effort was rebuffed and later, as the Anglo-Spanish Wars intensified, Elizabeth I gave her blessing to further privateering raids against Spanish ports in the Americas and shipping that was returning across the Atlantic, laden with treasure from the New World. At the same time, influential writers such as Richard Hakluyt and John Dee (who was the first to use the term "British Empire") were beginning to press for the establishment of England's own empire. By this time, Spain had become the dominant power in the Americas and was exploring the Pacific Ocean, Portugal had established trading posts and forts from the coasts of Africa and Brazil to China, and France had begun to settle the Saint Lawrence River area, later to become New France.
Although England tended to trail behind Portugal, Spain, and France in establishing overseas colonies, it carried out its first modern colonisation, referred to as the Munster Plantations, in 16th century Ireland by settling it with English and Welsh Protestant settlers. England had already colonised part of the country following the Norman invasion of Ireland in 1169. Several people who helped establish the Munster plantations later played a part in the early colonisation of North America, particularly a group known as the West Country Men. English overseas possessions (1583–1707). In 1578, Elizabeth I granted a patent to Humphrey Gilbert for discovery and overseas exploration. That year, Gilbert sailed for the Caribbean with the intention of engaging in piracy and establishing a colony in North America, but the expedition was aborted before it had crossed the Atlantic. In 1583, he embarked on a second attempt. On this occasion, he formally claimed the harbour of the island of Newfoundland, although no settlers were left behind. Gilbert did not survive the return journey to England and was succeeded by his half-brother, Walter Raleigh, who was granted his own patent by Elizabeth in 1584. Later that year, Raleigh founded the Roanoke Colony on the coast of present-day North Carolina, but lack of supplies caused the colony to fail.
In 1603, James VI of Scotland ascended (as James I) to the English throne and in 1604 negotiated the Treaty of London, ending hostilities with Spain. Now at peace with its main rival, English attention shifted from preying on other nations' colonial infrastructures to the business of establishing its own overseas colonies. The British Empire began to take shape during the early 17th century, with the English settlement of North America and the smaller islands of the Caribbean, and the establishment of joint-stock companies, most notably the East India Company, to administer colonies and overseas trade. This period, until the loss of the Thirteen Colonies after the American War of Independence towards the end of the 18th century, has been referred to by some historians as the "First British Empire". Americas, Africa and the slave trade.
The British West Indies initially provided England's most important and lucrative colonies. Settlements were successfully established in St. Kitts (1624), Barbados (1627) and Nevis (1628), but struggled until the "Sugar Revolution" transformed the Caribbean economy in the mid-17th century. Large sugarcane plantations were first established in the 1640s on Barbados, with assistance from Dutch merchants and Sephardic Jews fleeing Portuguese Brazil. At first, sugar was grown primarily using white indentured labour, but rising costs soon led English traders to embrace the use of imported African slaves. The enormous wealth generated by slave-produced sugar made Barbados the most successful colony in the Americas, and one of the most densely populated places in the world. This boom led to the spread of sugar cultivation across the Caribbean, financed the development of non-plantation colonies in North America, and accelerated the growth of the Atlantic slave trade, particularly the triangular trade of slaves, sugar and provisions between Africa, the West Indies and Europe.
To ensure that the increasingly healthy profits of colonial trade remained in English hands, Parliament decreed in 1651 that only English ships would be able to ply their trade in English colonies. This led to hostilities with the United Dutch Provinces—a series of Anglo-Dutch Wars—which would eventually strengthen England's position in the Americas at the expense of the Dutch. In 1655, England annexed the island of Jamaica from the Spanish, and in 1666 succeeded in colonising the Bahamas. In 1670, Charles II incorporated by royal charter the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC), granting it a monopoly on the fur trade in the area known as Rupert's Land, which would later form a large proportion of the Dominion of Canada. Forts and trading posts established by the HBC were frequently the subject of attacks by the French, who had established their own fur trading colony in adjacent New France.
Rivalry with other European empires. At the end of the 16th century, England and the Dutch Empire began to challenge the Portuguese Empire's monopoly of trade with Asia, forming private joint-stock companies to finance the voyages—the English, later British, East India Company and the Dutch East India Company, chartered in 1600 and 1602 respectively. The primary aim of these companies was to tap into the lucrative spice trade, an effort focused mainly on two regions: the East Indies archipelago, and an important hub in the trade network, India. There, they competed for trade supremacy with Portugal and with each other. Although England eclipsed the Netherlands as a colonial power, in the short term the Netherlands' more advanced financial system and the three Anglo-Dutch Wars of the 17th century left it with a stronger position in Asia. Hostilities ceased after the Glorious Revolution of 1688 when the Dutch William of Orange ascended the English throne, bringing peace between the Dutch Republic and England. A deal between the two nations left the spice trade of the East Indies archipelago to the Netherlands and the textiles industry of India to England, but textiles soon overtook spices in terms of profitability.
Peace between England and the Netherlands in 1688 meant the two countries entered the Nine Years' War as allies, but the conflict—waged in Europe and overseas between France, Spain and the Anglo-Dutch alliance—left the English a stronger colonial power than the Dutch, who were forced to devote a larger proportion of their military budget to the costly land war in Europe. The death of Charles II of Spain in 1700 and his bequeathal of Spain and its colonial empire to Philip V of Spain, a grandson of the King of France, raised the prospect of the unification of France, Spain and their respective colonies, an unacceptable state of affairs for England and the other powers of Europe. In 1701, England, Portugal and the Netherlands sided with the Holy Roman Empire against Spain and France in the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted for thirteen years. Colonies and territories of Scotland (1629–1707). Colonisation attempts by the Kingdom of Scotland predates the establishment of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and the British Empire. During the 17th century, the Kingdom of Scotland made attempts to establish trading schemes in Ireland and Canada. Nova Scotia, today a province of Canada, was a short lived scheme in the Mi'kmaq people territory. Additionally, there was a high number of Scots in Ireland, particularly in the region of Ulster, who settled there as planters.
North America. The first documented Scottish settlement in the Americas was of Nova Scotia in 1629. On 29 September 1621, the charter for the foundation of a colony was granted by James VI of Scotland to Sir William Alexander. Between 1622 and 1628, Sir William launched four attempts to send colonists to Nova Scotia; all failed for various reasons. A successful settlement of Nova Scotia was finally achieved in 1629. The colony's charter, in law, made Nova Scotia (defined as all land between Newfoundland and New England; i.e., The Maritimes) a part of mainland Scotland; this was later used to get around the English navigation acts. As a country, Scotland engaged in two ventures in an attempt to establish colonies within English colonies during the 1680s in Carolina and East New Jersey. The attempt to establish themselves in Carolina was largely in part due to Scottish Presbyterians fleeing from the threat of religious persecution in Scotland, and were assisted in their efforts by Scottish merchants who were aiming to develop transatlantic trade which was not subjected to the English Navigation Acts. The Act restricted Scottish trade with English colonies. Scottish settlement attempts in Carolina began in 1682, and was eventually defeated by the dissolution of the Scottish settlement of Stewartstoun, which was established in 1684, by the Spanish in 1686.
South America. In 1695, the Parliament of Scotland granted a charter to the Company of Scotland, which established a settlement in 1698 on the Isthmus of Panama. Besieged by neighbouring Spanish colonists of New Granada, and affected by malaria, the colony was abandoned two years later. The Darien scheme was a financial disaster for Scotland: a quarter of Scottish capital was lost in the enterprise. The episode had major political consequences, helping to persuade the government of the Kingdom of Scotland of the merits of turning the personal union with England into a political and economic one under the Kingdom of Great Britain established by the Acts of Union 1707. British Empire (1707–1783). The 18th century saw the newly united Great Britain rise to be the world's dominant colonial power, with France becoming its main rival on the imperial stage. Great Britain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and the Holy Roman Empire continued the War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted until 1714 and was concluded by the Treaty of Utrecht. Philip V of Spain renounced his and his descendants' claim to the French throne, and Spain lost its empire in Europe. The British Empire was territorially enlarged: from France, Britain gained Newfoundland and Acadia, and from Spain, Gibraltar and Menorca. Gibraltar became a critical naval base and allowed Britain to control the Atlantic entry and exit point to the Mediterranean. Spain ceded the rights to the lucrative "asiento" (permission to sell African slaves in Spanish America) to Britain. With the outbreak of the Anglo-Spanish War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739, Spanish privateers attacked British merchant shipping along the Triangle Trade routes. In 1746, the Spanish and British began peace talks, with the King of Spain agreeing to stop all attacks on British shipping; however, in the 1750 Treaty of Madrid Britain lost its slave-trading rights in Latin America.
In the East Indies, British and Dutch merchants continued to compete in spices and textiles. With textiles becoming the larger trade, by 1720, in terms of sales, the British company had overtaken the Dutch. During the middle decades of the 18th century, there were several outbreaks of military conflict on the Indian subcontinent, as the English East India Company and its French counterpart, struggled alongside local rulers to fill the vacuum that had been left by the decline of the Mughal Empire. The Battle of Plassey in 1757, in which the British defeated the Nawab of Bengal and his French allies, left the British East India Company in control of Bengal and as a major military and political power in India. France was left control of its enclaves but with military restrictions and an obligation to support British client states, ending French hopes of controlling India. In the following decades the British East India Company gradually increased the size of the territories under its control, either ruling directly or via local rulers under the threat of force from the Presidency Armies, the vast majority of which was composed of Indian sepoys, led by British officers. The British and French struggles in India became but one theatre of the global Seven Years' War (1756–1763) involving France, Britain, and the other major European powers.
The signing of the Treaty of Paris of 1763 had important consequences for the future of the British Empire. In North America, France's future as a colonial power effectively ended with the recognition of British claims to Rupert's Land, and the ceding of New France to Britain (leaving a sizeable French-speaking population under British control) and Louisiana to Spain. Spain ceded Florida to Britain. Along with its victory over France in India, the Seven Years' War therefore left Britain as the world's most powerful maritime power. Loss of the Thirteen American Colonies. During the 1760s and early 1770s, relations between the Thirteen Colonies and Britain became increasingly strained, primarily because of resentment of the British Parliament's attempts to govern and tax American colonists without their consent. This was summarised at the time by the colonists' slogan "No taxation without representation", a perceived violation of the guaranteed Rights of Englishmen. The American Revolution began with a rejection of Parliamentary authority and moves towards self-government. In response, Britain sent troops to reimpose direct rule, leading to the outbreak of war in 1775. The following year, in 1776, the Second Continental Congress issued the Declaration of Independence proclaiming the colonies' sovereignty from the British Empire as the new United States of America. The entry of French and Spanish forces into the war tipped the military balance in the Americans' favour and after a decisive defeat at Yorktown in 1781, Britain began negotiating peace terms. American independence was acknowledged at the Peace of Paris in 1783.
The loss of such a large portion of British America, at the time Britain's most populous overseas possession, is seen by some historians as the event defining the transition between the first and second empires, in which Britain shifted its attention away from the Americas to Asia, the Pacific and later Africa. Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations", published in 1776, had argued that colonies were redundant, and that free trade should replace the old mercantilist policies that had characterised the first period of colonial expansion, dating back to the protectionism of Spain and Portugal. The growth of trade between the newly independent United States and Britain after 1783 seemed to confirm Smith's view that political control was not necessary for economic success. The war to the south influenced British policy in Canada, where between 40,000 and 100,000 defeated Loyalists had migrated from the new United States following independence. The 14,000 Loyalists who went to the Saint John and Saint Croix river valleys, then part of Nova Scotia, felt too far removed from the provincial government in Halifax, so London split off New Brunswick as a separate colony in 1784. The Constitutional Act 1791 created the provinces of Upper Canada (mainly English speaking) and Lower Canada (mainly French-speaking) to defuse tensions between the French and British communities, and implemented governmental systems similar to those employed in Britain, with the intention of asserting imperial authority and not allowing the sort of popular control of government that was perceived to have led to the American Revolution.
