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A while ago I treated you to a dissertation entitled “Does The Sun Set On The British Empire?”, and concluded that it doesn’t. The UK’s widely scattered overseas territories, sparse though they are, mean that the sun is still always shining, somewhere in the world, over British territory.
The most important territories in maintaining this late-empire sunlight are the Pitcairn Islands, in the Pacific, and the British Indian Ocean Territory, in the Indian Ocean. To illustrate that, I offered the sunlight chart below, showing how Pitcairn and BIOT catch the sunlight when it’s dark in the UK.
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In fact, as my map at the head of this post shows, BIOT is pivotal. There, I’ve plotted the distribution of light and darkness, across the globe, at 02:15 Greenwich Mean Time, during the June solstice of 2024. *
And here’s the situation at the December solstice:
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Just after the sun sets in Pitcairn, it’s dark over every British territory except BIOT.
I’m revisiting the situation because the UK government has announced plans to hand over sovereignty of the Chagos Archipelago, which houses BIOT, to Mauritius. The announcement was made in October 2024, but the original agreement has now been contested by a new government in Mauritius. And the situation is further complicated by the fact that BIOT houses a large US military base on the island of Diego Garcia, so the new Trump administration also has a say in the process. (Meanwhile, the unfortunate Chagossians, evicted from their homeland in 1968 to make way for the military base, have so far been given no voice in the negotiations.)
The current proposal suggests that the military base would be maintained under a long-term lease agreement, in which case British sovereignty would be lost, and BIOT would cease to exist. At that point, the role of easternmost British territory would fall to the Sovereign Base Areas (SBAs), in Cyprus.
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