It is not uncommon among mainstream historians of the British Empire to stand perplexed, and sometimes awed, before the ‘enigma’ of how a small and relatively backward island could in such a short time soar to global supremacy. In 1109, Adelard of Bath left England and headed for the East in pursuit of Arab learning. Arabic was then the lingua franca of science, philosophy and knowledge, and Muslims were charting new frontiers of inquiry and understanding of the secular world at a time when Europe was wallowing in the stifling ecclesiastical tenebrousness of the Middle Ages. ‘Of course God rules the universe,’ Adelard wrote, ‘but we may and should enquire into the natural world. The Arabs teach us that’ (Lyons, 2009: 201). Daniel of Morley, an English seeker of learning and wisdom in Al-Andalus (Muslim/Moorish Spain), was so mesmerised by the vibrancy of intellectual life and cultural sophistication (especially ‘Arab Reason’) that when he returned to England with loads of manuscripts from Toledo, he and his patron embarked on transforming his small town into a hub of intellectual life. That small town is Oxford (Hughes, 2005). There is plainly no enigma or sense of intellectual advantage or civilisational superiority to explain it. The historical record is clear. It was a combination of colonialism, slavery, plunder, intrigue, intellectual and literal piracy and of course violence (Gott, 2011) that catapulted England to global hegemony. The empire on which the sun never set was also one in which the ‘blood never dried’ (Newsinger, 2004: 9).

It is this colonial legacy that the Hydra is heir to, and it continues to animate its global expansion. The contributions in this volume, each in its own way, attest to that fact. It has to be reiterated that the argument here, as in this book, is not against English as such. It would be both utterly irrational and hypocritical to try to make a case for such a thesis.