Tensions between Britain and the United States escalated again during the Napoleonic Wars, as Britain tried to cut off American trade with France and boarded American ships to impress men into the Royal Navy. The United States Congress declared war, the War of 1812, and invaded Canadian territory. In response, Britain invaded the US, but the pre-war boundaries were reaffirmed by the 1814 Treaty of Ghent, ensuring Canada's future would be separate from that of the United States. British Empire (1783–1815). Exploration of the Pacific. Since 1718, transportation to the American colonies had been a penalty for various offences in Britain, with approximately one thousand convicts transported per year. Forced to find an alternative location after the loss of the Thirteen Colonies in 1783, the British government looked for an alternative, eventually turning to Australia. On his first of three voyages commissioned by the government, James Cook reached New Zealand in October 1769. He was the first European to circumnavigate and map the country.
On his first of three voyages commissioned by the government, James Cook reached New Zealand in October 1769. He was the first European to circumnavigate and map the country. From the late 18th century, the country was regularly visited by explorers and other sailors, missionaries, traders and adventurers but no attempt was made to settle the country or establish possession. The coast of Australia had been discovered for Europeans by the Dutch in 1606, but there was no attempt to colonise it. In 1770, after leaving New Zealand, James Cook charted the eastern coast, claimed the continent for Britain, and named it New South Wales. In 1778, Joseph Banks, Cook's botanist on the voyage, presented evidence to the government on the suitability of Botany Bay for the establishment of a penal settlement, and in 1787 the first shipment of convicts set sail, arriving in 1788. Unusually, Australia was claimed through proclamation. Indigenous Australians were considered too uncivilised to require treaties, and colonisation brought disease and violence that together with the deliberate dispossession of land and culture were devastating to these peoples.
Indigenous Australians were considered too uncivilised to require treaties, and colonisation brought disease and violence that together with the deliberate dispossession of land and culture were devastating to these peoples. Britain continued to transport convicts to New South Wales until 1840, to Tasmania until 1853 and to Western Australia until 1868. The Australian colonies became profitable exporters of wool and gold, mainly because of the Victorian gold rush, making its capital Melbourne for a time the richest city in the world. The British also expanded their mercantile interests in the North Pacific. Spain and Britain had become rivals in the area, culminating in the Nootka Crisis in 1789. Both sides mobilised for war, but when France refused to support Spain it was forced to back down, leading to the Nootka Convention. The outcome was a humiliation for Spain, which practically renounced all sovereignty on the North Pacific coast. This opened the way to British expansion in the area, and a number of expeditions took place; firstly a naval expedition led by George Vancouver which explored the inlets around the Pacific North West, particularly around Vancouver Island.
This opened the way to British expansion in the area, and a number of expeditions took place; firstly a naval expedition led by George Vancouver which explored the inlets around the Pacific North West, particularly around Vancouver Island. On land, expeditions sought to discover a river route to the Pacific for the extension of the North American fur trade. Alexander Mackenzie of the North West Company led the first, starting out in 1792, and a year later he became the first European to reach the Pacific overland north of the Rio Grande, reaching the ocean near present-day Bella Coola. This preceded the Lewis and Clark Expedition by twelve years. Shortly thereafter, Mackenzie's companion, John Finlay, founded the first permanent European settlement in British Columbia, Fort St. John. The North West Company sought further exploration and backed expeditions by David Thompson, starting in 1797, and later by Simon Fraser. These pushed into the wilderness territories of the Rocky Mountains and Interior Plateau to the Strait of Georgia on the Pacific Coast, expanding British North America westward.
Continued conquest in India. The East India Company fought a series of Anglo-Mysore wars in Southern India with the Sultanate of Mysore under Hyder Ali and then Tipu Sultan. Defeats in the First Anglo-Mysore war and stalemate in the Second were followed by victories in the Third and the Fourth. Following Tipu Sultan's death in the fourth war in the Siege of Seringapatam (1799), the kingdom became a protectorate of the company. The East India Company fought three Anglo-Maratha Wars with the Maratha Confederacy. The First Anglo-Maratha War ended in 1782 with a restoration of the pre-war "status quo". The Second and Third Anglo-Maratha wars resulted in British victories. After the surrender of Peshwa Bajirao II on 1818, the East India Company acquired control of a large majority of the Indian subcontinent. Wars with France. Britain was challenged again by France under Napoleon, in a struggle that, unlike previous wars, represented a contest of ideologies between the two nations. It was not only Britain's position on the world stage that was at risk: Napoleon threatened to invade Britain itself, just as his armies had overrun many countries of continental Europe.
The Napoleonic Wars were therefore ones in which Britain invested large amounts of capital and resources to win. French ports were blockaded by the Royal Navy, which won a decisive victory over a French Imperial Navy-Spanish Navy fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar in 1805. Overseas colonies were attacked and occupied, including those of the Netherlands, which was annexed by Napoleon in 1810. France was finally defeated by a coalition of European armies in 1815. Britain was again the beneficiary of peace treaties: France ceded the Ionian Islands, Malta (which it had occupied in 1798), Mauritius, St Lucia, the Seychelles, and Tobago; Spain ceded Trinidad; the Netherlands ceded Guiana, Ceylon and the Cape Colony, while the Danish ceded Heligoland. Britain returned Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion to France; Menorca to Spain; Danish West Indies to Denmark and Java and Suriname to the Netherlands. Abolition of slavery. With the advent of the Industrial Revolution, goods produced by slavery became less important to the British economy. Added to this was the cost of suppressing regular slave rebellions. With support from the British abolitionist movement, Parliament enacted the Slave Trade Act in 1807, which abolished the slave trade in the empire. In 1808, Sierra Leone Colony was designated an official British colony for freed slaves. Parliamentary reform in 1832 saw the influence of the West India Committee decline. The Slavery Abolition Act, passed the following year, abolished slavery in the British Empire on 1 August 1834, finally bringing the empire into line with the law in the UK (with the exception of the territories administered by the East India Company and Ceylon, where slavery was ended in 1844). Under the Act, slaves were granted full emancipation after a period of four to six years of "apprenticeship". Facing further opposition from abolitionists, the apprenticeship system was abolished in 1838. The British government compensated slave-owners.
Britain's imperial century (1815–1914). Between 1815 and 1914, a period referred to as Britain's "imperial century" by some historians, around of territory and roughly 400 million people were added to the British Empire. Victory over Napoleon left Britain without any serious international rival, other than Russia in Central Asia. Unchallenged at sea, Britain adopted the role of global policeman, a state of affairs later known as the "Pax Britannica", and a foreign policy of "splendid isolation". Alongside the formal control it exerted over its own colonies, Britain's dominant position in world trade meant that it effectively controlled the economies of many countries, such as China, Argentina and Siam, which has been described by some historians as an "Informal Empire". British imperial strength was underpinned by the steamship and the telegraph, new technologies invented in the second half of the 19th century, allowing it to control and defend the empire. By 1902, the British Empire was linked together by a network of telegraph cables, called the All Red Line.
East India Company rule and the British Raj in India. The East India Company drove the expansion of the British Empire in Asia. The company's army had first joined forces with the Royal Navy during the Seven Years' War, and the two continued to co-operate in arenas outside India: the eviction of the French from Egypt (1799), the capture of Java from the Netherlands (1811), the acquisition of Penang Island (1786), Singapore (1819) and Malacca (1824), and the defeat of Burma (1826). From its base in India, the company had been engaged in an increasingly profitable opium export trade to Qing China since the 1730s. This trade, illegal since it was outlawed by China in 1729, helped reverse the trade imbalances resulting from the British imports of tea, which saw large outflows of silver from Britain to China. In 1839, the confiscation by the Chinese authorities at Canton of 20,000 chests of opium led Britain to attack China in the First Opium War, and resulted in the seizure by Britain of Hong Kong Island, at that time a minor settlement, and other treaty ports including Shanghai.
During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the British Crown began to assume an increasingly large role in the affairs of the company. A series of acts of Parliament were passed, including the Regulating Act 1773, East India Company Act 1784 and the Charter Act 1813 which regulated the company's affairs and established the sovereignty of the Crown over the territories that it had acquired. The company's eventual end was precipitated by the Indian Rebellion in 1857, a conflict that had begun with the mutiny of sepoys, Indian troops under British officers and discipline. The rebellion took six months to suppress, with heavy loss of life on both sides. The following year the British government dissolved the company and assumed direct control over India through the Government of India Act 1858, establishing the British Raj, where an appointed governor-general administered India and Queen Victoria was crowned the Empress of India. India became the empire's most valuable possession, "the Jewel in the Crown", and was the most important source of Britain's strength.
A series of serious crop failures in the late 19th century led to widespread famines on the subcontinent in which it is estimated that over 15 million people died. The East India Company had failed to implement any coordinated policy to deal with the famines during its period of rule. Later, under direct British rule, commissions were set up after each famine to investigate the causes and implement new policies, which took until the early 1900s to have an effect. New Zealand. On each of his three voyages to the Pacific between 1769 and 1777, James Cook visited New Zealand. He was followed by an assortment of Europeans and Americans which including whalers, sealers, escaped convicts from New South Wales, missionaries and adventurers. Initially, contact with the indigenous Māori people was limited to the trading of goods, although interaction increased during the early decades of the 19th century with many trading and missionary stations being set up, especially in the north. The first of several Church of England missionaries arrived in 1814 and as well as their missionary role, they soon become the only form of European authority in a land that was not subject to British jurisdiction: the closest authority being the New South Wales governor in Sydney. The sale of weapons to Māori resulted from 1818 on in the intertribal warfare of the Musket Wars, with devastating consequences for the Māori population.
The UK government finally decided to act, dispatching Captain William Hobson with instructions to take formal possession after obtaining native consent. There was no central Māori authority able to represent all New Zealand so, on 6 February 1840, Hobson and many Māori chiefs signed the Treaty of Waitangi in the Bay of Islands; most other chiefs signing in stages over the following months. William Hobson declared British sovereignty over all New Zealand on 21 May 1840, over the North Island by cession and over the South Island by discovery (the island was sparsely populated and deemed terra nullius). Hobson became Lieutenant-Governor, subject to Governor Sir George Gipps in Sydney, with British possession of New Zealand initially administered from Australia as a dependency of the New South Wales colony. From 16 June 1840 New South Wales laws applied in New Zealand. This transitional arrangement ended with the Charter for Erecting the Colony of New Zealand on 16 November 1840. The Charter stated that New Zealand would be established as a separate Crown colony on 3 May 1841 with Hobson as its governor.
Rivalry with Russia. During the 19th century, Britain and the Russian Empire vied to fill the power vacuums that had been left by the declining Ottoman Empire, Qajar dynasty and Qing dynasty. This rivalry in Central Asia came to be known as the "Great Game". As far as Britain was concerned, defeats inflicted by Russia on Persia and Turkey demonstrated its imperial ambitions and capabilities and stoked fears in Britain of an overland invasion of India. In 1839, Britain moved to pre-empt this by invading Afghanistan, but the First Anglo-Afghan War was a disaster for Britain. When Russia invaded the Ottoman Balkans in 1853, fears of Russian dominance in the Mediterranean and the Middle East led Britain and France to enter the war in support of the Ottoman Empire and invade the Crimean Peninsula to destroy Russian naval capabilities. The ensuing Crimean War (1854–1856), which involved new techniques of modern warfare, was the only global war fought between Britain and another imperial power during the "Pax Britannica" and was a resounding defeat for Russia. The situation remained unresolved in Central Asia for two more decades, with Britain annexing Baluchistan in 1876 and Russia annexing Kirghizia, Kazakhstan, and Turkmenistan. For a while, it appeared that another war would be inevitable, but the two countries reached an agreement on their respective spheres of influence in the region in 1878 and on all outstanding matters in 1907 with the signing of the Anglo-Russian Entente. The destruction of the Imperial Russian Navy by the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Tsushima during the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 limited its threat to the British.
Cape to Cairo. The Dutch East India Company had founded the Dutch Cape Colony on the southern tip of Africa in 1652 as a way station for its ships travelling to and from its colonies in the East Indies. Britain formally acquired the colony, and its large Afrikaner (or Boer) population in 1806, having occupied it in 1795 to prevent its falling into French hands during the Flanders Campaign. British immigration to the Cape Colony began to rise after 1820, and pushed thousands of Boers, resentful of British rule, northwards to found their own—mostly short-lived—independent republics, during the Great Trek of the late 1830s and early 1840s. In the process the Voortrekkers clashed repeatedly with the British, who had their own agenda with regard to colonial expansion in South Africa and to the various native African polities, including those of the Sotho people and the Zulu Kingdom. Eventually, the Boers established two republics that had a longer lifespan: the South African Republic or Transvaal Republic (1852–1877; 1881–1902) and the Orange Free State (1854–1902). In 1902 Britain occupied both republics, concluding a treaty with the two Boer Republics following the Second Boer War (1899–1902).
In 1869 the Suez Canal opened under Napoleon III, linking the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean. Initially the Canal was opposed by the British; but once opened, its strategic value was quickly recognised and became the "jugular vein of the Empire". In 1875, the Conservative government of Benjamin Disraeli bought the indebted Egyptian ruler Isma'il Pasha's 44 per cent shareholding in the Suez Canal for £4 million (equivalent to £ in ). Although this did not grant outright control of the strategic waterway, it did give Britain leverage. Joint Anglo-French financial control over Egypt ended in outright British occupation in 1882. Although Britain controlled the Khedivate of Egypt into the 20th century, it was officially a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire and not part of the British Empire. The French were still majority shareholders and attempted to weaken the British position, but a compromise was reached with the 1888 Convention of Constantinople, which made the Canal officially neutral territory. With competitive French, Belgian and Portuguese activity in the lower Congo River region undermining orderly colonisation of tropical Africa, the Berlin Conference of 1884–85 was held to regulate the competition between the European powers in what was called the "Scramble for Africa" by defining "effective occupation" as the criterion for international recognition of territorial claims. The scramble continued into the 1890s, and caused Britain to reconsider its decision in 1885 to withdraw from Sudan. A joint force of British and Egyptian troops defeated the Mahdist Army in 1896 and rebuffed an attempted French invasion at Fashoda in 1898. Sudan was nominally made an Anglo-Egyptian condominium, but a British colony in reality.
British gains in Southern and East Africa prompted Cecil Rhodes, pioneer of British expansion in Southern Africa, to urge a "Cape to Cairo" railway linking the strategically important Suez Canal to the mineral-rich south of the continent. During the 1880s and 1890s, Rhodes, with his privately owned British South Africa Company, occupied and annexed territories named after him, Rhodesia. Changing status of the white colonies. The path to independence for the white colonies of the British Empire began with the 1839 Durham Report, which proposed unification and self-government for Upper and Lower Canada, as a solution to political unrest which had erupted in armed rebellions in 1837. This began with the passing of the Act of Union in 1840, which created the Province of Canada. Responsible government was first granted to Nova Scotia in 1848, and was soon extended to the other British North American colonies. With the passage of the British North America Act, 1867 by the British Parliament, the Province of Canada, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia were formed into Canada, a confederation enjoying full self-government with the exception of international relations. Australia and New Zealand achieved similar levels of self-government after 1900, with the Australian colonies federating in 1901. The term "dominion status" was officially introduced at the 1907 Imperial Conference. As the dominions gained greater autonomy, they would come to be recognized as distinct realms of the empire with unique customs and symbols of their own. Imperial identity, through imagery such as patriotic artworks and banners, began developing into a form that attempted to be more inclusive by showcasing the empire as a family of newly birthed nations with common roots.
The last decades of the 19th century saw concerted political campaigns for Irish home rule. Ireland had been united with Britain into the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland with the Act of Union 1800 after the Irish Rebellion of 1798, and had suffered a severe famine between 1845 and 1852. Home rule was supported by the British prime minister, William Gladstone, who hoped that Ireland might follow in Canada's footsteps as a Dominion within the empire, but his 1886 Home Rule bill was defeated in Parliament. Although the bill, if passed, would have granted Ireland less autonomy within the UK than the Canadian provinces had within their own federation, many MPs feared that a partially independent Ireland might pose a security threat to Great Britain or mark the beginning of the break-up of the empire. A second Home Rule bill was defeated for similar reasons. A third bill was passed by Parliament in 1914, but not implemented because of the outbreak of the First World War leading to the 1916 Easter Rising.
World wars (1914–1945). By the turn of the 20th century, fears had begun to grow in Britain that it would no longer be able to defend the metropole and the entirety of the empire while at the same time maintaining the policy of "splendid isolation". Germany was rapidly rising as a military and industrial power and was now seen as the most likely opponent in any future war. Recognising that it was overstretched in the Pacific and threatened at home by the Imperial German Navy, Britain formed an alliance with Japan in 1902 and with its old enemies France and Russia in 1904 and 1907, respectively. First World War. Britain's fears of war with Germany were realised in 1914 with the outbreak of the First World War. Britain quickly invaded and occupied most of Germany's overseas colonies in Africa. In the Pacific, Australia and New Zealand occupied German New Guinea and German Samoa respectively. Plans for a post-war division of the Ottoman Empire, which had joined the war on Germany's side, were secretly drawn up by Britain and France under the 1916 Sykes–Picot Agreement. This agreement was not divulged to the Sharif of Mecca, who the British had been encouraging to launch an Arab revolt against their Ottoman rulers, giving the impression that Britain was supporting the creation of an independent Arab state.
The British declaration of war on Germany and its allies committed the colonies and Dominions, which provided invaluable military, financial and material support. Over 2.5 million men served in the armies of the Dominions, as well as many thousands of volunteers from the Crown colonies. The contributions of Australian and New Zealand troops during the 1915 Gallipoli Campaign against the Ottoman Empire had a great impact on the national consciousness at home and marked a watershed in the transition of Australia and New Zealand from colonies to nations in their own right. The countries continue to commemorate this occasion on Anzac Day. Canadians viewed the Battle of Vimy Ridge in a similar light. The important contribution of the Dominions to the war effort was recognised in 1917 by British prime minister David Lloyd George when he invited each of the Dominion prime ministers to join an Imperial War Cabinet to co-ordinate imperial policy. Under the terms of the concluding Treaty of Versailles signed in 1919, the empire reached its greatest extent with the addition of and 13 million new subjects. The colonies of Germany and the Ottoman Empire were distributed to the Allied powers as League of Nations mandates. Britain gained control of Palestine, Transjordan, Iraq, parts of Cameroon and Togoland, and Tanganyika. The Dominions themselves acquired mandates of their own: the Union of South Africa gained South West Africa (modern-day Namibia), Australia gained New Guinea, and New Zealand Western Samoa. Nauru was made a combined mandate of Britain and the two Pacific Dominions.
Inter-war period. The changing world order that the war had brought about, in particular the growth of the United States and Japan as naval powers, and the rise of independence movements in India and Ireland, caused a major reassessment of British imperial policy. Forced to choose between alignment with the United States or Japan, Britain opted not to renew its Anglo-Japanese Alliance and instead signed the 1922 Washington Naval Treaty, where Britain accepted naval parity with the United States. This decision was the source of much debate in Britain during the 1930s as militaristic governments took hold in Germany and Japan helped in part by the Great Depression, for it was feared that the empire could not survive a simultaneous attack by both nations. The issue of the empire's security was a serious concern in Britain, as it was vital to the British economy. In 1919, the frustrations caused by delays to Irish home rule led the MPs of Sinn Féin, a pro-independence party that had won a majority of the Irish seats in the 1918 British general election, to establish an independent parliament in Dublin, at which Irish independence was declared. The Irish Republican Army simultaneously began a guerrilla war against the British administration. The Irish War of Independence ended in 1921 with a stalemate and the signing of the Anglo-Irish Treaty, creating the Irish Free State, a Dominion within the British Empire, with effective internal independence but still constitutionally linked with the British Crown. Northern Ireland, consisting of six of the 32 Irish counties which had been established as a devolved region under the 1920 Government of Ireland Act, immediately exercised its option under the treaty to retain its existing status within the United Kingdom.
A similar struggle began in India when the Government of India Act 1919 failed to satisfy the demand for independence. Concerns over communist and foreign plots following the Ghadar conspiracy ensured that war-time strictures were renewed by the Rowlatt Acts. This led to tension, particularly in the Punjab region, where repressive measures culminated in the Amritsar Massacre. In Britain, public opinion was divided over the morality of the massacre, between those who saw it as having saved India from anarchy, and those who viewed it with revulsion. The non-cooperation movement was called off in March 1922 following the Chauri Chaura incident, and discontent continued to simmer for the next 25 years. In 1922, Egypt, which had been declared a British protectorate at the outbreak of the First World War, was granted formal independence, though it continued to be a British client state until 1954. British troops remained stationed in Egypt until the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936, under which it was agreed that the troops would withdraw but continue to occupy and defend the Suez Canal zone.
In 1922, Egypt, which had been declared a British protectorate at the outbreak of the First World War, was granted formal independence, though it continued to be a British client state until 1954. British troops remained stationed in Egypt until the signing of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty in 1936, under which it was agreed that the troops would withdraw but continue to occupy and defend the Suez Canal zone. In return, Egypt was assisted in joining the League of Nations. Iraq, a British mandate since 1920, gained membership of the League in its own right after achieving independence from Britain in 1932. In Palestine, Britain was presented with the problem of mediating between the Arabs and increasing numbers of Jews. The Balfour Declaration, which had been incorporated into the terms of the mandate, stated that a national home for the Jewish people would be established in Palestine, and Jewish immigration allowed up to a limit that would be determined by the mandatory power.
The right of the Dominions to set their own foreign policy, independent of Britain, was recognised at the 1923 Imperial Conference. Britain's request for military assistance from the Dominions at the outbreak of the Chanak Crisis the previous year had been turned down by Canada and South Africa, and Canada had refused to be bound by the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne. After pressure from the Irish Free State and South Africa, the 1926 Imperial Conference issued the Balfour Declaration of 1926, declaring Britain and the Dominions to be "autonomous Communities within the British Empire, equal in status, in no way subordinate one to another" within a "British Commonwealth of Nations". This declaration was given legal substance under the 1931 Statute of Westminster. The parliaments of Canada, Australia, New Zealand, the Union of South Africa, the Irish Free State and Newfoundland were now independent of British legislative control, they could nullify British laws and Britain could no longer pass laws for them without their consent. Newfoundland reverted to colonial status in 1933, suffering from financial difficulties during the Great Depression. In 1937 the Irish Free State introduced a republican constitution renaming itself "Ireland".
Second World War. Britain's declaration of war against Nazi Germany in September 1939 included the Crown colonies and India but did not automatically commit the Dominions of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa. All soon declared war on Germany. While Britain continued to regard Ireland as still within the British Commonwealth, Ireland chose to remain legally neutral throughout the war. After the Fall of France in June 1940, Britain and the empire stood alone against Germany, until the German invasion of Greece on 7 April 1941. British Prime Minister Winston Churchill successfully lobbied President Franklin D. Roosevelt for military aid from the United States, but Roosevelt was not yet ready to ask Congress to commit the country to war. In August 1941, Churchill and Roosevelt met and signed the Atlantic Charter, which included the statement that "the rights of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they live" should be respected. This wording was ambiguous as to whether it referred to European countries invaded by Germany and Italy, or the peoples colonised by European nations, and would later be interpreted differently by the British, Americans, and nationalist movements. Nevertheless, Churchill rejected its universal applicability when it came to the self-determination of subject nations including the British Indian Empire. Churchill further added that he did not become Prime Minister to oversee the liquidation of the empire.
For Churchill, the entry of the United States into the war was the "greatest joy". He felt that Britain was now assured of victory, but failed to recognise that the "many disasters, immeasurable costs and tribulations [which he knew] lay ahead" in December 1941 would have permanent consequences for the future of the empire. The manner in which British forces were rapidly defeated in the Far East irreversibly harmed Britain's standing and prestige as an imperial power, including, particularly, the Fall of Singapore, which had previously been hailed as an impregnable fortress and the eastern equivalent of Gibraltar. The realisation that Britain could not defend its entire empire pushed Australia and New Zealand, which now appeared threatened by Japanese forces, into closer ties with the United States and, ultimately, the 1951 ANZUS Pact. The war weakened the empire in other ways: undermining Britain's control of politics in India, inflicting long-term economic damage, and irrevocably changing geopolitics by pushing the Soviet Union and the United States to the centre of the global stage.
Decolonisation and decline (1945–1997). Though Britain and the empire emerged victorious from the Second World War, the effects of the conflict were profound, both at home and abroad. Much of Europe, a continent that had dominated the world for several centuries, was in ruins, and host to the armies of the United States and the Soviet Union, who now held the balance of global power. Britain was left essentially bankrupt, with insolvency only averted in 1946 after the negotiation of a US$3.75 billion loan from the United States, the last instalment of which was repaid in 2006. At the same time, anti-colonial movements were on the rise in the colonies of European nations. The situation was complicated further by the increasing Cold War rivalry of the United States and the Soviet Union. In principle, both nations were opposed to European colonialism. In practice, American anti-communism prevailed over anti-imperialism, and therefore the United States supported the continued existence of the British Empire to keep Communist expansion in check. At first, British politicians believed it would be possible to maintain Britain's role as a world power at the head of a re-imagined Commonwealth, but by 1960 they were forced to recognise that there was an irresistible "wind of change" blowing. Their priorities changed to maintaining an extensive zone of British influence and ensuring that stable, non-Communist governments were established in former colonies. In this context, while other European powers such as France and Portugal waged costly and unsuccessful wars to keep their empires intact, Britain generally adopted a policy of peaceful disengagement from its colonies, although violence occurred in Malaya, Kenya and Palestine. Between 1945 and 1965, the number of people under British rule outside the UK itself fell from 700 million to 5 million, 3 million of whom were in Hong Kong.
Initial disengagement. The pro-decolonisation Labour government, elected at the 1945 general election and led by Clement Attlee, moved quickly to tackle the most pressing issue facing the empire: Indian independence. India's major political party—the Indian National Congress (led by Mahatma Gandhi) — had been campaigning for independence for decades, but disagreed with Muslim League (led by Muhammad Ali Jinnah) as to how it should be implemented. Congress favoured a unified secular Indian state, whereas the League, fearing domination by the Hindu majority, desired a separate Islamic state for Muslim-majority regions. Increasing civil unrest led Attlee to promise independence no later than 30 June 1948. When the urgency of the situation and risk of civil war became apparent, the newly appointed (and last) Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, hastily brought forward the date to 15 August 1947. The borders drawn by the British to broadly partition India into Hindu and Muslim areas left tens of millions as minorities in the newly independent states of India and Pakistan. The princely states were provided with a choice to either remain independent or join India or Pakistan. Millions of Muslims crossed from India to Pakistan and Hindus vice versa, and violence between the two communities cost hundreds of thousands of lives. Burma, which had been administered as part of British India until 1937 gained independence the following year in 1948 along with Sri Lanka (formerly known as British Ceylon). India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka became members of the Commonwealth, while Burma chose not to join. That same year, the British Nationality Act was enacted, in hopes of strengthening and unifying the Commonwealth: it provided British citizenship and right of entry to all those living within its jurisdiction.
The British Mandate in Palestine, where an Arab majority lived alongside a Jewish minority, presented the British with a similar problem to that of India. The matter was complicated by large numbers of Jewish refugees seeking to be admitted to Palestine following the Holocaust, while Arabs were opposed to the creation of a Jewish state. Frustrated by the intractability of the problem, attacks by Jewish paramilitary organisations and the increasing cost of maintaining its military presence, Britain announced in 1947 that it would withdraw in 1948 and leave the matter to the United Nations to solve. The UN General Assembly subsequently voted for a plan to partition Palestine into a Jewish and an Arab state. It was immediately followed by the outbreak of a civil war between the Arabs and Jews of Palestine, and British forces withdrew amid the fighting. The British Mandate for Palestine officially terminated at midnight on 15 May 1948 as the State of Israel declared independence and the 1948 Arab-Israeli War broke out, during which the territory of the former Mandate was partitioned between Israel and the surrounding Arab states. Amid the fighting, British forces continued to withdraw from Israel, with the last British troops departing from Haifa on 30 June 1948.
Following the surrender of Japan in the Second World War, anti-Japanese resistance movements in Malaya turned their attention towards the British, who had moved to quickly retake control of the colony, valuing it as a source of rubber and tin. The fact that the guerrillas were primarily Malaysian Chinese Communists meant that the British attempt to quell the uprising was supported by the Muslim Malay majority, on the understanding that once the insurgency had been quelled, independence would be granted. The Malayan Emergency, as it was called, began in 1948 and lasted until 1960, but by 1957, Britain felt confident enough to grant independence to the Federation of Malaya within the Commonwealth. In 1963, the 11 states of the federation together with Singapore, Sarawak and North Borneo joined to form Malaysia, but in 1965 Chinese-majority Singapore was expelled from the union following tensions between the Malay and Chinese populations and became an independent city-state. Brunei, which had been a British protectorate since 1888, declined to join the union.
Suez and its aftermath. In the 1951 general election, the Conservative Party returned to power in Britain under the leadership of Winston Churchill. Churchill and the Conservatives believed that Britain's position as a world power relied on the continued existence of the empire, with the base at the Suez Canal allowing Britain to maintain its pre-eminent position in the Middle East in spite of the loss of India. Churchill could not ignore Gamal Abdul Nasser's new revolutionary government of Egypt that had taken power in 1952, and the following year it was agreed that British troops would withdraw from the Suez Canal zone and that Sudan would be granted self-determination by 1955, with independence to follow Sudan was granted independence on 1 January 1956. In July 1956, Nasser unilaterally nationalised the Suez Canal. The response of Anthony Eden, who had succeeded Churchill as Prime Minister, was to collude with France to engineer an Israeli attack on Egypt that would give Britain and France an excuse to intervene militarily and retake the canal. Eden infuriated US President Dwight D. Eisenhower by his lack of consultation, and Eisenhower refused to back the invasion. Another of Eisenhower's concerns was the possibility of a wider war with the Soviet Union after it threatened to intervene on the Egyptian side. Eisenhower applied financial leverage by threatening to sell US reserves of the British pound and thereby precipitate a collapse of the British currency. Though the invasion force was militarily successful in its objectives, UN intervention and US pressure forced Britain into a humiliating withdrawal of its forces, and Eden resigned.
The Suez Crisis very publicly exposed Britain's limitations to the world and confirmed Britain's decline on the world stage and its end as a first-rate power, demonstrating that henceforth it could no longer act without at least the acquiescence, if not the full support, of the United States. The events at Suez wounded British national pride, leading one Member of Parliament (MP) to describe it as "Britain's Waterloo" and another to suggest that the country had become an "American satellite". Margaret Thatcher later described the mindset she believed had befallen Britain's political leaders after Suez where they "went from believing that Britain could do anything to an almost neurotic belief that Britain could do nothing", from which Britain did not recover until the successful recapture of the Falkland Islands from Argentina in 1982.
Wind of change. Macmillan gave a speech in Cape Town, South Africa in February 1960 where he spoke of "the wind of change blowing through this continent". Macmillan wished to avoid the same kind of colonial war that France was fighting in Algeria, and under his premiership decolonisation proceeded rapidly. To the three colonies that had been granted independence in the 1950s—Sudan, the Gold Coast and Malaya—were added nearly ten times that number during the 1960s. Owing to the rapid pace of decolonisation during this period, the cabinet post of Secretary of State for the Colonies was abolished in 1966, along with the Colonial Office, which merged with the Commonwealth Relations Office to form the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (now the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office) in October 1968. Britain's remaining colonies in Africa, except for self-governing Southern Rhodesia, were all granted independence by 1968. British withdrawal from the southern and eastern parts of Africa was not a peaceful process. From 1952 the Kenya Colony saw the eight-year long Mau Mau rebellion, in which tens of thousands of suspected rebels were interned by the colonial government in detention camps to suppress the rebellion and over 1000 convicts executed, with records systematically destroyed. Throughout the 1960s, the British government took a "No independence until majority rule" policy towards decolonising the empire, leading the white minority government of Southern Rhodesia to enact the 1965 Unilateral Declaration of Independence from Britain, resulting in a civil war that lasted until the British-mediated Lancaster House Agreement of 1979. The agreement saw the British Empire temporarily re-establish the Colony of Southern Rhodesia from 1979 to 1980 as a transitionary government to a majority rule Republic of Zimbabwe. This was the last British possession in Africa.
In Cyprus, a guerrilla war waged by the Greek Cypriot organisation EOKA against British rule, was ended in 1959 by the London and Zürich Agreements, which resulted in Cyprus being granted independence in 1960. The UK retained the military bases of Akrotiri and Dhekelia as sovereign base areas. The Mediterranean colony of Malta was amicably granted independence from the UK in 1964 and became the country of Malta, though the idea had been raised in 1955 of integration with Britain. Most of the UK's Caribbean territories achieved independence after the departure in 1961 and 1962 of Jamaica and Trinidad from the West Indies Federation, established in 1958 in an attempt to unite the British Caribbean colonies under one government, but which collapsed following the loss of its two largest members. Jamaica attained independence in 1962, as did Trinidad and Tobago. Barbados achieved independence in 1966 and the remainder of the eastern Caribbean islands, including the Bahamas, in the 1970s and 1980s, but Anguilla and the Turks and Caicos Islands opted to revert to British rule after they had already started on the path to independence. The British Virgin Islands, The Cayman Islands and Montserrat opted to retain ties with Britain, while Guyana achieved independence in 1966. Britain's last colony on the American mainland, British Honduras, became a self-governing colony in 1964 and was renamed Belize in 1973, achieving full independence in 1981. A dispute with Guatemala over claims to Belize was left unresolved.
British Overseas Territories in the Pacific acquired independence in the 1970s beginning with Fiji in 1970 and ending with Vanuatu in 1980. Vanuatu's independence was delayed because of political conflict between English and French-speaking communities, as the islands had been jointly administered as a condominium with France. Fiji, Papua New Guinea, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu became Commonwealth realms. End of empire. By 1981, aside from a scattering of islands and outposts, the process of decolonisation that had begun after the Second World War was largely complete. In 1982, Britain's resolve in defending its remaining overseas territories was tested when Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands, acting on a long-standing claim that dated back to the Spanish Empire. Britain's successful military response to retake the Falkland Islands during the ensuing Falklands War contributed to reversing the downward trend in Britain's status as a world power.
On 1 January 1984, Brunei, Britain's last remaining Asian protectorate, was granted full independence. Independence had been delayed due to the opposition of the Sultan, who had preferred British protection. In September 1982 the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, travelled to Beijing to negotiate with the Chinese Communist government, on the future of Britain's last major and most populous overseas territory, Hong Kong. Under the terms of the 1842 Treaty of Nanking and 1860 Convention of Peking, Hong Kong Island and Kowloon Peninsula had been respectively ceded to Britain "in perpetuity", but the majority of the colony consisted of the New Territories, which had been acquired under a 99-year lease in 1898, due to expire in 1997. Thatcher, seeing parallels with the Falkland Islands, initially wished to hold Hong Kong and proposed British administration with Chinese sovereignty, though this was rejected by China. A deal was reached in 1984—under the terms of the Sino-British Joint Declaration, Hong Kong would become a special administrative region of the People's Republic of China. The handover ceremony in 1997 marked for many, including King Charles III, then Prince of Wales, who was in attendance, "the end of Empire", though many British territories that are remnants of the empire still remain.
Legacy. Britain retains sovereignty over 14 territories outside the British Isles. In 1983, the British Nationality Act 1981 renamed the existing Crown Colonies as "British Dependent Territories", and in 2002 they were renamed the British Overseas Territories. Most former British colonies and protectorates are members of the Commonwealth of Nations, a voluntary association of equal members, comprising a population of around 2.2 billion people. The United Kingdom and 14 other countries, all collectively known as the Commonwealth realms, voluntarily continue to share the same person— King Charles III—as their respective head of state. These 15 nations are distinct and equal legal entities: the United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand, Antigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Belize, Grenada, Jamaica, Papua New Guinea, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Solomon Islands and Tuvalu. During the colonial era, emphasis was given to study of the classical Greco-Roman heritage and their experience with empire, aiming to parse how that heritage could be applied to improve the future of the colonies. American hegemony, which throughout its early rise had challenged British claims of being the "New Rome", became the successor to British dominance in the mid-20th century; the two countries' historical ties and wartime collaboration supported a peaceful handoff of power after World War II. As for the United Kingdom itself, British views of the former Empire are more positive than is the case with other post-imperial nations; discourse around the former Empire has continued to impact the nation's present-day understanding of itself, as seen in the debate leading up to its decision to leave the European Union in 2016.
Decades, and in some cases centuries, of British rule and emigration have left their mark on the independent nations that rose from the British Empire. The empire established the use of the English language in regions around the world. Today it is the primary language of up to 460 million people and is spoken by about 1.5 billion as a first, second or foreign language. It has also significantly influenced other languages. Individual and team sports developed in Britain, particularly football, cricket, lawn tennis, and golf were exported. Some sports were also invented or standardised in the former colonies, such as badminton, polo, and snooker in India (see also: Sport in British India). British missionaries who travelled around the globe often in advance of soldiers and civil servants spread Protestantism (including Anglicanism) to all continents. The British Empire provided refuge for religiously persecuted continental Europeans for hundreds of years. British educational institutions also remain popular in the present day, in part due to the importance of the English language and similarity of British curriculums to those in the former colonies.
Political boundaries drawn by the British did not always reflect homogeneous ethnicities or religions, contributing to conflicts in formerly colonised areas. The British Empire was responsible for large migrations of peoples (see also: Commonwealth diaspora). Millions left the British Isles, with the founding settler colonist populations of the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand coming mainly from Britain and Ireland. Millions of people moved between British colonies, with large numbers of South Asian people emigrating to other parts of the empire, such as Malaysia and Fiji, and Overseas Chinese people to Malaysia, Singapore and the Caribbean; about half of all modern immigration to the Commonwealth nations continues to occur between them. The demographics of the United Kingdom changed after the Second World War owing to immigration to Britain from its former colonies. In the 19th century, innovation in Britain led to revolutionary changes in manufacturing, the development of factory systems, and the growth of transportation by railway and steamship. Debate has also occurred as to what extent the Industrial Revolution, originating from the United Kingdom, was facilitated by or dependent on imperialism. British colonial architecture, such as in churches, railway stations and government buildings, can be seen in many cities that were once part of the British Empire; Western technologies and architecture had been globalised in part due to the Empire's military and administrative requirements. Integration of former colonies into the global economy was also a major legacy. The British choice of system of measurement, the imperial system, continues to be used in some countries in various ways. The convention of driving on the left-hand side of the road has been retained in much of the former empire.
The Westminster system of parliamentary democracy has served as the template for the governments of many former colonies, and English common law for legal systems. It has been observed that almost every former colony that emerged as an independent democratic state is a former British colony, though this correlation greatly declines in strength after 30 years of an ex-colony's independence. International commercial contracts are often based on English common law. The British Judicial Committee of the Privy Council still serves as the highest court of appeal for twelve former colonies. Interpretations of Empire. Historians' approaches to understanding the British Empire are diverse and evolving. Two key sites of debate over recent decades have been the impact of post-colonial studies, which seek to critically re-evaluate the history of imperialism, and the continued relevance of historians Ronald Robinson and John Gallagher, whose work greatly influenced imperial historiography during the 1950s and 1960s. In addition, differing assessments of the empire's legacy remain relevant to debates over recent history and politics, such as the Anglo-American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as Britain's role and identity in the contemporary world.
Historians such as Caroline Elkins have argued against perceptions of the British Empire as a primarily liberalising and modernising enterprise, criticising its widespread use of violence and emergency laws to maintain power. Common criticisms of the empire include the use of detention camps in its colonies, massacres of indigenous peoples, and famine-response policies. Some scholars, including Amartya Sen, assert that British policies worsened the famines in India that killed millions during British rule. Conversely, historians such as Niall Ferguson say that the economic and institutional development the British Empire brought resulted in a net benefit to its colonies. Other historians treat its legacy as varied and ambiguous. Public attitudes towards the empire within 21st-century Britain have been broadly positive although sentiment towards the Commonwealth has been one of apathy and decline.
Batman (1989 film) Batman is a 1989 superhero film based on the DC Comics character of the same name, created by Bob Kane and Bill Finger. Directed by Tim Burton, it is the first installment of Warner Bros.' initial "Batman" film series. The film was produced by Jon Peters and Peter Guber and stars Jack Nicholson, Michael Keaton, Kim Basinger, Robert Wuhl, Pat Hingle, Billy Dee Williams, Michael Gough, and Jack Palance. The film takes place early in the war on crime of the title character (Keaton) and depicts his conflict with his archenemy the Joker (Nicholson). After Burton was hired as director in 1986, Steve Englehart and Julie Hickson wrote film treatments before Sam Hamm wrote the first screenplay. "Batman" was not greenlit until after the success of Burton's "Beetlejuice" (1988). The tone and themes of the film were partly influenced by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland's "" and Frank Miller's "The Dark Knight Returns". The film primarily adapts and then diverges from the "Red Hood" origin story for the Joker, having Batman inadvertently cause gangster Jack Napier to fall into Axis Chemical acid, triggering his transformation into the psychotic Joker. Additionally, Batman co-creator Bob Kane worked as a consultant for the film.
Numerous leading men were considered for the role of Batman before Keaton was cast. Keaton's casting was controversial since, by 1988, he had become typecast as a comedic actor and many observers doubted he could portray a serious role. Nicholson accepted the role of the Joker under strict conditions that dictated top billing, a portion of the film's earnings (including associated merchandise), and his own shooting schedule. Filming took place at Pinewood Studios from October 1988 to January 1989. The budget escalated from $30 million to $48 million, while the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike forced Hamm to drop out. Warren Skaaren did rewrites, with additional uncredited drafts done by Charles McKeown and Jonathan Gems. "Batman" was both critically and financially successful, earning over $400 million in box office totals. Critics and audiences particularly praised Nicholson and Keaton's performances, Burton's direction, the production design, and Elfman's score. It was the sixth-highest-grossing film in history at the time of its release. The film received several Saturn Award nominations and a Golden Globe nomination for Nicholson's performance, and won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction.
The film was followed by three sequels: "Batman Returns" (1992), with both Burton and Keaton returning; "Batman Forever" (1995), which featured Val Kilmer in the lead role; and "Batman & Robin" (1997), which featured George Clooney in the role. Keaton eventually reprised the role of Batman in the DC Extended Universe film "The Flash" (2023). The film also led to the development of "" (1992–1995), which in turn began the DC Animated Universe of spin-off media, and has influenced Hollywood's modern marketing and development techniques of the superhero film genre. Plot. Reporter Alexander Knox and photojournalist Vicki Vale investigate sightings of "Batman", a masked vigilante targeting Gotham City's criminals. Both attend a fundraiser hosted by billionaire Bruce Wayne, who is secretly Batman, having chosen this path after witnessing a mugger murder his parents when he was a child. During the event, Wayne becomes infatuated with Vale. Meanwhile, mob boss Carl Grissom sends his sociopathic second-in-command Jack Napier to raid Axis Chemicals and retrieve incriminating evidence. However, this is secretly a ploy to have Napier murdered for sleeping with Grissom's mistress Alicia Hunt. Corrupt lieutenant Max Eckhardt arranges the hit on Napier by conducting an unauthorized police operation. However, Commissioner James Gordon arrives, takes command, and orders the officers to capture Napier alive. Batman also appears, while Napier kills Eckhardt as revenge for the double-crossing. During a scuffle with Batman, Napier topples off a catwalk and falls into a vat of chemicals. Although presumed dead, Napier survives with various disfigurements including chalk white skin and emerald-green hair and nails. He undergoes surgery to repair the damage, but ends up with a rictus grin. Driven insane by his new appearance, Napier, now calling himself "the Joker", kills Grissom, massacres Grissom's associates, and takes over his operations.
He then starts terrorizing Gotham by lacing hygiene products with "Smylex" – a deadly chemical that causes victims to die laughing. Joker soon becomes obsessed with Vicki and lures her to the Flugelheim Museum, which his henchmen start vandalizing. Batman rescues Vicki, takes her to the Batcave, and provides her with all of his research on Smylex, which will allow Gotham's residents to escape the toxin. Conflicted with his love for her, Wayne visits her apartment intending to reveal his secret identity, only for the Joker to interrupt the meeting. Joker asks Wayne, "Have you ever danced with the devil in the pale moonlight?", which Wayne recognizes as the catchphrase used by the mugger who killed his parents, realizing the killer to have been Joker (as Napier) all along. He shoots Wayne, who survives thanks to a serving tray hidden underneath his shirt.
Sometime later, Gordon announces that the police have arrested all of Joker's men, effectively dismantled what remained of Carl Grissom's mafia organizations, and unveils the Bat-Signal. Batman leaves the police a note, promising to defend Gotham should crime strike again, and asking them to use the Bat-Signal to summon him in times of need. Alfred takes Vicki to Wayne Manor, explaining that Wayne will be a little late. She responds that she is not surprised, as Batman looks at the signal's projection from a rooftop, standing watch over the city. Production. Development. In the late 1970s, Batman's popularity was waning. CBS was interested in producing a "Batman in Outer Space" film. Producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan purchased the film rights of Batman from DC Comics on October 3, 1979. It was Uslan's wish "to make the definitive, dark, serious version of Batman, the way Bob Kane and Bill Finger had envisioned him in 1939. A creature of the night; stalking criminals in the shadows." Richard Maibaum was approached to write a script with Guy Hamilton to direct, but the two turned down the offer. Uslan was unsuccessful with pitching "Batman" to various movie studios because they wanted the film to be similar to the campy 1960s television series. Columbia Pictures and United Artists were among those to turn down the film.
A disappointed Uslan then wrote a script titled "Return of the Batman" to give the film industry a better idea of his vision for the film. Uslan later compared its dark tone to that of the successful four-part comic book "The Dark Knight Returns", which his script predated by six years. In November 1979, producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber joined the project. Melniker and Uslan became executive producers. The four felt it was best to pattern the film's development after that of "Superman" (1978). Uslan, Melniker and Guber pitched "Batman" to Universal Pictures, but the studio turned it down. Though no movie studios were yet involved, the project was publicly announced with a budget of $15 million in July 1980 at the Comic Art Convention in New York. Warner Bros., the studio behind the successful Superman film franchise, decided to also accept and produce "Batman".
After the financial success of "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" (1985), Warner Bros. hired Tim Burton to direct "Batman". Burton had then-girlfriend Julie Hickson write a new 30-page film treatment, feeling the previous script by Mankiewicz was campy. The success of "The Dark Knight Returns" and the graphic novel "" rekindled Warner Bros.' interest in a film adaptation. Burton was initially not a comic book fan, but he was impressed by the dark and serious tone found in both "The Dark Knight Returns" and "The Killing Joke". Warner Bros. enlisted the aid of Englehart to write a new treatment in March 1986. Like Mankiewicz's script, it was based on his own "Strange Apparitions" and included Silver St. Cloud, Dick Grayson, the Joker, and Rupert Thorne, as well as a cameo appearance by the Penguin. Warner Bros. was impressed, but Englehart felt there were too many characters. He removed the Penguin and Dick Grayson in his second treatment, finishing in May 1986. Burton approached Sam Hamm, a comic book fan, to write the screenplay. Hamm decided not to use an origin story, feeling that flashbacks would be more suitable and that "unlocking the mystery" would become part of the storyline. He reasoned, "You totally destroy your credibility if you show the literal process by which Bruce Wayne becomes Batman." Hamm replaced Silver St. Cloud with Vicki Vale and Rupert Thorne with his own creation, Carl Grissom. He completed his script in October 1986, which demoted Dick Grayson to a cameo rather than a supporting character. One scene in Hamm's script had a young James Gordon on duty the night of the murder of Bruce Wayne's parents. When Hamm's script was rewritten, the scene was deleted, reducing it to a photo in the "Gotham Globe" newspaper seen in the film.
Warner Bros. was less willing to move forward on development, despite their enthusiasm for Hamm's script, which Kane greeted with positive feedback. Hamm's script was then bootlegged at various comic book stores in the United States. "Batman" was finally given the greenlight to commence pre-production in April 1988, after the success of Burton's "Beetlejuice" the same year. When comic book fans found out about Burton directing the film with Michael Keaton starring in the lead role, controversy arose over the tone and direction "Batman" was going in. Hamm explained, "They hear Tim Burton's name and they think of "Pee-wee's Big Adventure". They hear Keaton's name, and they think of any number of Michael Keaton comedies. You think of the 1960s version of "Batman", and it was the complete opposite of our film. We tried to market it with a typical dark and serious tone, but the fans didn't believe us." To combat negative reports on the film's production, Kane was hired as creative consultant. Batman's co-creator, Bill Finger, was uncredited at the time of the film's release and his name was not added to any Batman-related media until 2016.
Casting. Parallel to the "Superman" casting, a variety of Hollywood A-listers were considered for the role of Batman, including Mel Gibson, Kevin Costner, Charlie Sheen, Tom Selleck, Bill Murray, Harrison Ford and Dennis Quaid. Burton was pressured by Warner Bros. to cast an obvious action movie star, and had approached Pierce Brosnan, but he had no interest in playing a comic book character. Burton was originally interested in casting an unknown actor, Willem Dafoe, who was falsely reported to be considered for the Joker but had actually been considered for Batman early in development. Producer Jon Peters suggested Michael Keaton, arguing he had the right "edgy, tormented quality" after having seen his dramatic performance in "Clean and Sober". Having directed Keaton in "Beetlejuice", Burton agreed. The casting of Keaton caused a furor among comic book fans, with 50,000 protest letters sent to Warner Bros. offices. Kane, Hamm, and Uslan also heavily questioned the casting. "Obviously there was a negative response from the comic book people. I think they thought we were going to make it like the 1960s TV series, and make it campy, because they thought of Michael Keaton from "Mr. Mom" and "Night Shift" and stuff like that." Keaton studied "The Dark Knight Returns" for inspiration.
Tim Curry, David Bowie, John Lithgow, Brad Dourif, Ray Liotta, and James Woods were all considered for the Joker. Lithgow, during his audition, attempted to talk Burton out of casting him, a decision he would later publicly regret, stating, "I didn't realize it was such a big deal." Burton wanted to cast John Glover, but the studio insisted on using a movie star. Robin Williams lobbied hard for the part. Jack Nicholson had been the studio's top choice since 1980. Peters approached Nicholson as far back as 1986, during filming of "The Witches of Eastwick"; unlike Keaton, he was a popular choice for his role. Nicholson had what was known as an "off-the-clock" agreement. His contract specified the number of hours he was entitled to have off each day, from the time he left the set to the time he reported back for filming, as well as being off for Los Angeles Lakers home games. Nicholson demanded that all of his scenes be shot in a three-week block, but the schedule lapsed into 106 days. He reduced his standard $10 million fee to $6 million in exchange for a cut of the film's earnings (including associated merchandise), which led to remuneration in excess of $50 million—biographer Marc Eliot reports that Nicholson may have received as much as $90 million. He also demanded top billing on promotional materials.
Sean Young was originally cast as Vicki Vale, but was injured in a horse-riding accident prior to commencement of filming. Young's departure necessitated an urgent search for an actress who, besides being right for the part, could commit to the film at very short notice. Peters suggested Kim Basinger: she was able to join the production immediately and was cast. As a fan of Michael Gough's work in various Hammer Film Productions, Burton cast Gough as Bruce Wayne's mysterious butler, Alfred. Reporter Alexander Knox was portrayed by Robert Wuhl. In the original script, Knox was killed by the Joker's poison gas during the climax, but the filmmakers "liked [my] character so much," Wuhl said, "that they decided to let me live." Burton chose Billy Dee Williams as Harvey Dent because he wanted to include the villain Two-Face in a future film using the concept of an African-American Two-Face for the black and white concept, but Tommy Lee Jones was later cast in the role for "Batman Forever", which disappointed Williams. Nicholson convinced the filmmakers to cast his close friend Tracey Walter as the Joker's henchman Bob. Irish child actor Ricky Addison Reed was cast as Dick Grayson before the character was removed by Warren Skarren for the revised shooting script. The rest of the cast included Pat Hingle as Commissioner Gordon, Jerry Hall as Alicia, Lee Wallace as Mayor Borg, William Hootkins as Lt. Eckhardt, and Jack Palance as crime boss Carl Grissom.
Design. Burton had been impressed with the design of Neil Jordan's "The Company of Wolves" (1984), but was unable to hire its production designer Anton Furst for "Beetlejuice" as he had instead committed to Jordan's London-filmed ghost comedy "High Spirits" (1988), a choice he later regretted. A year later Burton successfully hired Furst for "Batman", and they enjoyed working with each other. "I don't think I've ever felt so naturally in tune with a director," Furst said. "Conceptually, spiritually, visually, or artistically. There was never any problem because we never fought over anything. Texture, attitude and feelings are what Burton is a master at." Furst and the art department deliberately mixed clashing architectural styles to "make Gotham City the ugliest and bleakest metropolis imaginable". Furst continued, "[W]e imagined what New York City might have become without a planning commission. A city run by crime, with a riot of architectural styles. An essay in ugliness. As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going". The 1985 film "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam was also a notable influence upon the film's production design, as both Burton and Furst studied it as a reference.
As if hell erupted through the pavement and kept on going". The 1985 film "Brazil" by Terry Gilliam was also a notable influence upon the film's production design, as both Burton and Furst studied it as a reference. Black and white charcoal drawings of key locations and sets were created by Furst's longtime draftsman, Nigel Phelps. Derek Meddings served as the visual effects supervisor, overseeing the miniatures and animation. Conceptual illustrator Julian Caldow designed the Batmobile, Batwing and assorted bat-gadgets that were later constructed by prop builder John Evans. Keith Short sculpted the final body of the 1989 Batmobile, adding two Browning machine guns. On designing the Batmobile, Furst explained, "We looked at jet aircraft components, we looked at war machines, we looked at all sorts of things. In the end, we went into pure expressionism, taking the Salt Flat Racers of the 30s and the Sting Ray macho machines of the 50s". The car was built upon a Chevrolet Impala when previous development with a Jaguar and Ford Mustang failed. In the end, we went into pure expressionism, taking the Salt Flat Racers of the 30s and the Sting Ray macho machines of the 50s". The car was built upon a Chevrolet Impala when previous development with a Jaguar and Ford Mustang failed. The car itself was later purchased by standup comedian/ventriloquist Jeff Dunham, who had it outfitted with a Corvette engine to make it street legal.
Costume designer Bob Ringwood turned down the chance to work on "Licence to Kill" in favor of "Batman". Ringwood found it difficult designing the Batsuit because "the image of Batman in the comics is this huge, big six-foot-four hunk with a dimpled chin. Michael Keaton is a guy with average build", he stated. "The problem was to make somebody who was average-sized and ordinary-looking into this bigger-than-life creature." Burton commented, "Michael is a bit claustrophobic, which made it worse for him. The costume put him in a dark, Batman-like mood though, so he was able to use it to his advantage". Burton's idea was to use an all-black suit, and was met with positive feedback by Bob Kane. Vin Burnham was tasked with sculpting the Batsuit, in association with Alli Eynon. Jon Peters wanted to use a Nike product placement with the Batsuit. Ringwood studied over 200 comic book issues for inspiration. 28 sculpted latex designs were created; 25 different cape looks and 6 different heads were made, accumulating a total cost of $250,000. Comic book fans initially expressed negative feedback against the Batsuit. Burton opted not to use tights, spandex, or underpants as seen in the comic book, feeling it was not intimidating. Prosthetic makeup designer Nick Dudman used acrylic-based makeup paint called PAX for Nicholson's chalk-white face. Part of Nicholson's contract was approval over the makeup designer.
Filming. The filmmakers considered filming "Batman" entirely on the Warner Bros. backlot in Burbank, California, but media interest in the film made them change the location. It was shot at Pinewood Studios in England from October 10, 1988, to February 14, 1989, with 80 days of main shooting and 86 days of second unit shooting. 18 sound stages were used, with seven stages occupied, including the 51 acre backlot for the Gotham City set, one of the biggest ever built at the studio. Locations included Knebworth House and Hatfield House doubling for Wayne Manor, plus Acton Lane Power Station and Little Barford Power Station. The original production budget escalated from $30 million to $48 million. Filming was highly secretive. The unit publicist was offered and refused £10,000 for the first pictures of Jack Nicholson as the Joker. The police were later called in when two reels of footage (about 20 minutes' worth) were stolen. With various problems during filming, Burton called it "Torture. The worst period of my life!"
Hamm was not allowed to perform rewrites during the 1988 Writers Guild of America strike. Warren Skaaren, who had also worked on Burton's "Beetlejuice", did rewrites. Jonathan Gems and Charles McKeown rewrote the script during filming. Only Skaaren received screenplay credit with Hamm. Hamm criticized the rewrites, but blamed the changes on Warner Bros. Burton explained, "I don't understand why that became such a problem. We started out with a script that everyone liked, although we recognized it needed a little work." Dick Grayson appeared in the shooting script but was deleted because the filmmakers felt he was irrelevant to the plot; Kane supported this decision. Keaton used his comedic experience for scenes such as Bruce and Vicki's Wayne Manor dinner. He called himself a "logic freak" and was concerned that Batman's secret identity would in reality be fairly easy to uncover. Keaton discussed ideas with Burton to better disguise the character, including the use of contact lenses. Ultimately, Keaton decided to perform Batman's voice at a lower register than when he was portraying Bruce Wayne, which became a hallmark of the film version of the character, with Christian Bale later using the same technique.
Originally in the climax, the Joker was meant to kill Vicki Vale, sending Batman into a vengeful fury. Jon Peters reworked the climax without telling Burton and commissioned production designer Anton Furst to create a model of the cathedral. This cost $100,000 when the film was already well over budget. Burton disliked the idea, having no clue how the scene would end: "Here were Jack Nicholson and Kim Basinger walking up this cathedral, and halfway up Jack turns around and says, 'Why am I walking up all these stairs? Where am I going?' 'We'll talk about it when you get to the top!' I had to tell him that I didn't know." Music. Burton hired Danny Elfman of Oingo Boingo, his collaborator on "Pee-wee's Big Adventure" and "Beetlejuice", to compose the music score. For inspiration, Elfman was given "The Dark Knight Returns". Elfman was worried, as he had never worked on a production this large in budget and scale. In addition, producer Jon Peters was skeptical of hiring Elfman, but was later convinced when he heard the opening number. Peters and Peter Guber wanted Prince to write music for the Joker and Michael Jackson to do the romance songs. Elfman would then combine the style of Prince and Jackson's songs together for the entire film score. At the encouragement of Prince's then-manager Albert Magnoli, it was agreed that Prince himself would write and sing the film's songs.
Burton protested the ideas, citing "my movies aren't commercial like "Top Gun"." Elfman enlisted the help of composer Shirley Walker and Oingo Boingo lead guitarist Steve Bartek to arrange the compositions for the orchestra. Elfman was later displeased with the audio mixing of his film score. ""Batman" was done in England by technicians who didn't care, and the non-caring showed," he stated. "I'm not putting down England because they've done gorgeous dubs there, but this particular crew elected not to." "Batman" was one of the first films to spawn two soundtracks. One of them featured songs written by Prince while the other showcased Elfman's score. Both were successful, and compilations of Elfman's opening credits were used in the title sequence theme for "", also composed by Shirley Walker. Themes. When discussing the central theme of "Batman", director Tim Burton explained, "the whole film and mythology of the character is a complete duel of the freaks. It's a fight between two disturbed people", adding, "The Joker is such a great character because there's a complete freedom to him. Any character who operates on the outside of society and is deemed a freak and an outcast then has the freedom to do what they want... They are the darker sides of freedom. Insanity is in some scary way the most freedom you can have, because you're not bound by the laws of society".
Burton saw Bruce Wayne as the bearer of a double identity, exposing one while hiding the reality from the world. Burton biographer Ken Hanke wrote that Bruce Wayne, struggling with his alter-ego as Batman, is depicted as an antihero. Hanke felt that Batman has to push the boundaries of civil justice to deal with certain criminals, such as the Joker. Kim Newman theorized that "Burton and the writers saw Batman and the Joker as a dramatic antithesis, and the film deals with their intertwined origins and fates to an even greater extent". "Batman" conveys trademarks found in 1930s pulp magazines, notably the design of Gotham City stylized with Art Deco design. Richard Corliss, writing for "Time", observed that Gotham's design was a reference to films such as "The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari" (1920) and "Metropolis" (1927). "Gotham City, despite being shot on a studio backlot", he continued, "is literally another character in the script. It has the demeaning presence of German Expressionism and fascist architecture, staring down at the citizens." Hanke further addressed the notions of "Batman" being a period piece, in that "The citizens, cops, people and the black-and-white television looks like it takes place in 1939"; but later said: "Had the filmmakers made Vicki Vale a femme fatale rather than a damsel in distress, this could have made "Batman" as a homage and tribute to classic film noir." Portions of the climax pay homage to "Vertigo" (1958).
Marketing. The B.D. Fox ad agency created hundreds of unused logos and posters for promotion, many by John Alvin. In the end Burton and producers decided on only using a gold and black logo designed by Anton Furst and airbrushed by Bill Garland, with no other key art variation, to keep an air of mystery about the film. The logo is also an ambiguous image, which can be read either as Batman's symbol or as a gaping mouth. Earlier designs "had the word 'Batman' spelled in "RoboCop" or "Conan the Barbarian"-type font". Jon Peters unified all the film's tie-ins, even turning down $6 million from General Motors to build the Batmobile because the car company would not relinquish creative control. During production, Peters read in "The Wall Street Journal" that comic book fans were unsatisfied with the casting of Michael Keaton. In response, Peters rushed the first film trailer that played in thousands of theaters during Christmas. It was simply an assemblage of scenes without music, but created enormous anticipation for the film, with audiences clapping and cheering. DC Comics allowed screenwriter Sam Hamm to write his own comic book miniseries. Hamm's stories were collected in the graphic novel "Batman: Blind Justice" (). Denys Cowan and Dick Giordano illustrated the artwork. "Blind Justice" tells the story of Bruce Wayne trying to solve a series of murders connected to Wayne Enterprises. It also marks the first appearance of Henri Ducard, who was later used in the rebooted "Batman Begins", albeit as an alias for the more notable Ra's al Ghul.
In the months before "Batman"s release in June 1989, a popular culture phenomenon known as "Batmania" began. Over $750 million worth of merchandise was sold. Cult filmmaker and comic book writer Kevin Smith remembered: "That summer was huge. You couldn't turn around without seeing the Bat-Signal somewhere. People were cutting it into their fucking heads. It was just the summer of Batman and if you were a comic book fan it was pretty hot." Hachette Book Group USA published a novelization, "Batman", written by Craig Shaw Gardner. It remained on "The New York Times" Best Seller list throughout June 1989. Burton admitted he was annoyed by the publicity. David Handelman of "The New York Observer" categorized "Batman" as a high concept film. He believed "it is less movie than a corporate behemoth". Reception. Box office.
Despite the film's box office – over $400 million against a budget of no more than $48 million – Warner Bros. claimed it ended up losing $35.8 million and "not likely to ever show a profit," which has been attributed to a case of Hollywood accounting. Critical response. "Batman" was criticized by some for being too dark, but nonetheless received a generally positive response from critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds an approval rating of 77% based on 142 reviews, with an average score of 7.1/10. The website's critical consensus reads, "An eerie, haunting spectacle, "Batman" succeeds as dark entertainment, even if Jack Nicholson's Joker too often overshadows the title character." On Metacritic, the film received a weighted average score of 69 based on 21 reviews, indicating "generally favorable reviews". Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an average grade of "A" on an A+ to F scale. Many observed that Burton was more interested in the Joker and the art and set production design than Batman or anything else in terms of characterization and screentime. Comic book fans reacted negatively over the Joker murdering Thomas and Martha Wayne; in the comic book, Joe Chill is responsible. Writer Sam Hamm said it was Burton's idea to have the Joker murder Wayne's parents. "The Writer's Strike was going on, and Tim had the other writers do that. I also hold innocent to Alfred letting Vicki Vale into the Batcave. Fans were ticked off with that, and I agree. That would have been Alfred's last day of employment at Wayne Manor," Hamm said.
The songs written by Prince were criticized for being "too out of place". While Burton has stated he had no problem with the Prince songs, he was less enthusiastic with their use in the film. On the film, Burton remarked, "I liked parts of it, but the whole movie is mainly boring to me. It's OK, but it was more of a cultural phenomenon than a great movie." Despite initial negative reactions from comics fans prior to the film's release, Keaton's portrayal of Batman was generally praised. James Berardinelli called the film entertaining, with the highlight being the production design. However, he concluded, "the best thing that can be said about "Batman" is that it led to "Batman Returns", which was a far superior effort." "Variety" felt "Jack Nicholson stole every scene" but still greeted the film with positive feedback. Roger Ebert was highly impressed with the production design, but claimed ""Batman" is a triumph of design over story, style over substance, a great-looking movie with a plot you can't care much about." He also called the film "a depressing experience". On the syndicated television series "Siskel & Ebert", his reviewing partner Gene Siskel disagreed, describing the film as having a "refreshingly adult" approach with performances, direction and set design that "draws you into a psychological world".
Legacy. Anton Furst and Peter Young won the Academy Award for Best Art Direction, while Nicholson was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Actor (Musical or Comedy). The British Academy of Film and Television Arts nominated "Batman" in six categories (Production Design, Visual Effects, Costume Design, Makeup, Sound and Actor in a Supporting Role for Nicholson), but it won none of the categories. Nicholson, Basinger, the makeup department, and costume designer Bob Ringwood all received nominations at the Saturn Awards. The film was also nominated for the Saturn Award for Best Fantasy Film and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation. The success of "Batman" prompted Warner Bros. Animation to create the acclaimed "", as a result beginning the long-running DC Animated Universe and helped establish the modern day superhero film genre. Series co-creator Bruce Timm stated the television show's Art Deco design was inspired from the film. Timm commented, "our show would never have gotten made if it hadn't been for that first "Batman" movie." Burton joked, "ever since I did "Batman", it was like the first dark comic book movie. Now everyone wants to do a dark and serious superhero movie. I guess I'm the one responsible for that trend."
"Batman" initiated the original "Batman" film series and spawned three sequels: "Batman Returns" (1992), "Batman Forever" (1995), and "Batman & Robin" (1997), the latter two of which were directed by Joel Schumacher instead of Burton and replaced Keaton as Batman with Val Kilmer and George Clooney, respectively. Executive producers Benjamin Melniker and Michael E. Uslan filed a breach of contract lawsuit in Los Angeles County Superior Court on March 26, 1992. Melniker and Uslan claimed to be "the victims of a sinister campaign of fraud and coercion that has cheated them out of continuing involvement in the production of "Batman" and its sequels. We were denied proper credits, and deprived of any financial rewards for our indispensable creative contribution to the success of "Batman"." A superior court judge rejected the lawsuit. Total revenues of "Batman" have topped $2 billion, with Uslan claiming to have "not seen a penny more than that since our net profit participation has proved worthless." Warner Bros. offered the pair an out-of-court settlement, a sum described by Melniker and Uslan's attorney as "two popcorns and two Cokes".
Reflecting on the twentieth anniversary of its release in a retrospective article on Salon.com, film commentator Scott Mendelson noted the continuing impact that "Batman" has had on the motion film industry, including the increasing importance of opening weekend box office receipts; the narrowing window between a film's debut and its video release that caused the demise of second-run movie theaters; the accelerated acquisition of pre-existing, pre-sold properties for film adaptations that can be readily leveraged for merchandizing tie-ins; the primacy of the MPAA PG-13 as the target rating for film producers; and more off-beat, non-traditional casting opportunities for genre films. The film was responsible for the British Board of Film Classification introducing its "12" age rating, as its content fell between what was expected for a "PG" or "15" certificate. The American Film Institute anointed Batman the 46th greatest movie hero and the Joker the 45th greatest movie villain on "AFI's 100 Years...100 Heroes and Villains".
Robert Wuhl reprises his role as Alexander Knox in The CW's Arrowverse crossover, "Crisis on Infinite Earths". The event also retroactively established that the world of the film and its sequel, "Batman Returns", takes place on Earth-89; which is one of the worlds destroyed by the Anti-Monitor (LaMonica Garrett) during the Crisis. Michael Keaton reprises his role as Batman in "The Flash" set in the DC Extended Universe. Video games. Several video games based on the film were released: By Ocean Software in 1989, by Sunsoft in and 1990, and by Atari Games in 1991. Konami was also in talks of releasing an arcade game around the same time as Atari. Comic book continuations. In March 2016, artist Joe Quinones revealed several art designs he and Kate Leth had created to pitch a comic book continuation set in the Batman '89 universe to DC Comics. The pitch, which was rejected, would have included the story of Billy Dee Williams' Harvey Dent turning into Two-Face as well as the inclusion of characters such as Batgirl in a story that took place following the events of "Batman Returns". In 2021, DC announced it would be releasing a comic book continuation of the "Batman '89" film. The series would be written by Sam Hamm and illustrated by Joe Quinones. The comic's synopsis revealed that it would include the return of Selina Kyle/Catwoman, an introduction of a new Robin, and the transformation of Williams' Harvey Dent into Two-Face.
A followup series was later announced by DC Comics on August 17, 2023. The first issue of the new series was released on November 28, 2023. It was written again by Sam Hamm, with art by Joe Quinones. In the series, Batman has mysteriously disappeared after Dent's death, leading Gotham citizens to take to the streets to fight in his place, including Barbara Gordon, who becomes Batgirl. Scarecrow and Harley Quinn will be featured as the main antagonists, seemingly referencing the unproduced fifth film in the Burton and Schumacher series, "Batman Unchained". Direct sequel novels. On April 11, 2024, it was announced that a new novel would be released which would tie-in to the film. Announced with the title "", the novel was written by author John Jackson Miller, and acts as a direct sequel to the film, being set between the events of "Batman" and its sequel "Batman Returns", with Batman focusing on dismantling the remnants of Joker's organization, while contemplating on the idea that Joker might not actually be dead. The novel also includes certain characters introduced in the sequel, with one example being Max Shreck. It was released on October 15, 2024, by Penguin Random House; a sequel, titled "Batman: Revolution", was later revealed by Miller and is scheduled for release in fall 2025.
Home media. "Batman" has been released on various formats, including VHS, LaserDisc, DVD and Blu-ray. In an unprecedented move at the time, it was made available to buy on VHS in the United States on November 15, less than six months after its theatrical release, at a suggested retail price of only $24.95 although most sellers sold it for less. It was first released on DVD on March 25, 1997, as a double sided disc containing both Widescreen (1.85:1) and Full Screen (1.33:1) versions of the film. The 2005 "Batman: The Motion Picture Anthology 1989–1997" included 2-disc special edition DVDs of the film and all three of its sequels. The anthology was also released as a 4-disc Blu-ray set in 2009, with each film and its previous extras contained on a single disc. Other Blu-ray reissues include a "30th Anniversary" Digibook with 50-page booklet, and a steelcase edition; both also include a Digital Copy. Most recently the "25th Anniversary" Diamond Luxe reissue contained the same disc as before and on a second disc, a new 25-minute featurette: "Batman: The Birth of the Modern Blockbuster". The film was also included in "The Tim Burton Collection" DVD and Blu-ray set in 2012, alongside its first sequel, "Batman Returns". "Batman" was released on Ultra HD Blu-ray on June 4, 2019.
Batman (1966 film) Batman (also known as Batman: The Movie) is a 1966 American superhero film directed by Leslie H. Martinson. Based on the television series, and the first full-length theatrical adaptation of the DC Comics character of the same name, the film stars Adam West as Batman and Burt Ward as Robin. The film hit theaters two months after the last episode of the first season of the television series. The film includes most members of the original TV cast, with the exception of Julie Newmar as Catwoman, who, in the film, was replaced by Lee Meriwether. Plot. When Batman and Robin get a tip that Commodore Schmidlapp, owner of the Big Ben Distillery, is in danger aboard his yacht, they launch a rescue mission using the Batcopter. As Batman descends on the bat-ladder to land on the yacht, it suddenly vanishes beneath him. He rises out of the sea with a shark attacking his leg. After Batman dislodges it with bat-shark repellent, the shark explodes. Batman and Robin head back to Commissioner Gordon's office, where they deduce that the tip was a set-up by the United Underworld, a gathering of four of the most powerful villains in Gotham City: the Joker, the Penguin, the Riddler, and the Catwoman.
The four criminals equip themselves with a dehydrator that can turn humans into dust until they are rehydrated (an invention of Schmidlapp's, who is unaware that he has been kidnapped), escape in a war-surplus, pre-atomic submarine made to resemble a penguin, and recruit three pirate-themed henchmen (Bluebeard, Morgan and Quetch). Batman and Robin learn that the yacht was really a holographic projection and return via Batboat to a buoy concealing a projector, where they are trapped on the buoy by a magnet and targeted by torpedoes. They use a radio-detonator to destroy two of the torpedoes, and a porpoise sacrifices itself to intercept the last one. Catwoman, disguised as Soviet journalist "Kitayna Ireyna Tatanya Kerenska Alisoff" (acronymed as Kitka) of the Moscow "Bugle", helps the group kidnap Bruce Wayne and pretends to be kidnapped with him, as part of a plot to lure Batman and finish him off with another of Penguin's explosive animals (of course unaware that Bruce Wayne is Batman's alter-ego).
Although Batman and Robin come out on top, Batman is heartbroken to discover that his "true love" Miss Kitka is actually Catwoman when she loses her mask. Commodore Schmidlapp accidentally breaks the powdered Council members' vials and sneezes on them, scattering the dust. Batman sets to work, constructing an elaborate Super Molecular Dust Separator to filter the mingled dust. Robin asks him whether it might be in the world's best interests for them to alter the dust samples so that humans can no longer harm one another. In response, Batman says that they cannot do so, reminding Robin of the fate of the Penguin's henchmen and their tainted rehydration, and can only hope for people, in general, to learn to live together peacefully on their own. With the world watching, the Security Council is re-hydrated. All members are restored alive and well, but continue to squabble amongst themselves, totally oblivious of their surroundings; however, each of them now speaks the language and displays the stereotypical mannerisms of a nation other than their own. Batman quietly expresses his sincere hope to Robin that this "strange mixing of minds" does more good than harm. The duo quietly leaves United World Headquarters by climbing out of the window and descending on their bat-ropes.
Production. Development. William Dozier wanted to make a big-screen film to generate interest in his proposed "Batman" television series by having the feature in theaters while the first season of the series was rolling before the cameras. The studio, 20th Century-Fox, refused because it would have to cover the entire cost of a movie, while it would only have to share the cost of a TV series (a much less risky proposition). The studio acquiesced after a 1965 screening of Columbia Pictures' 1943 "The Batman" serial in New York City renewed interest in the character and after the television series became phenomenally successful. The project was announced in a March 26, 1966, issue of "Variety" magazine. The film features many characters from the show. It was written by series writer Lorenzo Semple Jr. and directed by Leslie H. Martinson, who had directed a pair of the television series season one episodes: "The Penguin Goes Straight" and "Not Yet, He Ain't". Semple Jr. completed the screenplay in 10 days. Principal photography began on April 28, 1966, and concluded within 28 days, with a further three days to complete second-unit photography.
Casting. The film includes most members of the original TV cast: the actors for Batman, Robin, Alfred, Gordon, O'Hara, Aunt Harriet, the Joker, the Penguin, and the Riddler all reprised their roles. Though Julie Newmar had at this point played Catwoman in two episodes of in the TV series, she had other commitments at that time and was replaced by Lee Meriwether in the film. According to the "Biography" special "Catwoman: Her Many Lives" aired on July 20, 2004, Newmar was unable to reprise her role because of a back injury. Catwoman was nonetheless played by Newmar once again in the following eleven episodes of of the series; Eartha Kitt would then play Catwoman in three episodes of . Jack LaLanne has a cameo as a man on a rooftop with bikini-clad women. Tone and themes. Even though it is often described (like many contemporary shows) as a parody of a popular comic-book character, some commentators believe that its comedy is not so tightly confined. They felt the film's depiction of the Caped Crusader "captured the feel of the contemporary comics perfectly". The film was made at a time when "the Batman of the Golden Age comics was already essentially neutered".
Certain elements verge into direct parody of the history of Batman. The movie, like the TV series, is strongly influenced by the comparatively obscure 1940s serials of Batman, such as the escapes done almost out of luck. The penchant for giving devices a "Bat-" prefix and the dramatic use of stylized title cards during fight scenes acknowledge some of the conventions that the character had accumulated in various media, but the majority of "Batman"'s campier moments can be read as a broader parody on contemporary mid-1960s culture in general. Furthermore, the movie represented Batman's first major foray into Cold War issues, paying heavy attention to Polaris Missiles, war surplus submarines and taking a poke at the Pentagon. The inclusion of a glory-hunting presidential character and the unfavorable portrayal of Security Council Members marked Batman's first attempts to poke fun at domestic and international politics. Vehicles. Besides the Batmobile, other vehicles used by The Dynamic Duo include: Of the three new Batvehicles which first appeared in the "Batman" film, only the Batcycle properly crossed over into the TV series as the budgetary limits of the TV series precluded the full use of the others. While the Batcopter and Batboat from the movie appeared briefly in episodes (including a use of the Batboat in the conclusion of the first post-film two-parter: "Walk the Straight and Narrow"), they primarily did so in the form of stock-footage scenes from the film intercut into the series.
Music. Nelson Riddle's original score to "Batman the Movie" was released in 2010 by La-La Land Records and Fox Music. The album contains the entire score as heard in the film in chronological order as well as an unreleased cue. This limited edition includes a lavishly illustrated color booklet which features exclusive liner notes by Brian Baterwhite. This Limited Edition was of 2000 units. It was newly re-issued in 2016. While the program and master of this release is identical to the 2010 release, this reissue features all-new exclusive liner notes by John Takis and art design by Jim Titus. This new Limited Edition is of 2500 units. Release. Theatrical. "Batman" premiered at the Paramount Theatre in Austin, Texas, on July 30, 1966 (between the first and second seasons of the TV series); it was moderately successful at the box office. The Batboat featured in the film was created by Austin-based company Glastron, whose payment was in having the film premiere in their hometown. In conjunction with the premiere, Jean Boone of Austin CBS affiliate station KTBC interviewed the film's cast, including Lee Meriwether, Cesar Romero, and Adam West.
Television. ABC, the network which previously aired the "Batman" television series, first broadcast the film on the July 4, 1971, edition of "The ABC Sunday Night Movie"; the film was quickly rebroadcast on ABC September 4 of that year. Home media. The film debuted on home video via formats VHS and Betamax release in 1985 by Playhouse Video, then apparently re-released (after a Blockbuster Video executive asked why it "wouldn't" be repackaged on the heels of the successful "Batman" film of 1989) in 1989 by CBS/Fox Video, and in 1994 by Fox Video. The film was released on DVD in 2001, and re-released July 1, 2008, on DVD and on Blu-ray by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment. Reception. Box office. According to Fox records, the film needed to earn $3.2 million in rentals to break even and made $3.9 million (equivalent to $ million in ). Critical response. "Batman" holds an 81% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on thirty-six reviews. The site's consensus states: ""Batman: The Movie" elevates camp to an art form -- and has a blast doing it, every gloriously tongue-in-cheek inch of the way."
Bill Gibron of Filmcritic.com gave the film 3 out of 5 stars: "Unlike other attempts at bringing these characters to life...the TV cast really captures the inherent insanity of the roles". "Variety" stated in their review that "the intense innocent enthusiasm of Cesar Romero, Burgess Meredith and Frank Gorshin as the three criminals is balanced against the innocent calm of Adam West and Burt Ward, Batman and Robin respectively". Sequels. West and Ward reprised their roles in "Batman" animated movies for the show's 50th anniversary along with Julie Newmar returning. "Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders" was released on Digital HD and digital media on October 11, 2016, and on DVD and Blu-ray November 1. A sequel to "Batman: Return of the Caped Crusaders" called "Batman vs. Two-Face" was released on October 10, 2017. The film starred William Shatner voicing Two-Face as the main antagonist. Adam West completed his voiceover work, but died of leukemia in June 2017, before it was released.